Ranked Choice bill Reform

When you are in an environment where large groups of individuals have equal or similar decision making power, it becomes difficult and time consuming to come to any kind of consensus. Especially if all the individuals have competing interests. Even if all you need is a small majority. But there might still be a way.

You could have a system where every individual has a chance to make a proposal for how to move forward, and then rank their preference of their proposal along with everyone else’s, with logical modifiers. And by logical modifiers I mean that they would have the ability to say you want to use they’re proposal &/OR someone else’s. This system has some organizational use, but it’s most obvious application is legislative work.

For example, let’s say you (the legislature) have an infrastructure project you want to get through. Let’s call this hypothetical project A1. And you know another senator that wants a different infrastructure project. Let’s call it C22. You care more about your project than your fellow senators, and you also care about reducing the deficit. And infrastructure projects cost money. Therefore you would rather that only your plan is passed over both of your plans passing. But you would also rather both of your plans passing over nothing happening. On top of that you have another fellow senator, let’s just make up a name for him and call him Hans. He wants to fund a project to build an alien death laser to put into orbit. Let’s call this proposal MegatronDeathRay. While all of you agree that this third proposal is very important, again, you care about deficit spending. So you’re ranked choice goes as follows:
A1
A1 & C22
A1 & MegatronDeathRay
A1 & C22 & MegatronDeathRay
[Nay]
C22
MegatronDeathRay
C22 & MegatronDeathRay

Here, Nay means that you would rather that nothing is passed. Now let’s say you’re indifferent between C22 and MegatronDeathRay. Your choices could look something like this:
A1
A1 & (C22 OR MegatronDeathRay)
A1 & C22 & MegatronDeathRay
[Nay]
C22 OR MegatronDeathRay
C22 & MegatronDeathRay

If you wanted to, you could set up a way to publish your preferences without actually voting on them. By seeing the preferences of the other members, you know more exactly how to approach the issue, who you need to convince, etc.. And perhaps the biggest advantage is that it allows smaller parties or even lowly individuals to get a word in on what bills should or shouldn’t be passed. Without leading to gridlock.

Ranked choice voting has many different dynamics without the logical modifiers. And adding them in adds a whole new level of complexity. Exploring this might be a better topic for another time. One thing that is yet to be determined is what to do with the Nay vote. Initially, I figured that the end of the preference list was the nay vote. But I can still see the merits of having a way of saying, “I don’t want anything to pass, but if something does pass, make it this.” It seems like increasing granularity would be a worthwhile goal.