I have no idea how to vote on the cap and invest thing. On one hand, fighting climate change is obviously important and I don't personally mind gas being a little more expensive. What's an extra $20 a month? On the other hand, taxes like this are incredibly regressive and I don't love the way a lot of the revenues been spent. Right now I kind of feel that if Mullet or Reichert wins then I want to keep the cap, but if it's Ferguson I'd rather repeal it. I'll have to think about it some more...
I'm split on RCV because while nothing could be worse than FPTP voting, RCV is like… second-worst.
It's also biased (towards centrism), has some other strange properties, and worst it's too complicated considering how little most voters want to think about things.
Approval voting (just select everyone you like with no ranking) is as far as I know simpler and better.
It's okay, but that's not at all how it's marketed, so it'll cause voter disappointment. Basically it makes it safe to vote for an "extreme" candidate at #1 but only as long as you don't expect them to win, and then what's the point?
"This is a great case study in climate cognitive dissonance. Most voters profess concern about climate change, but are in practice unwilling to incur any financial cost to support policies that will help mitigate it."
I am not sure "cognitive dissonance" is the right description - it could be that voters would buy lots of climate change measures if the price tag to them was zero but aren't willing to buy very much if the price tag to them is $0.25 a gallon more expensive gasoline. One of the problems with poll questions that ask "Are you in favor of X" is that they don't put a price tag on X. The price quite often matters a lot to voters, particularly if it is ia highly visible price tag like gasoline prices.
Activists in Arkansas are trying to codify abortion at 18 weeks. The signatures were thrown by the Secretary of State for bogus reasons, but there’s a pending lawsuit to get it back on the ballot.
Well, Matt, you should do some homework on the situation in Washington. The actual increase in gas costs was $.43 or so, which I, sadly pay, every few days. That bumps a fill-up by 16 x .43 = $6.88, something that everyone notices. Especially, the poor. Well, not everyone. The state's snooty tooth rich -- lots of those guys around here -- don't notice. They're too busy gentrifying the underclasses out of their cities.
That's odd... Governor Jay Inslee estimated the increase would be "a few pennies" and fired an economist who predicted otherwise. More homework needed.
Also WTF was the thinking behind using all the money from the cap and trade program to jobs and etc programs to fight climate change?!? The cap and trade program *is* the best thing you could do so take the money and give it back to people with checks to politically insulate it or something else popular. If you think you have political capital to spend on the climate just make the permits more pricey (if you can send people more money that makes it easier).
They had one that looked more like this, in 2016 they proposed a carbon tax and used the proceeds to decrease the sales tax, but the Groups on the left killed it because the proceeds were going to everyone and not to “communities of color” or whatever.
I can see the policy logic. The more you raise in the short term, the more renewable energy you install, the less you have to spend on permits in the future. But if course that doesn't work if it's repealed.
Will Oregon really use RCV for presidential elections? I'm a big fan of RCV but I think to be used for presidential elections you also need a law directing the electors to vote so as to best effectuate the resulting ranking (ie look at all electors from RCV states and run the algorithm to figure out who wins given the other votes and then all vote for that guy). You don't want people to think they can rank their choices non-strategically and then end up with their electors voting for someone with no national shot.
One hecto-War-and-Piece is therefore about 33 kilo-NYT-articles. We're one hecto-day from the election, so you'd need about 330 NYT-length articles published each day to match this pace. Most US newspapers these days are Gannett shells that just reproduce the national wire, and not all foreign newspapers will be breathlessly attuned to US politics, so many will have coverage a literal fraction of the NYT.
I don't think you can scrounge more than 60 newspaper-equivalents worldwide (citation: just making up numbers using my gut; probably an overestimate). If that's right, then 1 NYT-equivalent would need to publish about 5.5 articles a day on the election to fill out your claim. 5.5 articles is possible, given (say) how breathlessly Clinton's emails got covered, but it still seems a little high. If my estimate of 60 newspaper-equivalents is too high, then each NYT-equivalent would need to produce more articles than that, which is a bridge too far for me.
You're overlooking all the book authors, independent journalists/pundits/bloggers, social media commenters, student essayists, letters-to-the-editor writers, foreign government officials, corporate strategists, and others whose work is included in Matt's passive-voiced "will be written."
Thanks for the heads-up about my own state (Oregon). We haven't even tried out our first RCV election in Portland, and now "they" want to extend it to State and Federal elections. Why can't we try it out first?
My visit to Ballotpedia also revealed that someone wants to change our "kicker." We already get checks if the state's revenue exceeds its revenue forecast, but now someone apparently wants the corporate kicker to go to residents. Oregon is already unable to maintain a rainy-day fund. Now we have more simplistic ideas for direct redistribution.
Along the lines of direct redistribution, another measure currently collecting signatures is a wacky idea to add a new corporate tax and use it to send $750 a year to each resident. I filled out a survey on that one, without knowing who was looking for campaign ideas. Hopefully I didn't give them any winning ad concepts. (During the survey I was asking myself "what's all this about $750?" I still don't get it...
I don't understand how people can be confused by RCV. It's literally, "rank the following x candidates in order from 1-x according to how qualified you think they are to hold the office of (insert office here)."
I do understand why both major political parties would hate any method of voting that increases their opponents' chances of getting elected.
Concerns about comprehensibility are presumably not about how individual voters enter their votes, but about how the scores are aggregated: Borda-count, Dowdall system, tournament-style? There are options, many of which can be called, accurately, “RCV”.
In some of them, the person with the most first-place votes does not always win. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s a thing that will need explaining.
Yeah. There are several politicians who have pretended to be against RCV because they believe minority communities don't understand it. I cannot think of anything more racist. Literally rank your choices in order. A 5 year old could understand it.
The majority of voters do not have opinions on multiple political candidates and are unable to distinguish them or their policy platforms from each other. Because the majority of voters do not think about politics, do not care about politics unless it directly impacts them, and are basically voting for who they'd rather have a beer with. They are unable to rank multiple candidates because they have no clue who they are or what the difference is between them. We are in the same country where over 40% of the population doesn't know how many Senators a state has.
I mean, do you love cricket? (Let's assume no). Could you rank the 6 greatest wicket-keepers of all time, in order? Probably not, right? It's not because you can't rank things, but because you have no clue who or what a wicket-keeper is, can't name any of the major players, and basically don't know because you don't care. Right? Well that's quite close to how voters feel about politicians.
You are probably in a bubble of highly-educated political obsessives who could rank multiple candidates. But the average person would think you're a politics-obsessed weirdo, and so cannot. Make sense?
MS Dhoni and Ian Healy for being ferociously quick around the wicket, keeping for tremendous spin bowlers. Sangakkara was pretty special, too.
A guy named Jack Russell (unforgettable name!), for England, who played before my time following cricket, who's still famous for playing up to the wicket for fast bowlers.
If you want to include batting, then you're putting Gilchrist and Quentin de Cock into the mix.
If leadership counts for something, then Ricky Ponting a deserves a place on the list. A cut (but only just) below GOAT with both gloves and bat, but one of the best captains qua captains ever.
Is that six? I've not really ranked them, and don't want to. My top-of-mind list also over-values the last several generations of players, because that's who I've seen. I'm sure there were tremendous keepers back in the days of uncovered wickets that no one ever thinks of anymore.
Nope it's very much the opposite. My experience with this is from actually talking to voters during the last mayoral election in NYC a ranked choice election. Voters have very little trouble understanding the concept of a second choice. Even minorities can figure it out. You're just way over thinking it.
50% of Maine voters only 'ranked' 1 candidate in Maine's last RCV election (which was their 4th BTW). Seems like a more relevant factoid than your anecdote.
You're probably in a bubble of politics-obsessed weirdos, but regular people do not know more than 1 candidate at a time, or what their exact policy platforms are
You keep talking about me being in a bubble but you know nothing about me and I'm telling you about my experience talking to actual voters when canvassing. It seems to me that your ideological priors are the thing that are at issue here. It's really not that hard to rank people. I've had dozens if not hundreds of conversations with regular old normies about this. Who do you like for mayor? Oh who would your second choice be? Not complicated. Everyone gets it. Totally made up concern
People don't understand the complicated weighting of the votes after they are cast, not 'how to fill out the ballot'.
Doubling back to say that I don't think I could do a good job explaining the weighting system to a neighbor, and I am reasonably well educated. Assuming that minority communities, who might be less well educated and less engaged with the minutae of newfangled algebraic voting methods, might not understand it, seems not racist at all and actually a reason to do more work to educate people.
When canvassing in NYC in the last election this rarely came up. Although the New York system isn't algebraic and only takes first place votes so it's relatively easy to understand.
On RCV, I've come to appreciate that a silver lining to the two-party system is that it moves the post-election government-forming coalition building found in other countries to before the election. Political coalitions often turn not on pure policy agreement but on personalities and other individual factors.
If an aspiring politician can't play well with others in one of the two parties, are they as an individual capable of building coalitions and willing to compromise to achieve their policy goals after the election?
>a silver lining to the two-party system is that it moves the post-election government-forming coalition building found in other countries to before the election
I want to like this comment but I'm not sure I understand it. The US system doesn't have formal coalitions per-se, but whatever you want to call our arrangements between elected officials, they're always determined after the election and not before. How much power will Joe Manchin have to block legislation or impose his will? How much power will the Freedom Caucus have? No one knows until the votes are counted and we see who gets how many seats
Cat women aren't particularly Democratic, while dog men are more Republican, men who have cats are more likely to be Democrats than women who have cats, and no-pets women are the most Democratic group
It's not useful without knowing how many cats the individuals own though - the term, "cat lady" is applied to owners of multiple cats, not just one cat. (That said, "men who have cats are more likely to be Democrats than women who have cats" is probably one of the least surprising statistics I've ever seen.)
Sadly the GSS data from 2018 only has data about about 100 women with cats and no children so more there's a lot more to learn here. But yes there are tons of women with cats who vote for Trump/GOP out there so Vance's stereotype of liberal misanthropic cat women is well, dumb.
My current rule for voting on ballot measures in CA is to vote no on any tax increase or new bonds to increase spending. This is a very poorly run state that blows money on all kinds of ineffective programs. Some states have no income taxes or no sales taxes but not CA. It wouldn’t hurt for this state to turn a little less blue. Newsom has very little chance of becoming President and he’s making things worse by signing dumb, irresponsible laws that allow schools to stop reporting transitions to parents.
"Newsom has very little chance of becoming President" I think this claim is pretty wrong. The lesson everyone should have learned from 2016 is literally anyone, even a know nothing game show host, can become president if they can win a major party nomination.
If Newsom can do that he'd have a decent shot depending on the fundamentals of the election cycle.
Exactly, if the nominees where Newsom and VP Vance in 2028 and the economy was in recession Newsom would easily win despite people screaming "But what about the French Laundry!?!?!?!"
It is beyond me how anyone can support RCV after the "stolen election" idiocy of 2020. Whatever it's merits, too many people are incapable of understanding how the counting works. Can you imagine what would have happened if a bunch of swing states had RCV and Trump had been leading after round one? Given that there are alternatives that are easy to understand (eg approval voting), there is no reason to support RCV (yes, I know that RCV has many advantages. But the fact that RCV increases the likelihood that results will been seen as illegitimate trumps all of them).
I have read plausible arguments that RCV doesn't even achieve its goal of leading to more reasonable, moderate, electable (in the case of primaries) candidates. It may encourage voters to vote for their extreme preferences (knowing they can still rank someone more reasonable below that preference) without thinking about electability first. And then the extreme candidates end up winning.
Good run down - I appreciate bringing attention to these, often ignored, initiatives.
I have no idea how to vote on the cap and invest thing. On one hand, fighting climate change is obviously important and I don't personally mind gas being a little more expensive. What's an extra $20 a month? On the other hand, taxes like this are incredibly regressive and I don't love the way a lot of the revenues been spent. Right now I kind of feel that if Mullet or Reichert wins then I want to keep the cap, but if it's Ferguson I'd rather repeal it. I'll have to think about it some more...
I'm split on RCV because while nothing could be worse than FPTP voting, RCV is like… second-worst.
It's also biased (towards centrism), has some other strange properties, and worst it's too complicated considering how little most voters want to think about things.
Approval voting (just select everyone you like with no ranking) is as far as I know simpler and better.
Interesting, I will have to look in to it. But personally, bias towards centrism sounds great to me.
It's okay, but that's not at all how it's marketed, so it'll cause voter disappointment. Basically it makes it safe to vote for an "extreme" candidate at #1 but only as long as you don't expect them to win, and then what's the point?
"This is a great case study in climate cognitive dissonance. Most voters profess concern about climate change, but are in practice unwilling to incur any financial cost to support policies that will help mitigate it."
I am not sure "cognitive dissonance" is the right description - it could be that voters would buy lots of climate change measures if the price tag to them was zero but aren't willing to buy very much if the price tag to them is $0.25 a gallon more expensive gasoline. One of the problems with poll questions that ask "Are you in favor of X" is that they don't put a price tag on X. The price quite often matters a lot to voters, particularly if it is ia highly visible price tag like gasoline prices.
Activists in Arkansas are trying to codify abortion at 18 weeks. The signatures were thrown by the Secretary of State for bogus reasons, but there’s a pending lawsuit to get it back on the ballot.
Well, Matt, you should do some homework on the situation in Washington. The actual increase in gas costs was $.43 or so, which I, sadly pay, every few days. That bumps a fill-up by 16 x .43 = $6.88, something that everyone notices. Especially, the poor. Well, not everyone. The state's snooty tooth rich -- lots of those guys around here -- don't notice. They're too busy gentrifying the underclasses out of their cities.
Estimates very, I went with the one reported by the Washington state government
That's odd... Governor Jay Inslee estimated the increase would be "a few pennies" and fired an economist who predicted otherwise. More homework needed.
Also WTF was the thinking behind using all the money from the cap and trade program to jobs and etc programs to fight climate change?!? The cap and trade program *is* the best thing you could do so take the money and give it back to people with checks to politically insulate it or something else popular. If you think you have political capital to spend on the climate just make the permits more pricey (if you can send people more money that makes it easier).
They had one that looked more like this, in 2016 they proposed a carbon tax and used the proceeds to decrease the sales tax, but the Groups on the left killed it because the proceeds were going to everyone and not to “communities of color” or whatever.
Yeah, most of the money from the cap seems to be going to the tribes.
I can see the policy logic. The more you raise in the short term, the more renewable energy you install, the less you have to spend on permits in the future. But if course that doesn't work if it's repealed.
Major upvote for this.
Will Oregon really use RCV for presidential elections? I'm a big fan of RCV but I think to be used for presidential elections you also need a law directing the electors to vote so as to best effectuate the resulting ranking (ie look at all electors from RCV states and run the algorithm to figure out who wins given the other votes and then all vote for that guy). You don't want people to think they can rank their choices non-strategically and then end up with their electors voting for someone with no national shot.
Thanks for writing this Ben. Very informative and we need more coverage of state and local issues in our media ecosystem generally.
+1
Also, Bolts (founded by Daniel Nichanian) is the best resource on this.
https://boltsmag.org/
"enough words to fill War and Peace a hundred times over will be written answering that question."
Not a fact-checker, but this is at the high end of plausibility.
Per Microsoft Word's wordcounter, War and Peace (Aylmer's translation; https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2600/pg2600.txt), has 564596 words. According to the anecdata in WaPo's "Why the New York Times is looking to shorten stories" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/10/new-york-times-story-length/), the five front-page NYT stories in October 2023 had 1700 words apiece.
One hecto-War-and-Piece is therefore about 33 kilo-NYT-articles. We're one hecto-day from the election, so you'd need about 330 NYT-length articles published each day to match this pace. Most US newspapers these days are Gannett shells that just reproduce the national wire, and not all foreign newspapers will be breathlessly attuned to US politics, so many will have coverage a literal fraction of the NYT.
I don't think you can scrounge more than 60 newspaper-equivalents worldwide (citation: just making up numbers using my gut; probably an overestimate). If that's right, then 1 NYT-equivalent would need to publish about 5.5 articles a day on the election to fill out your claim. 5.5 articles is possible, given (say) how breathlessly Clinton's emails got covered, but it still seems a little high. If my estimate of 60 newspaper-equivalents is too high, then each NYT-equivalent would need to produce more articles than that, which is a bridge too far for me.
What the fuck is a kilo? Please rewrite this post using bushels and fathoms.
You're overlooking all the book authors, independent journalists/pundits/bloggers, social media commenters, student essayists, letters-to-the-editor writers, foreign government officials, corporate strategists, and others whose work is included in Matt's passive-voiced "will be written."
Ooh, yeah. Then 1 hecto-War-and-Peace is probably a drastic *under*estimate.
This is what I wanted to see in the comment section!
Thanks for the heads-up about my own state (Oregon). We haven't even tried out our first RCV election in Portland, and now "they" want to extend it to State and Federal elections. Why can't we try it out first?
My visit to Ballotpedia also revealed that someone wants to change our "kicker." We already get checks if the state's revenue exceeds its revenue forecast, but now someone apparently wants the corporate kicker to go to residents. Oregon is already unable to maintain a rainy-day fund. Now we have more simplistic ideas for direct redistribution.
Along the lines of direct redistribution, another measure currently collecting signatures is a wacky idea to add a new corporate tax and use it to send $750 a year to each resident. I filled out a survey on that one, without knowing who was looking for campaign ideas. Hopefully I didn't give them any winning ad concepts. (During the survey I was asking myself "what's all this about $750?" I still don't get it...
I don't understand how people can be confused by RCV. It's literally, "rank the following x candidates in order from 1-x according to how qualified you think they are to hold the office of (insert office here)."
I do understand why both major political parties would hate any method of voting that increases their opponents' chances of getting elected.
Concerns about comprehensibility are presumably not about how individual voters enter their votes, but about how the scores are aggregated: Borda-count, Dowdall system, tournament-style? There are options, many of which can be called, accurately, “RCV”.
In some of them, the person with the most first-place votes does not always win. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s a thing that will need explaining.
Yeah. There are several politicians who have pretended to be against RCV because they believe minority communities don't understand it. I cannot think of anything more racist. Literally rank your choices in order. A 5 year old could understand it.
The majority of voters do not have opinions on multiple political candidates and are unable to distinguish them or their policy platforms from each other. Because the majority of voters do not think about politics, do not care about politics unless it directly impacts them, and are basically voting for who they'd rather have a beer with. They are unable to rank multiple candidates because they have no clue who they are or what the difference is between them. We are in the same country where over 40% of the population doesn't know how many Senators a state has.
I mean, do you love cricket? (Let's assume no). Could you rank the 6 greatest wicket-keepers of all time, in order? Probably not, right? It's not because you can't rank things, but because you have no clue who or what a wicket-keeper is, can't name any of the major players, and basically don't know because you don't care. Right? Well that's quite close to how voters feel about politicians.
You are probably in a bubble of highly-educated political obsessives who could rank multiple candidates. But the average person would think you're a politics-obsessed weirdo, and so cannot. Make sense?
Bwahaha! Since you brought it up:
MS Dhoni and Ian Healy for being ferociously quick around the wicket, keeping for tremendous spin bowlers. Sangakkara was pretty special, too.
A guy named Jack Russell (unforgettable name!), for England, who played before my time following cricket, who's still famous for playing up to the wicket for fast bowlers.
If you want to include batting, then you're putting Gilchrist and Quentin de Cock into the mix.
If leadership counts for something, then Ricky Ponting a deserves a place on the list. A cut (but only just) below GOAT with both gloves and bat, but one of the best captains qua captains ever.
Is that six? I've not really ranked them, and don't want to. My top-of-mind list also over-values the last several generations of players, because that's who I've seen. I'm sure there were tremendous keepers back in the days of uncovered wickets that no one ever thinks of anymore.
Any more SB cricket fans out there?
Nope it's very much the opposite. My experience with this is from actually talking to voters during the last mayoral election in NYC a ranked choice election. Voters have very little trouble understanding the concept of a second choice. Even minorities can figure it out. You're just way over thinking it.
50% of Maine voters only 'ranked' 1 candidate in Maine's last RCV election (which was their 4th BTW). Seems like a more relevant factoid than your anecdote.
You're probably in a bubble of politics-obsessed weirdos, but regular people do not know more than 1 candidate at a time, or what their exact policy platforms are
https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2023/01/15/the-ranked-choice-voting-elections-of-2022-in-alaska-and-maine/
You keep talking about me being in a bubble but you know nothing about me and I'm telling you about my experience talking to actual voters when canvassing. It seems to me that your ideological priors are the thing that are at issue here. It's really not that hard to rank people. I've had dozens if not hundreds of conversations with regular old normies about this. Who do you like for mayor? Oh who would your second choice be? Not complicated. Everyone gets it. Totally made up concern
People don't understand the complicated weighting of the votes after they are cast, not 'how to fill out the ballot'.
Doubling back to say that I don't think I could do a good job explaining the weighting system to a neighbor, and I am reasonably well educated. Assuming that minority communities, who might be less well educated and less engaged with the minutae of newfangled algebraic voting methods, might not understand it, seems not racist at all and actually a reason to do more work to educate people.
When canvassing in NYC in the last election this rarely came up. Although the New York system isn't algebraic and only takes first place votes so it's relatively easy to understand.
On RCV, I've come to appreciate that a silver lining to the two-party system is that it moves the post-election government-forming coalition building found in other countries to before the election. Political coalitions often turn not on pure policy agreement but on personalities and other individual factors.
If an aspiring politician can't play well with others in one of the two parties, are they as an individual capable of building coalitions and willing to compromise to achieve their policy goals after the election?
>a silver lining to the two-party system is that it moves the post-election government-forming coalition building found in other countries to before the election
I want to like this comment but I'm not sure I understand it. The US system doesn't have formal coalitions per-se, but whatever you want to call our arrangements between elected officials, they're always determined after the election and not before. How much power will Joe Manchin have to block legislation or impose his will? How much power will the Freedom Caucus have? No one knows until the votes are counted and we see who gets how many seats
Very interesting point!
Cat Lady Politics Explained: https://x.com/j_wolak_/status/1816854230117822945
Cat women aren't particularly Democratic, while dog men are more Republican, men who have cats are more likely to be Democrats than women who have cats, and no-pets women are the most Democratic group
Democats
It's not useful without knowing how many cats the individuals own though - the term, "cat lady" is applied to owners of multiple cats, not just one cat. (That said, "men who have cats are more likely to be Democrats than women who have cats" is probably one of the least surprising statistics I've ever seen.)
Sadly the GSS data from 2018 only has data about about 100 women with cats and no children so more there's a lot more to learn here. But yes there are tons of women with cats who vote for Trump/GOP out there so Vance's stereotype of liberal misanthropic cat women is well, dumb.
My current rule for voting on ballot measures in CA is to vote no on any tax increase or new bonds to increase spending. This is a very poorly run state that blows money on all kinds of ineffective programs. Some states have no income taxes or no sales taxes but not CA. It wouldn’t hurt for this state to turn a little less blue. Newsom has very little chance of becoming President and he’s making things worse by signing dumb, irresponsible laws that allow schools to stop reporting transitions to parents.
"Newsom has very little chance of becoming President" I think this claim is pretty wrong. The lesson everyone should have learned from 2016 is literally anyone, even a know nothing game show host, can become president if they can win a major party nomination.
If Newsom can do that he'd have a decent shot depending on the fundamentals of the election cycle.
Anyone can, Newsom won’t. He and his brand of deep blue state politics are toxic in swing states that he needs to win.
Adultery. French laundry. Adultery. French laundry. Adultery. French laundry.
Which is why Bill Clinton and Donald Trump could never, ever be elected president.
19 year old girlfriend. Though to be fair he was much younger when this happened, only 39.
I don't really care about this stuff and neither do most voters. If character was an issue, Bill Clinton and Trump would never have been elected.
Exactly, if the nominees where Newsom and VP Vance in 2028 and the economy was in recession Newsom would easily win despite people screaming "But what about the French Laundry!?!?!?!"
It is beyond me how anyone can support RCV after the "stolen election" idiocy of 2020. Whatever it's merits, too many people are incapable of understanding how the counting works. Can you imagine what would have happened if a bunch of swing states had RCV and Trump had been leading after round one? Given that there are alternatives that are easy to understand (eg approval voting), there is no reason to support RCV (yes, I know that RCV has many advantages. But the fact that RCV increases the likelihood that results will been seen as illegitimate trumps all of them).
Approval voting is my number 1 choice and RCV is my number 2 choice, but I would vote for either of them.
Your comment has both a ranked choice and approval in it 😄
Given what I have discussed, why do you think that RCV is preferable to the status quo?
A hot middle take is that maybe it would make sense to use RCV in primaries but not the general.
I have read plausible arguments that RCV doesn't even achieve its goal of leading to more reasonable, moderate, electable (in the case of primaries) candidates. It may encourage voters to vote for their extreme preferences (knowing they can still rank someone more reasonable below that preference) without thinking about electability first. And then the extreme candidates end up winning.
Exactly. A run off system is much better.