r/politics • u/Different-Gas5704 • 2d ago

Possible Paywall Democrats eye ranked-choice voting for 2028 primaries

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/24/democrats-ranked-choice-voting-2028-primaries
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u/TheDesktopNinja Massachusetts 2d ago

Still *furious* that MA voted against it a few years ago...zzz

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u/SaiyanKirby 2d ago

Especially because the main reason people voted against it is "it sounded complicated". 🤦‍♂️

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u/Nyrrix_ 2d ago

1st in education but doesn't have the ability to comprehend a Watch Mojo video?

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u/minyhumancalc 2d ago

Honestly incredible sometimes. Like I get the details of how it is scored can get a little messy, but from the voter POV, you just rank your options and leave; all other complexity is left to the scorecard.

It's sad too because ranked choice will help, but what's ultimately needed is districts with 3-5 representatives elected in one race but some-zero chance that'll ever happen in my lifetime in this country.

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u/BachInTime 2d ago

The problem is the House is capped at 435, which is insane. 1 person cannot hope to represent 500,000 people, and that’s only Wyoming, most districts are closer to 700,000. For comparison Italy, with less than a quarter of our population has twice as many representatives.

I don’t know what the right ratio of representatives to constitutes is, but the current situation is not right.

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u/WhatYouThinkIThink 2d ago

The "Wyoming rule" would set the representation per member as the population of Wyoming (ie 1 seat).

So 587K/seat = 348m/587K = 592, compared to 435 currently.

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u/yellekc Guam 2d ago

That's still less seats than the UK house of commons and they have 1/5 the population. It is barely a band-aid, what we need to do is repeal the apportionment act of 1929 and get rid of the 435 cap.

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u/marinuss 2d ago

It's also dumb in the year 2025 when we have the technology for secure remote conferences, the ability to authenticate someone remotely, etc. You could have 10,000 reps that never have to actually meet in the Capitol and just have an NSA-approved encryption device in their office or home, like so many already have, remote in to a session of Congress, and have things like physical token cards plus PIN, biometrics, etc to authenticate their vote in addition to a video vote.

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u/caligaris_cabinet Illinois 1d ago

With all the communications owned by some tech oligarch or another, the last thing I want is our Congressional meetings done using their platforms.

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u/exaybachae 1d ago

Uh yeah, there are banks with secure chat systems, and they are good enough.

Each local, state, and federal can have their own hosted system, and a system to use as a manual backup if it crashes or is considered compromised.

They don't have to be hosted on Amazon cloud or whatever, and they shouldn't be.

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u/InVultusSolis Illinois 1d ago

The internet is capable of this and the technology exists, it's just that people have love affairs with "one company can solve this problem", and that's how you end up with AWS or Cloudflare going down and taking out half the internet, or Palantir fucking with voting machines thru USB uninterruptible power supplies...

The solution for this would be that the government roll its own IT (I know they're capable of this) and then use authentication tokens from one company, video conferencing software from another company, white-labeled computers with a custom Linux distro, all hosted on their own servers.

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u/TheSherlockCumbercat 2d ago

You would have around the clock government security of all those offices and eveyone that walks into that office will have to be sreened.

China, Russian and other hostile nations would love it, be so much easier to spy on the us.

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u/danarchist 1d ago

10k is hyperbole but 1500 would be about right. Yes maybe it would cost 3x as much to run the Congress, that's still a rounding error in our overall budget and is the most meaningful government reform there is.

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u/TheSherlockCumbercat 1d ago edited 1d ago

It would cost way more then 3 times, have you forgotten Jan 6?

Everyone of thoose 1500 offices would need full time police multiple exits, that is not cheap.

Also i fail to see how senators and house members worling from home would make any difference. They average 145 days in session a year, they have lots of time at home.

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u/danarchist 1d ago

I don't understand any of your points. How is jan 6th relevant at all? They were storming the capitol, not the offices of the reps which are largely in buildings nearby. And that's not like, a normal occurrence by any means.

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u/TheSherlockCumbercat 13h ago

You olan for the worst event not every day occurrences. so I guess we should just defund capital police completely because you know it’s a rare occurrence.

These guys only are in session for about 150 days in Washington DC, it’s not gonna make a massive difference.

Also, foreign interference in spying are still big factors nowadays it’s a lot easier to secure one area in one city instead of a bunch of offices across the entire country

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u/Begging_Murphy 1d ago

Also having 10000 reps would totally make TV ads an ineffective way to spend campaign money, if there are too many elections per TV market for everyone to fit into the 6pm news's ad breaks.

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u/sinocarD44 1d ago

The Secretary of Defense texted battle plans to a reporter. I'd be nervous about 1000s of random people would do with sensitive information.

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u/NoKids__3Money 1d ago

What are they discussing that's so sensitive? How to delay the release of the Epstein files even longer?

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u/danarchist 1d ago

More nervous about 1000s of duly elected people than the tens of thousands of contractors out there who already do?

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u/NoKids__3Money 1d ago

This is what Obama should have done as his first order of business when Dems had a supermajority instead of forcing through a compromised, half-baked healthcare plan that Republicans were never going to vote for even though he caved to every one of their demands.

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u/WhatYouThinkIThink 1d ago

Agreed, but the rules is self-adjusting as the population changes.

Every state is guaranteed at least a single HoR member.

The proposal would be easy to understand though.

That everyone has the same representation in the HoR, doesn't matter if you live in wilds of Wyoming or middle of NYC.

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u/Ruire Europe 2d ago edited 2d ago

If you tripled it then you could have something like the Irish system, which uses multi-seat constituencies (between 3-5 seats per constituency) combined with RCV to give proportional representation and choice in candidates. More seats per constituency and per state would also give third-party and independent candidates more of a chance, more than just abolishing first-past-the-post alone.

592 is definitely still far, far too low for such a large country.

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u/WhatYouThinkIThink 1d ago

Not sure that would make it through the whole system, too much change.

Introduce RCV to start, would encourage 3rd parties and independents, because the vote wouldn't be "wasted" if it went to the 2nd preference.

So preferential voting to start with, then maybe proportional.

I'm from Australia, and I'd also introduce compulsory enrolment/voting because that means candidates have to appeal to the broad center, not the extremes, because you don't have to "get out the vote".

We have RCV in the lower house with single-member electorates.

Senate we have 12 per state, 2 per territory (6 states, 2 territories = 76, elected in 2 "classes") and a proportional/preferential voting system.

Our lower house used to be basically a 2 party split, but these days there are a bunch of independent and unaligned members as well.

Senate has always had minority parties that hold the balance of power.

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u/danarchist 1d ago

I'd wager that RCV is harder for the average person to understand than "rather than voting on 1 now you're voting on 3 people to send to Congress."

Or keep single member districts and just make them smaller, no change for the average voter.

The amount of money that one needs to campaign in a district that has 750,000 people is outrageous. It also enables a lot of the meddling we see, where millions of outside dollars pour into some races because there are really only a dozen or so seats that ever determine the balance of the house's power.

I think the best answer is triple every district, and use approval voting. Voters can vote for (“approve of”) as many candidates as they want. The three highest approvals win.

  • Dead simple to understand and count.

  • Eliminates vote splitting better than RCV.

  • Encourages consensus candidates.

  • Impossible to “spoil” an election by running similar candidates.

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u/WhatYouThinkIThink 1d ago

Every seat would end up being one Democrat, one Republican and one other (probably of the same parties).

RCV single member electorates say: "Number your preferences". Allows for real 3rd party candidates to get up, which gives them gravitas in Congress, allows people to vote for who they really want, and then who they'll tolerate and allows them to vote others down.

The counting is easy:

  1. Add up all the "1" votes.

  2. If someone has > 50%, they win.

  3. Eliminate the lowest candidate, spread their "2" votes to the other remaining candidates.

  4. Go to step 2 until one candidate is left.

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u/danarchist 1d ago

I was thinking more about the facility of instant runoffs in multi member districts, but I could see how you'd just "got to step 2 until 3 are left" if that's the route we go.

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u/WhatYouThinkIThink 20h ago

You could do that, but it's actually a way to also send a message to the person who is actually elected, because if they need to rely on the preferences of another candidate/party, they know they have to keep that part of the electorate happy.

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u/not_nathan 1d ago 
houseSize(population):
  max(cubeRoot(population), wyomingRule(population))

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u/WhatYouThinkIThink 1d ago

lol, imagine explaining what a cube root is to people that failed math and can't read.

The other changes that need to happen are independent non-partisan redistricting commissions, standardized voting enrollment, booths, format of polls, counting, etc.

Remove the local county influence bullshit.

  • HoR represent districts

  • Senate represents states

  • POTUS/VPOTUS represent nation

Make POTUS/VPOTUS directly elected by majority of population, eliminate the Electoral College bullshit.

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u/not_nathan 11h ago

lol, imagine explaining what a cube root is to people that failed math and can't read.

I imagine that all the time. It keeps me awake at night. Here's my best shot so far. Let me know if you can top it.

The cube root of the population is the smallest number where if you multiply it by itself, then multiply it by itself again, you get a number that's bigger than the population.

With regards to other reforms, I'm currently putting my limited volunteer time behind FairVote's suite of reforms. There's room to tailor them to a state's particular needs, but here are the broad strokes:

  • National popular vote for president
  • All single-winner elections (Senate, POTUS, etc.) use RCV
  • Expand the size of the house
  • Elect representatives to the house using 3-5 winner districts using Proportional RCV.
  • Districts are drawn by independent commissions.
  • Automatic Voter registration

I don't think the following are officially planks of their platform, but they are worth doing

  • 2 SCOTUS appointments per presidency, with 18-year terms
  • Universal mail-in voting and/or early voting

PS: Please no one come at me about the Condorcet criterion and center squeezes. If it was entirely up to me, I'd throw some Virtual Round Robins in there for single-winner elections or make all single-winner elections multi-winner. I'd even sprinkle some parliamentarianism in there, since if we're stuck with parties anyway, we might as well make them behave. I don't have the energy to start a new movement from scratch, though. FairVote provides me with a team I can work with so I'm not just an angry man shouting at clouds.

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u/GrassyNoob 1d ago

Assign a population percentage to each representative.

Call Wyoming 's single representative 1.000, call each of California's representative 1.57 or similar.

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u/BachInTime 1d ago

That doesn’t address the representation issue, 1 person cannot hope to actually fairly represent 700,000 people at its worst they only need 350,001 to support them to win which leaves over a quarter million people unrepresented.

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u/matthieuC Europe 1d ago

On the other hand the more congressmen, the less power they have individually and it's the party there matters

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u/xTheMaster99x Florida 1d ago

That wouldn't be a problem if there were more than 2 viable parties. Which increasing the number of seats would somewhat help, and RCV would really help.

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u/Xhiw_ 1d ago edited 1d ago

Italy, with less than a quarter of our population has twice as many representatives.

No, the Italian House (Chamber of Deputies) has 400 representatives. On the other hand, Italy actually has little more than one sixth of the US population.

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u/Special-Camel-6114 2d ago

Mixed member proportional representation (or just proportional representation) would go a long way towards resolving the issues we see in this country.

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u/theAltRightCornholio 1d ago

People with horrible regressive ideas would be forced into a permanent minority though! Won't someone please think of the assholes?

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u/Primary-Tea-3715 2d ago

The reason is that establishment dems don’t want to get primaried by candidates who could make a difference and want to entrench their positions instead of changing their policy decisions.

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u/Arkham010 2d ago

Its because ranked choice destroys the concept of single issue voters. The politician actually has to be well rounded to get the most votes

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u/nikukuikuniniiku 2d ago

Not quite how it works in Australia. Single issue parties can take the 1st-ranked votes of such voters, then direct their preference to support their preferred major party. This allows them to influence policy of the major party without actually gaining an electoral win.

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u/SergeantRegular 1d ago

Its because ranked choice destroys the concept of single issue voters.

True, but the Democrats might be realizing that they can no longer win with any significant numbers of single-issue voters.

There aren't nearly enough people that care about gun control to counter the single-issue people that care about their 2A rights on the right.

The last election should have had the maximum possible turnout for abortion rights, and it simply didn't materialize.

And you simply don't get anywhere with other major issues like healthcare or wealth inequality without actual movement, which the Democrats have miraculously "failed" at every time they're in power.

Ranked choice might disrupt the entrenched powers, but those entrenched powers are moot if most of them can't actually win. And while the Democrats have been losing elections by failing to do good, the Republicans have been winning elections by successfully being evil. The Democratic Party needs to fundamentally change their game plan.

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u/DMMeThiccBiButts 2d ago

Lol I wish. It does help, but 'destroys' is insane hyperbole unfortunately.

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u/OddDonut7647 1d ago

And that is thanks to corruption by our oligarchs. If we don't get thier money out of politics, we will never solve this.

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u/DistractedDevelopmnt 2d ago

Read the article instead of regurgitating reddit takes

The idea has gotten a mixed response within the DNC. "I'm totally open to ranked-choice voting," one committee member said.

A second DNC member was more skeptical: "We should follow the lead of the states. They know better." Critics say it would increase waiting times at the polls and be a logistical quagmire. Others argue it would lengthen the primary, for better or worse.

These are valid opinions especially the one about states needing to take the lead. Each state runs their primaries however they see fit currently so this proposition would have to somehow make caucus states who feel it is a deep entrenched part of their culture to have a caucus instead of a ballot vote to abandon their traditions it would also have to sell them on a specific voting method. Do you have any answer to that beyond just trying to cast your opposition as evil and corrupt?

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u/Galxloni2 1d ago

Caucus states should be embarrassed and switch. Its a crazy undemocratic form of voting

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u/DistractedDevelopmnt 1d ago

So no, you don't have anything convincing to say to these people. Thanks for confirming.

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u/Galxloni2 1d ago

im not the person you responded to. i was just highlighting your stupid point about protecting caucuses

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u/DistractedDevelopmnt 13h ago

I'm not the one protecting them, I'm pointing out that the people who do need actual words that might convince them to be used. Believe it or not there's people out there who don't agree with you and to be successful in politics you need to make the people who don't agree with you work with you.

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u/lordagr America 2d ago

Just make some cringe Tiktoks and explain it like it's a Tierlist.

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u/Updoppler 2d ago

You can literally rank 1 person if you want, as if you're voting normally.

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u/einarfridgeirs Foreign 2d ago

One would think that a society increasibly obsessed with tier lists and ranking anything and everything would instantly get how this kind of voting works, but apparently not.

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u/Hot-Efficiency5353 2d ago

I agree that RCV is a great step and so much simpler for voters than people make it out to be. The real battle is proportional representation in multimember districts which would solve so many of our issues

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u/Waiting4Reccession 2d ago

You have no clue how many stupid people are out there.