Yeah… FairVote is not a great organization. I really hate to badmouth anyone, but I’ve caught employees lying about things that really shouldn’t be lied about.

As for that article in particular, it has a few obvious flaws and biases, including, at best, half-truths.

They make the standard claim that RCV produces a majority winner, but the problem is that this isn’t true. RCV discards ballots in order to get the math to claim the winner has >50% of the remaining ballots. They don’t necessarily have support from >50% of the voters. You can get any system to claim a “majority winner” by eliminating last place candidates and discarding exhausted ballots. The Alaska special election is an example of both a spoiler RCV election and one the where the winner didn’t have majority support.

They play word-games with the concept of what a vote actually is, and try to claim that approval voting gives some people more than one vote while RCV doesn’t. Horseshit. Your vote is your entire ballot for any voting system. Under RCV you rank candidates, under approval you say Yes/No on every candidate. Voting “Yes” for more candidates doesn’t change your influence on an approval election, because you have to give an opinion for every candidate. See here for a brief talk about one person one vote.

They talk about how adding compromise candidates can hurt your favorite under approval as if that’s a bad thing. We want people to vote honestly, there shouldn’t be an incentive to cast disingenuous votes. RCV encourages you to vote for candidates you don’t actually like.

They make claims about sensitivity to strategic voting that simply aren’t true, approval voting is actually quite robust against strategic voting.

Throughout the whole article they make a lot of comparisons that don’t actually support their reasoning when you follow the logic. There’s honestly too many to bitch about but at one point they heavily imply that 71% of voters ranking more than one candidate is evidence that people don’t vote strategically under RCV.

They repeat the wrong claim that voting for more people means more power. It’s weird how they don’t consider ranking more people as “more power” than ranking only a few. Again, everyone voting in both kinds of elections have equal power, no matter how they vote. For approval, it’s easy to see just by imaging your vote as placing all the candidates into two piles. For RCV it’s easier to just think of your entire ballot as your vote, which is a logical view of equal power that works for any voting system.

They try to make the claim that people interpreting their task as voters differently would give different people different power???

Look, I’m sorry for this wall of text, I really am, but you have to understand that FairVote is a political organization in the bad way. At least this article didn’t lie about spoilers or vote splitting like they often do. Under RCV, voting for you true favorite can backfire, but under approval it’s always safe to give your favorite a vote.

The thing is, RCV isn’t bad, it’s just approval is better. Approval is much easier to use for any kind of election, be it single-winner, multi-winner, or proportional. The other versions of RCV get confusing in a hurry.

To prove it, I’ll explain all three versions right here:

Single winner:

1. vote for everyone you like
2. most votes wins

Multi-winner:

1. vote for everyone you like
2. most votes wins first seat
3. all ballots with 1 winner on them count for ½
4. most votes wins second seat
5. same as step 3 and ballots with 2 winners count for ⅓
6. most votes wins third seat
7. same as steps 3 and 5 and ballots with 3 winners count for ¼
8. etc. Etc.

Proportional:

1. Vote for as many parties as you like
2. Each ballot is divided by the number of votes cast on that ballot
3. assign seats to reflect the vote totals

That’s it. It really is that simple.

Again, sorry for the wall of text, it’s just I’m here for honest discussion and FairVote pisses me off with how much they try to spin things.