Ranked choice voting is in the news lately because of the big mess New York City has made of implementing it in its Democratic primaries for the mayoral race. But in the talk about how it works, one point strikes me as a bit odd.
As I understand it, RCV counts up the first-choice candidate votes. If no one reaches 50%, whoever got the least number is washed out, and their voters' second-place candidates are promoted to first, the numbers are re-counted, and the cycle is repeated until someone reaches a majority.
While this seems like a good system at first glance, the implementation has a strange quirk in it: the people whose second-choice votes get redistributed first -- and are therefore the most likely to influence the final results -- are the ones who voted for the least popular candidate, or in other words, the ones whose preferences are the least representative of the overall will of the electorate.
What's the rationale for giving that group disproportionate power in choosing the winning candidate? That seems a bit counterintuitive.
