Ranked Choice Voting – Because We All Desperately Want Complicated Elections (Political Humor/Truth)
Staff Writer February 20, 2024
Colorado Free Press
Many people believe elections are far too simple and understandable for the average person. Since 2020, we have heard nothing but clamoring for more complex elections, because even with election machines, the process is still simple enough that conspiracy theorists ask questions. People everywhere express a burning desire to hand everything over to the experts they have come to love and adore. Thus, Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) was born.
You don’t have to know calculus, or even trigonometry, to understand RCV. It’s actually elementary math, though far beyond the basic counting skills and multi-digit addition that a normal election requires. A good knowledge of fractions will do. You do, of course, remember which fraction you flip when you divide, right? If not, well, you are not smart enough to understand elections and you had better just fill out your ballot and go away quietly. Otherwise we might expose you in front of your fifth-grader as being too stupid to divide 9/17 by 8/7.
You may have heard something about how if you vote for a losing candidate, you get several votes on your preference, but voters who vote for the winning candidate first only get one vote. This sounds unfair, like a redistribution of votes, but it’s not. At least only sort of. Maybe in a way but not really. Generally and overall it is perfectly fine in the opinion of many experts. So just don’t worry your little head about it, and besides redistribution is a friendly neighborly thing to do, like when we redistribute your salary to people who happen to have been between jobs for a decade or two.
You will not need to worry about a thing with RCV even if you are an expert and can do fractions, because all the votes will get fed into an election machine and the machine will tell us who won, because the machines can do fractions, or anything else they are programmed to do. Don’t worry, they can’t violate their Prime Directive; all those stories you’re thinking of are fiction, like Orwell.
There is of course a slightly different strategy to winning an RCV election, but you don’t need to know what it is. Just keep on doing everything the same and we will let you know if you win an election sometime.
Political Humor/Truth from Cincinattia, Colorado Free Press Contributor