What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without &quot;throwing our left-of-centre&quot; vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don&#x27;t want to research beyond 3 candidates, don&#x27;t!<p>I can&#x27;t see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there&#x27;s usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don&#x27;t have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever.<p>The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smh.com.au&#x2F;politics&#x2F;federal&#x2F;it-was-people-play-would-be-senator-ricky-muir-on-the-kangaroo-poo-fight-20130909-2tg2g.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smh.com.au&#x2F;politics&#x2F;federal&#x2F;it-was-people-play-w...</a><p>But this &quot;preference whispering&quot; is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single &#x27;1&#x27; for a given party and it was <i>their</i> preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn&#x27;t go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It&#x27;s not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don&#x27;t even have to keep numbering.