Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Why ranked-choice voting is bad: Consider a current scenario.

Ranked-choice ballot
Stephen Barnes/Getty Images

Shannon is the founder of Negative.vote, which is promoting statewide ballot initiatives to allow voters to register firm opposition to one candidate in each race.


It was at a 1980 Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when someone is first recorded coining this famous aphorism: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." You may have heard a rumor that Albert Einstein said it, and that would be false.

We live in an era, though, when truth is subjective. If enough people believe a thing, it does not have to be true.

The coronavirus jumped to humans in a Wuhan seafood market. Vote-by-mail is fraudulent. Jared Kushner is a cyborg. The flu vaccine makes you susceptible to Covid-19. Hillary Clinton eats babies. All true, we've heard.

Just like the Romans reveled in gladiator games and torture, so too are our citizens addicted to conflict of their favorite untruths. Conflict is very entertaining, after all.

Our elections are the modern-day version of the Roman Colosseum. We keep the masses captivated with semi-regular clashes.

There is a 24-hour opinion industry that reaps the benefits of constant conflict coverage. Networks have devolved into de facto subsidiaries of the two major political parties.

And so, it goes. Another Black man receives unjust, extrajudicial capital punishment on our streets from a white police officer. No judge, no jury; just the death penalty, aired.

Protests turn counterproductive when antifa socialist agitators (and white supremacists pretending to be antifa) join in. Looters loot. Police shoot rubber bullets at badged media, on air. Our president openly calls for the shooting of looters. No trials or conviction required. Who needs a legal system? These ratings are gold.

We all seem to be living in a parallel universe, with time running in reverse. The 1960s are upon us and the 1860s may be on the horizon.

The root cause of all this suffering is plainly one fundamental flaw — the way we vote. A voter's voice is limited to just one thumbs-up vote, which guarantees conflict.

A one-vote system always manifests over time into a tug-of-war, or an actual war, between two major parties.

It also artificially empowers two ideological minorities to make them appear to be much larger than they really are. This is called a cramming effect. It inflates and emboldens extremists and unbalanced partisans, who then wrongly believe they represent a majority. In truth, Republicans and Democrats nowadays each represent less than 20 percent of the American electorate.

To make matters worse, some "reformers" prescribe a new way to vote, which is really the same old way in disguise. They call it ranked-choice voting — and it is yet another one-vote system.

Ranked-choice voting is spreading like a disease because Americans are desperate to try anything to fix their political system. And they are extremely gullible to disinformation that it will disrupt the two-party system. RCV will not.

That majority winner will always be from the two-party system, because multiple independent and minor party candidates must all split votes with each other.

One-vote elections fuel negative propaganda and a money-in-politics arms race — then generate plenty of close contests.

Ranked-choice elections perpetuate the two-party system, artificially inflate those parties to make one appear dominant, further empowers extreme partisans — then generate even more close red vs. blue contests

And the prospect of razor-thin margins of victory enable foreign governments to meddle in elections, exacerbate the money-in-politics arms race and cement the status quo.

RCV advocates shamelessly, and falsely, promote the opposite narrative. Here's an example of the disinformation and another below how this false claim is constantly re-spread.

Imagine for a moment that we decided criminal guilt by popular opinion. Now, I know that RCV advocates are going to say, "You can't possibly believe that crackpot Shannon fella. He's the guy that thinks we should decide guilt based on popular opinion."

To clarify, I do not think that we should resolve guilt or innocence based on popular opinion. It is just a useful mental exercise to illustrate how RCV fails.

So consider an opportunity to rank these three possible answers — President Trump, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin or George Floyd himself — to the question: Who was responsible for George Floyd's death?

This presents a complex dilemma. Because the first reaction for many is surely going to be "definitely not George Floyd!"

However, RCV prohibits you from voting against any options. You may only list in order of priority the options you favor.

Under RCV's instant runoff system, the second-place finisher will get a head-to-head matchup runoff against the first-place option, with ballots with the third-place option on top getting redistributed to those voters' next choices.

What if polls indicate well above one-third support for the idea that Floyd was responsible for his own death? What if many are also likely to vote that the president was responsible?

If you wanted Floyd to "lose the election" (as I would) but believe he is not going to be eliminated in the first round, your ranking decision would be influenced by your conclusion about whether Trump or Chauvin would fare better in a head-to-head against Floyd.

Accordingly, you cannot always vote sincerely with RCV. You must vote strategically to make sure your worst outcome does not prevail.

It would be much simpler just to vote thumbs-down against our worst outcome.

Unfortunately, Americans everywhere will adopt ranked-choice voting in coming decades. Its momentum of untruth is unstoppable. It will become widely accepted before voters inevitably experience its shortcomings — and it will ultimately be repealed by voters, again. All that will cost us millions of dollars and many years of precious time.

But if Albert Einstein invented ranked-choice voting, who can be against it

Read More

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

The B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber flys over the 136th Rose Parade Presented By Honda on Jan. 1, 2025, in Pasadena, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.

The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.

Keep ReadingShow less
Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are
a close up of a typewriter with the word conspiracy on it

Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are

The Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate shooting, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a man’s livestreamed beheading of his father last year were all fueled by conspiracy theories. But while the headlines suggest that conspiratorial thinking is on the rise, this is not the case. Research points to no increase in conspiratorial thinking. Still, to a more dangerous reality: the conspiracies taking hold and being amplified by political ideologues are increasingly correlated with violence against particular groups. Fortunately, promising new research points to actions we can take to reduce conspiratorial thinking in communities across the US.

Some journalists claim that this is “a golden age of conspiracy theories,” and the public agrees. As of 2022, 59% of Americans think that people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today than 25 years ago, and 73% of Americans think conspiracy theories are “out of control.” Most blame this perceived increase on the role of social media and the internet.

Keep ReadingShow less
Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job
woman wearing academic cap and dress selective focus photography
Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job

A college education used to be considered, along with homeownership, one of the key pillars of the American Dream. Is that still the case? Recent experiences of college graduates seeking employment raise questions about whether a university diploma remains the best pathway to pursuing happiness, as it once was.

Consider the case of recent grad Lohanny Santo, whose TikTok video went viral with over 3.6 million “likes” as she broke down in tears and vented her frustration over her inability to find even a minimum wage job. That was despite her dual degrees from Pace University and her ability to speak three languages. John York, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in math from New York University, writes that “it feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”

Keep ReadingShow less