Quote:
The other part of the presidental election process reform I believe in is implementing some sort of ranking based voting. More and more cities are implementing some type of system, usually after a near runaway vote to implement it. San Fransisco just used it in this past election for all city officials, and it worked well.


Well, I wouldn't quite go that far. You could say "it didn't work too badly."
There were some software and computer glitches which messed up and stalled the counting. These failures were of a qualitatively different type than just the usual eVoting snafus. They did get them fixed eventually, however.

But the more important issue is this: There are several different ways of doing ranking-based voting. The one which SF uses is the worst of these choices, called "instant runoff voting." It has the nasty property that you can sometimes optimize the chances for your candidate by not ranking the candidates in your preferred order.

I can't dig up the link right now, but there is a comparison of the different rank-order based systems and their pitfalls somewhere.
[Edit: this is not the link I was looking for, but at least here's something. electionmethods.org ]

Perhaps dwallach can direct us to some good resources here.

I'm all in favor of ranking-based voting systems, but we shouldn't get in a hurry and ram the wrong one into practice, as San Francisco did.