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Ranked choice. If no one has a majority, you eliminate the lowest vote getter and take the second choice of people who voted for that candidate. Repeat until there's a majority.
Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.
It's still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.
That's not a bug. It's the entire aim of an electoral system.
The people who aren't the extreme ends of two poles and actually have policies the majority are in favor of are the people who are supposed to be in office. I shouldn't be choosing between "arrest people for using birth control" and "eat the rich and disband the police".
You also don't get progress in any direction when both parties are spending half their time unraveling everything the last group did.
I wouldn't call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don't even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won't vote Conservative, Conservative voters won't vote NDP.
This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.
Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn't call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.
If the Canadian Liberals thought it'd win them more elections, they would've done an election reform years ago.
...like they'd initially promised.
The center should be the people representing the country. There's a lot of room in there for a diverse, varied set of perspectives. The fact that 1/3 of the country hates the two extremes and is OK with the middle is exactly why the people in the middle are the ones who are supposed to be elected.
The middle will move over time as the electorate's value change. That's where progress happens. The 10% who are Neo Nazis should absolutely not have anyone make it into office. That's not what functional government is.
Then you end up with Ed Stelmach as leader.
Runoff elections seem the best from my view point
You end up with the actual preference of the majority best represented. You don't get put in a spot where you have to choose one of Trump or Clinton based on which extreme is least objectionable. You can vote for someone sane, then choose between the two extremes as your "worst case".
It allows moderates to actually be represented instead of primaried out of the race, then scared to be in the general election because they might spoil the race for their party's winner.
I explain my rationale in a response to the guy that I responded to. I realize it's a thin distinction, but I think it's an important one.
You know the alternate name for ranked choice? Instant runoff.
In your opinion, why does making everyone come out a second time produce better results?
I don't like the idea of having to vote multiple times, but it's better than ranked choice, as with ranked you can get a person in that the majority of people didn't vote for. If you have multiple rounds of just one vote cast, at least you're picking the person you want each time, rather than 'i guess this person is better than person X, but i really don't want him in.
As I alluded to, this is what happened in Alberta politics - we had 3 candidates for conservative leadership: two were very polar, and one guy was in the middle, and thus the guy in the middle won, but no one really wanted him to win. Conversely, if they had just voted regularly, the guy that won would have been kicked out since voting for him wasn't an option. Then you could run the thing again, and get a better split between the polar candidates.
I think we have a different understanding of ranked choice.
In your example, you have 3 candidates, and candidate 3 isn't very popular. He isn't many people's first choice. At the end of round 1, candidate 1 has 45% of the first choice votes, candidate 2 has 46% of the first choice votes, and candidate 3 has 9% of the first choice votes. Candidate 3 is then eliminated, and those who voted for him have their votes go to their second choice candidate. That should leave either candidate 1 or 2 winning. The only way he wins is if he had more first choice votes than one of the other candidates.
If someone who is everyone's second choice but no one's first choice wins, that sounds like approval voting or something similar, not ranked choice.
Edit: Looking at the referenced election, it looks like he was the most popular among the people who didn't want the 2 popular candidates. The first round was 8 candidates and a simple ballot. The second round was a runoff election with the 3 most popular candidates and a ranked choice ballot. He won the first round of that. No one had 50%, so instant runoff, but he also won the second round of that.
To avoid that situation, you would have had to change the run-off rules to only allow the 2 top people instead of the 3 top people. But it still was an in person run off that gave you the result you dislike.
Yes, we're talking about different things, it seems (also thanks for being civil in your reply). My apologies - your definition seems better than what my understanding was.
In any round though you only have 1 vote still, it's just collecting the votes ahead of time? The only thing you lose is knowing who is in each round in advance?
In your example, wouldn't the same candidates have been knocked out in each round regardless?
Again, see the chain, but my understanding was wrong. I was thinking ranked was you got multiple votes (1st preference, 2nd preference). That system sucks.
I think the ideal solution would be like selecting skills in an rpg. You get some number of points, say 10, and you can give as many or as few to each candidate as you want. If there's only one candidate you want you give them all your points, otherwise, you can do essentially the same thing as rank choice and give some to every candidate but different amounts
That way still ends up with candidates that you didn't vote for though, the ranked choice method means you always have a vote in each round.