It always blows my mind how little effort the people in charge put into the final details of picking systems.

STAR needs to write a similar article to this.

https://newsdirect.com/news/open-letter-to-ranked-choice-voting-supporters-946993204

Not sure about the specific implementation, but at least mathematically it's also equivalent to combined approval voting (i.e. -1, 0, 1).

@toby-pereira Right.... but of course "the popular vote" isn't so meaningful with ranked ballots either.. I assume he means "the most people who picked a candidate as their first choice," and admittedly this has become associated with "popular vote" and even "democracy" simply because that's been how it's been done for so long.

Really, though, the term "popular vote" makes sense when contrasted with "electoral college." But not so much as it is being used here.

Steve Forbes did similar things with the thing he is most known for, the flat tax. Similarly, it sounds so nice and simple and logical as long as you don't actually think too hard about it.

They said they would post a recording of the debate on Youtube.

It was generally rather biased against alternatives to Hare.

@jack-waugh This seems to be a very abstract proof of something that doesn't even seem to be true - an ordinal voting system can't be continuous, respect anonymity and unanimity. At the end of the video he asks about an election (using FPTP) used to elect a pizza topping. He says he personally thinks the most likely condition to fail is continuity. He personally thinks? I mean, does it? I'd say that by any reasonable definition of continuity, FPTP doesn't fail. You don't get any weird jumps in the result after changing one vote, like you might do in a Condorcet method if e.g. a cycle suddenly appears or gets broken. You wouldn't get any discontinuities in the Borda count either.

Edit - Just looking at the comments, people are talking about how any change in a vote is a discrete jump so it's not continuous in that respect, but that much is obvious from the start.

There is an online obituary if you want to read it here.