Until ranked choice for president
That wouldn't change anything. RCV still produces a polarized two-party system.
Psephomancy
joined 2 years ago
Ranked Choice Voting doesn't make third parties viable, either. It uses the same counting method as our current system (tally up people's first-choice preferences) and therefore suffers from all the same problems, like vote-splitting, spoiler effect, and center-squeeze effect. You can't fix the problems of FPTP by adding more rounds of FPTP. You need to allow voters to express opinions about all of the candidates and then actually count all of those opinions.
If you want third parties to be viable, you want real reforms like STAR Voting, Condorcet RCV, or Approval Voting.
Better ranked system (transferable vote instead of points)
https://civs1.civs.us/civs_create.html ? or https://star.vote for scored ballots
You just advertised a system that doesn’t count dissenting votes, therefore making it impossible to find the real acceptance of some choice.
Likewise, RCV doesn't count all of the voter's rankings, making it impossible to find the true preferred candidate from the published election results.
Down voting and abstaining have been studied (and used), too:
My suggestion here is counting all rankings, not having a winner determined by the sums of first choices, which would introduce some complexity and possible elimination of ballots
Some ranked ballot systems that count all rankings:
You probably mean https://www.rcv123.org/? But that uses Hare's method, which is pretty flawed and won't always pick the candidate preferred by the voters.
Better to use https://star.vote/ (score ballots) or https://civs1.civs.us/civs_create.html (ranked ballots).
Unfortunately the form of RCV used everywhere in the US is Hare's method, which eliminates candidates based only on voters' first-choice rankings, which largely just perpetuates all the same problems as FPTP. There are many other better reforms. One of those should become the norm instead.
That one's not a flaw. All elections can suffer from ties. Pure Condorcet just makes it obvious when there's a tie (and this is very rare). There are a bunch of Condorcet completion methods for resolving the tie.