this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
459 points (99.4% liked)
Progressive Politics
4229 readers
1528 users here now
Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)
(Sidebar still a work in progress post recommendations if you have them such as reading lists)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, the DNC chair has passed to someone who is willing to actually back the left.
Sadly RCV is just a bad system.
It's better than Plurality, but when you dig into the mathematic details of RCV, it's just as broken as Plurality, just in new an horrible ways.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorium says that all Ordinal voting systems are shit. They all have a spoiler effect. It's just a question of when does it kick in.
All that said, there is a much better system. A Cardinal system called STAR.
A breakdown can be found at www.starvoting.org
The short of it is that instead of a meaningless ranking, you rate.each candidate on a scale of 0-5, and candidates may share ratings.
Those ratings are then counted independently of each other. The two highest rated candidates then go onto an automatic second step that incentivises the use.if the lower end of the scale for candidates you don't like. You see which of the final two candidates are rated higher on each ballot.
If your bottom two candidates make it to the final step, and you rated one as a 2, and the other a 0, the 2 gets your final vote.
No thrown out ballots because of ballot exhaustion. They all get counted and even the losing side has a slight say in who is elected. Which would prevent another Trump completely.
this comparison table here actually shows STAR is a pretty terrible system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems
Some of those criterion are odd, and yeah, most don't even apply to STAR, because it's Cardinal and not Ordinal.
Bit it's also important to know why and how the criterion are applied.
Like being cloneproof,
This wiki, (which is better for election specific stuff) says this;
A bit later is says this;
It's a weakness, and it's important to know about, but it's not election breaking, it just renders the automatic runoff meaningless. Except it doesn't because people still care about the who, even if the platforms are identical.
An election breaking criterion to fail would be Monotonicity. STAR satisfies it.