Electing a Speaker does you no actual good if they can’t, in office, maintain the confidence of a majority of the House, and assemble that majority into a coalition to pass legislation. If they were elected without genuine majority support they would be ineffective and potentially quickly removed by a vote to vacate.
So while the current mess is embarrassing and annoying, it’s mostly a result of the fragmented factions and there not being a majority legislative coalition, moreso than the particular mechanics of how you hold a Speakership election.
That makes sense to me and I had not really though about it in that way. That said, and I have not clue as to where to find the data, of if such data even exists, I would love to see if under a racked voting structure once might have predicted the results that did emerge.
I think some of your concern about lacking a genuine majority hangs on how people understand the different voting processes. I think most in Congress would actually get the implication of the rank voting and see the winner as actually having majority support.
But the observation that if the Speaker cannot be effective then the type of “business continuity plan” I was waving my hand at probably would not improve anything.
To add to this, if the ranked choice voting is implemented with a “no confidence” option (as it should to prevent the vote-in vote-out cycle described above), then you could easily end up in the same situation as the house currently is in, where no candidate manages to beat out “no confidence”.
Electing a Speaker does you no actual good if they can’t, in office, maintain the confidence of a majority of the House, and assemble that majority into a coalition to pass legislation. If they were elected without genuine majority support they would be ineffective and potentially quickly removed by a vote to vacate.
So while the current mess is embarrassing and annoying, it’s mostly a result of the fragmented factions and there not being a majority legislative coalition, moreso than the particular mechanics of how you hold a Speakership election.
That makes sense to me and I had not really though about it in that way. That said, and I have not clue as to where to find the data, of if such data even exists, I would love to see if under a racked voting structure once might have predicted the results that did emerge.
I think some of your concern about lacking a genuine majority hangs on how people understand the different voting processes. I think most in Congress would actually get the implication of the rank voting and see the winner as actually having majority support.
But the observation that if the Speaker cannot be effective then the type of “business continuity plan” I was waving my hand at probably would not improve anything.
To add to this, if the ranked choice voting is implemented with a “no confidence” option (as it should to prevent the vote-in vote-out cycle described above), then you could easily end up in the same situation as the house currently is in, where no candidate manages to beat out “no confidence”.