A ballot measure that would repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting and open primary system has very narrowly failed, according to final unofficial results released Wednesday by the Division of Elections.
The final margin for Ballot Measure 2, pending certification, is 664 out of 340,110 votes, with “No” outpacing “Yes” 50.1% to 49.9%.
RCV is definitely better than FPTP, but basically everything is. From what I’ve seen, the only thing mathematically worse than what we have now would be a random pick.
I strongly prefer Approval because ranked voting systems in general tend to have glitches. Unranked ones still suffer from issues due to strategic voting, but no moreso than their ranked counterparts. From there I prefer Approval to Score and others simply because Approval is easy to explain (“vote for as many as you want instead of just one” — there you go, one sentence!) and thus easier to sell to people who don’t understand it.
Still though, there’s a lot of options for sure. If you’re interested in learning more, there’s a couple of interactive articles about voting systems I came across (one while writing this comment); this first one by Nicky Case is a great starter, and this followup by Jameson Quinn gives a bit more detail for some stuff, particularly about strategic voting.