“Opposition forming to ranked-choice voting” - CommonWealth Magazine:
Ranked-choice voting proponents point to the recent 4th Congressional District Democratic primary as a poster childfor ranked choice voting – seven candidates split the vote in a generally liberal field, leading to the victory of the most moderate candidate with less than 23 percent of the vote.But Amore said the race illustrates the problems with ranked-choice voting. “I follow politics very closely and I can’t name all the people who ran. I definitely can’t tell you the differences between them,” Amore told CommonWealth. “To go in and say I’m going rank these eight people…the difference between them was razor thin, it becomes a guessing game.”
Asking voters to rank candidates in order of preference, Amore said, “sounds beautiful in a mathematical equation but practically speaking it’s disastrous.”
Pardon me, Mr. Amore, but this reasoning is… what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right—BULLSHIT.
If Massachusetts moves to ranked-choice voting, low-information voters will do the same thing they always have—put the candidates they recognize at the top of the list, and anyone else running in random order below that. They’ll be no worse off than they are under the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system we currently have.
Informed voters, however, will have a lot more control over how their votes are allocated, which I’m guessing is what Amore and his Republican friends are afraid of.