> It’s not just that these (measures) went down so solidly — they went down in solidly Democratic states<p>This is an oddly naive sounding quote from a political science professor, enough so that I wonder whether it was taken out of context. Democrats haven’t embraced outright voter suppression the way Republicans have but that doesn’t mean that the people who run the major parties want to lose power, and ranked-choice voting is almost certain to lead to more upsets.<p>I think main lesson here is that there isn’t “one weird trick” to improve competition. Progress has to start at the lower levels so people get comfortable with the idea, especially so concerns about cost are assuaged, and it has to be done with local groups rather than national PACs.<p>I live in DC where I-83 passed by a huge margin (72:27). The two things which I think helped with that are that it was promoted by local activists around the city _and_ it came out of a sense many voters have that the Democratic primary shouldn’t be the only election which matters (which is the case here until the national Republican Party stops tainting the name). If you want votes, you really need people to believe there’s a problem which needs solving before pitching your solution.
If approval or score voting got rejected, I'd be sad. But IMO, instant-runoff voting is the one system that stands out as even worse than first-past-the-post. It's not even monotonic.
People in power have a singular goal of retaining power. This provides them a powerful incentive to keep an uneducated electorate but blame someone else for the reason the electorate is uneducated.
Really disappointing news. The spoiler effects in plurality voting are just so objectively non-partisanly bad that it's hard to justify keeping it. (Especially when you can expect everybody running the election is able to read and write and do math.)