People should be free to vote for who best represents them while still counting their vote if their preference didn’t win.
Passing state level electoral reform will not only empower the creation of stronger 3rd parties, but also force the legacy political parties to have to compete and actually represent people.
No more safe seats, no more hostage situation, no more voting while holding our noses, only democracy. More democracy was always going to be the solution to this problem. Who could possibly be against more democracy?
RCV is a bad option that’s presented as if it could fix anything.
RCV was first invented in the 1780s, and the inventor wrote about it as the bad idea that it was, but because he was a mathematician, he wrote about the dead ends in the search for something better than the simple First Past the Post system that was in use in America.
The inventor, by the way, was Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet. His life was fascinating, and his death tragic, but for the moment we’ll focus on his efforts to find a better voting system.
He created a criteria for a better voting system, now named in his honor. The Condorcet Winner is the candidate who can win against any other candidate in a one on one race. They’re sometimes called the pairwise winner.
The point being, RCV, or it’s older name of Instant Runoff, cannot reliably elect the Condorcet Winner.
This was why Condorcet abandoned the system.
It was revived by some guys a few decades after Condorcet’s death. They didn’t care that it was a flawed system, just that it was slightly better than the only other option available at the time.
But that was 200 years ago. We now have quite a few options that are not deeply flawed.
First is Approval. It’s a dead simple system that always finds the Condorcet Winner.
How Approval works is thus; you get a list of names on your ballot. Mark any and all that you approve of. You may mark more than one candidate for each position.
The candidate with the highest overall approval wins.
Then there’s STAR. It’s brand new as far as voting systems go, only created in 2014. But it’s also the best system designed to date.
Basically the voter rates each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5. Multiple candidates can have the same rating. To find the winner, you simply add up the ratings for each candidate, then you take the highest two and look at each ballot. The candidate with the higher rating on that ballot gets the vote. If neither of the top two is rated higher on a ballot, either being not rated or rated the same, then the ballot is counted as No Preference, and that number is reported as part of the final tally.
As you said, STAR is arguably better in some ways but Approval being dead simple to explain to people and technically already supported by existing voting machines is worth a whole lot on its own as far as being a good voting system.
Try explaining STAR or Approval to someone who is only familiar with FPTP, see which one they understand more quickly.
Because “Vote for everyone you’re OK with winning the office and it counts as a vote for any of them, whoever gets the most votes wins” or “It’s just like what we’ve been doing, but you can pick more than one person and your vote counts for all of them” explains Approval voting.
As opposed to having to do a cumulative total across all ballots to figure out if your ballot counts as a vote at all, before figuring out whether your vote actually counts as a vote for someone you voted 5 for or someone you voted 2 for.
While I agree that first past the post is the worst possible option, we need national reform as well.
STAR or RCV has the potential to break the 2 party system where votes are counted, but it comes up short against the electoral college system. As long as the electoral college is how we choose our President we will only have 2 viable candidates and the parties will have elevated power to not only choose our candidates but to elevate their preferred down ballot candidates which hobbles alternative voting mechanisms.
The electoral college combined with citizens United gives the parties practically unchecked power.
I’m wondering what the best path forward is… it doesn’t seem likely to pass in either Texas or Florida, but sometimes purple states will surprise you. Backup plan is getting ballot measures in enough of the smaller states to make up the same number of electors. The captured SCOTUS would probably shoot it down somehow, but I think enough people would literally riot in the street over that that they’d at least think twice about it.
Here’s the thing, in a sane world, the president wouldn’t matter quite so much. If you actually had a more reasonable legislature, they would have the political will to actually hold the president accountable for going beyond his scope.
That is to say for those wanting a more “perfect” president than some moderately inactive centrist, don’t expect that out a country like this. It’s a singular position and really should be the second choice of people who want a more hardcore candidate, with a failure to build consensus on ‘the’ hardcore candidate.
Very true. One thing that struck me about the last 8 years was how beholden the Republicans were to Trump during this entire time. It was batshit and I cannot remember any other time the legislator was so beholden to a President. We need them to be an independent branch, not scared of one man.
National reform will only happen from the bottom up. Need to change the local elections first and push every incumbent out of their seats. The current people in power will never cede.
People should be free to vote for who best represents them while still counting their vote if their preference didn’t win.
Passing state level electoral reform will not only empower the creation of stronger 3rd parties, but also force the legacy political parties to have to compete and actually represent people.
No more safe seats, no more hostage situation, no more voting while holding our noses, only democracy. More democracy was always going to be the solution to this problem. Who could possibly be against more democracy?
Videos on Electoral Reform
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
STAR voting
Alternative vote
Ranked Choice voting
Range Voting
Single Transferable Vote
Mixed Member Proportional representation
RCV please
RCV is a bad option that’s presented as if it could fix anything.
RCV was first invented in the 1780s, and the inventor wrote about it as the bad idea that it was, but because he was a mathematician, he wrote about the dead ends in the search for something better than the simple First Past the Post system that was in use in America.
The inventor, by the way, was Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet. His life was fascinating, and his death tragic, but for the moment we’ll focus on his efforts to find a better voting system.
He created a criteria for a better voting system, now named in his honor. The Condorcet Winner is the candidate who can win against any other candidate in a one on one race. They’re sometimes called the pairwise winner.
The point being, RCV, or it’s older name of Instant Runoff, cannot reliably elect the Condorcet Winner.
This was why Condorcet abandoned the system.
It was revived by some guys a few decades after Condorcet’s death. They didn’t care that it was a flawed system, just that it was slightly better than the only other option available at the time.
But that was 200 years ago. We now have quite a few options that are not deeply flawed.
First is Approval. It’s a dead simple system that always finds the Condorcet Winner.
How Approval works is thus; you get a list of names on your ballot. Mark any and all that you approve of. You may mark more than one candidate for each position.
The candidate with the highest overall approval wins.
Then there’s STAR. It’s brand new as far as voting systems go, only created in 2014. But it’s also the best system designed to date.
Basically the voter rates each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5. Multiple candidates can have the same rating. To find the winner, you simply add up the ratings for each candidate, then you take the highest two and look at each ballot. The candidate with the higher rating on that ballot gets the vote. If neither of the top two is rated higher on a ballot, either being not rated or rated the same, then the ballot is counted as No Preference, and that number is reported as part of the final tally.
As you said, STAR is arguably better in some ways but Approval being dead simple to explain to people and technically already supported by existing voting machines is worth a whole lot on its own as far as being a good voting system.
Try explaining STAR or Approval to someone who is only familiar with FPTP, see which one they understand more quickly.
Because “Vote for everyone you’re OK with winning the office and it counts as a vote for any of them, whoever gets the most votes wins” or “It’s just like what we’ve been doing, but you can pick more than one person and your vote counts for all of them” explains Approval voting.
As opposed to having to do a cumulative total across all ballots to figure out if your ballot counts as a vote at all, before figuring out whether your vote actually counts as a vote for someone you voted 5 for or someone you voted 2 for.
While I agree that first past the post is the worst possible option, we need national reform as well.
STAR or RCV has the potential to break the 2 party system where votes are counted, but it comes up short against the electoral college system. As long as the electoral college is how we choose our President we will only have 2 viable candidates and the parties will have elevated power to not only choose our candidates but to elevate their preferred down ballot candidates which hobbles alternative voting mechanisms.
The electoral college combined with citizens United gives the parties practically unchecked power.
Obligatory this thing
I’m wondering what the best path forward is… it doesn’t seem likely to pass in either Texas or Florida, but sometimes purple states will surprise you. Backup plan is getting ballot measures in enough of the smaller states to make up the same number of electors. The captured SCOTUS would probably shoot it down somehow, but I think enough people would literally riot in the street over that that they’d at least think twice about it.
Add to that, would also be great if we actually had proportional representation that matched population growth.
Here’s the thing, in a sane world, the president wouldn’t matter quite so much. If you actually had a more reasonable legislature, they would have the political will to actually hold the president accountable for going beyond his scope.
That is to say for those wanting a more “perfect” president than some moderately inactive centrist, don’t expect that out a country like this. It’s a singular position and really should be the second choice of people who want a more hardcore candidate, with a failure to build consensus on ‘the’ hardcore candidate.
Very true. One thing that struck me about the last 8 years was how beholden the Republicans were to Trump during this entire time. It was batshit and I cannot remember any other time the legislator was so beholden to a President. We need them to be an independent branch, not scared of one man.
National reform will only happen from the bottom up. Need to change the local elections first and push every incumbent out of their seats. The current people in power will never cede.
Pretty much this, and all the focus on the presidential election when they have some shot at winning some districts and such.
France has a runoff for president