What Do They Think of RCV in Bah Hahba?

The Society of Actuaries does it.

Seventy-five percent of Great Britain — Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the United Kingdom — does it. (Fucking Wales.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does it.

And now Maine, the first state to implement a one-to-one laptop program for all students, does it, too.

The “it” is ranked-choice voting, a method that allows voters to rank the candidates in their order of preference. When used to elect a single candidate, ranked-choice voting helps to select a winner that reflects the support of a majority of voters.

Many cities and towns already use ranked-choice voting to elect mayors and members of council. But Maine is the first state to use it for state and federal elections.

Many people, including Jennifer Lawrence, support ranked-choice voting. (That should mean something, right? After all, she’s the only person born in the 1990’s who’s won as Oscar. So far, anyway. Maybe she supports ranked-choice voting because the Academy used ranked-choice voting to award her an Oscar? Who knows.)

This video gives a very simple example of how ranked-choice voting works.

But maybe there’s a better example. Imagine that a book club is trying to decide which book they should read next, and rather than just voting for their top choice, the group instead ranks each of three books:

• Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks (MJ4MF)
• The Grapes of Math (GM)
• Riot at the Calc Exam, and Other Mathematically Bent Stories (RCE)

The voting proceeds as follows:

Order	Number of Votes
MJ4MF / Grapes / Riot	4
MJ4MF / Riot / Grapes	5
Grapes / MJ4MF / Riot	6
Grapes / Riot / MJ4MF	2
Riot / MJ4MF / Grapes	2
Riot / Grapes / MJ4MF	1

First, consider only the first-place votes, and determine if any candidate received a majority. In this case, none of them received more than half of the first-place votes: MJ4MF received 9 first-place votes, Grapes received 8, and Riot received 3.

Since no one won, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated. Sorry, Colin Adams; we’ll have to say good-bye to Riot at the Calc Exam.

Now, the voters who had their first choice eliminated will have their votes counted for their second choice instead. So, 2 additional votes go to MJ4MF, while 1 vote goes to Grapes.

This means that MJ4MF, with 9 + 2 = 11 votes, is the winner, since Grapes received only 8 + 1 = 9 votes in the second round. Sorry, Greg Tang; you should’ve chosen a less worthy adversary.

C’mon, now… you didn’t really think MJ4MF was gonna lose, did ya?

On Tuesday, voters in Maine used ranked-choice voting to decide several political races, but they also got to vote on whether to use ranked-choice voting in future elections. Because ranked-choice voting takes time to tabulate, two of Tuesday’s contests were still undecided as of Thursday morning. So, voters literally were asked to decide if they should keep or reject a system that they had never seen used in an election. Doesn’t that seem just a bit odd?

You know what else is odd? Numbers that aren’t divisible by 2.