Single-winner Elections
Vote pairing is a voter strategy for single-winner elections, but it is made moot by the election system of instant-runoff voting, or ranked choice voting. Vote pairing allows a person to electorally support a candidate that is unlikely to win an election, without inadvertently preventing the election of another candidate that they would otherwise prefer. Instant-runoff voting addresses this same problem within an official voting system. In instant-runoff voting, voters rank their choices. The vote counting runs through everyone's first choices and then the candidate that comes in last gets taken out. The votes of everyone who voted for that candidate then get redistributed to their second-choice candidates and the counting runs through everyone's new top choices again. The process repeats until there's only one candidate left. Advocates of vote pairing tend to simultaneously advocate instant-runoff voting in election reform.
Another alternative is approval voting, which doesn't use a rank ballot. In approval voting, voters vote for as many candidates as they approve of. The total number of approval votes can greatly exceed the number of voters, but the candidate with the most approval votes wins.
Read more about this topic: Vote Pairing
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“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”
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