Yes, the Instant-Runoff/Hare form of RCV is a broken system that elects candidates based on incomplete information, which means it can eliminate the most-preferred candidates through vote-splitting.
There are other ranked systems that are good, like Total Vote Runoff or Ranked Robin, but in an election like this with many candidates, it can be tedious to rank every one.
A score-based ballot is probably a better choice, with less cognitive burden. (Though STAR is specifically designed for single-winner elections, not 3-winner elections. I’m not sure how well it performs in strategy-resistance in the multi-winner case. They have a proportional multi-winner variant, too.)
The cognitive burden of any election with 39 candidates will always be significant. What about a system—whether score-based on ranking-based—in which each voter is only presented with 8-12 of the candidates?
While the nominal goal of the election is to identify three winners, I think the information-gathering objective is much more important here than in political elections. The broader ranking list, and more so than the ultimate outcome, is what matters for helping donors identify orgs they should research more, should re-consider, etc. I’d rather get a chance at the considered opinion of ~25% of the electorate vs. a possible but more cursory assessment by 100%.
Please consider using
starscore (or approval) voting next year instead of RCVYes, the Instant-Runoff/Hare form of RCV is a broken system that elects candidates based on incomplete information, which means it can eliminate the most-preferred candidates through vote-splitting.
There are other ranked systems that are good, like Total Vote Runoff or Ranked Robin, but in an election like this with many candidates, it can be tedious to rank every one.
A score-based ballot is probably a better choice, with less cognitive burden. (Though STAR is specifically designed for single-winner elections, not 3-winner elections. I’m not sure how well it performs in strategy-resistance in the multi-winner case. They have a proportional multi-winner variant, too.)
The cognitive burden of any election with 39 candidates will always be significant. What about a system—whether score-based on ranking-based—in which each voter is only presented with 8-12 of the candidates?
While the nominal goal of the election is to identify three winners, I think the information-gathering objective is much more important here than in political elections. The broader ranking list, and more so than the ultimate outcome, is what matters for helping donors identify orgs they should research more, should re-consider, etc. I’d rather get a chance at the considered opinion of ~25% of the electorate vs. a possible but more cursory assessment by 100%.
I’m not an expert, but this may be a good idea. Apparently ranked-choice voting is always vulnerable to certain types of failures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem), but these can be avoided with rated voting systems.