RCV does have a name recognition and a perceived ‘hotness’ that other voting systems haven’t really matched. And in politics, name recognition matters. I think it is counter productive to attack it to push another voting system. Instead, imo it makes more sense to push the alternative voting system by comparing it to FPTP, our current voting system.
American people don’t have a federal holiday on elections, am I right?
Edit: I didn’t mean federal holiday. Just a holiday that’s mandatory to follow even for private firms.
That’s correct. It’s just a normal weekday.
Utterly insane that elections are held on weekdays. I’m so thankful we have mandatory voting, easy early voting, voting by mail, elections on weekends, and protections for employees who need to vote on the day they if they’re working in Australia. We also already have ranked choice voting by single transferable vote as well as proportional representative voting in most jurisdictions (all bicameral parliaments).
Unfortunately we have a beyond-uncomfortable fraction of the population that are totally cool with trying to prevent/discourage people from voting, as long as the near term political benefit is in their favor.
But I’m still glad to hear about other governments doing things for the good of the people. One of these days maybe enough of the US population will realize we can implement things that worked in other countries!
Just have to convince them that other countries exist…
ACT is unicameral, and I don’t think we’re the only ones
Yeah, as are NT and QLD. My comment was stating that all bicameral parliaments in Australia have proportional representational voting; not that all parliaments in Australia are bicameral.
I mean even federal holidays don’t help. At least for the lower classes since businesses are not forced to follow said holidays. It may be good for federal/government workers but from the private sector it will mean very little.
But I am not talking about federal holidays. I am talking about holidays in both the private and government sector for elections. That’s a fairly reasonable/old law in many countries including mine.
Not in Canada either, but we do have a special holiday for Truth and Reconciliation where our Aboriginal peoples are acknowledged through ceremonial water skiing in Tofino
Voting is not governed on the federal level. That power is reserved to the states. Most reasonable states have 30+ days of early voting. The people complaining about no federal holiday for voting have probably never voted. If your state does not have early voting then get on that shit and stop bitching online.
Having most governance at the state level is a good thing. You are 1 voice in a million instead of 1 voice in 300 million. It is easier for people to influence state government. State laws have a bigger impact on people’s lives.
If someone isn’t knowledgeable and involved in state politics but is posting online about politics then they are just another braying jackass doing nothing to fix things.
Dude, have you considered the possibility that people canNOT be Americans also?
Me:
APPROVAL VOTING AND FIVE MEMBER DISTRICTS, DAMNIT!
While I agree, Ranked is a solid improvement over FPTP.
EDIT: After some reading, I retract my statement, Ranked has a bunch of glaring flaws and can be worse sometimes. Still good that people are talking about it though.
The biggest advantage of ranked choice is that it allows third (… tenth) party votes
It’s also more fun television, watching as candidates come last and their votes flow
SVT or Approval voting wpuld both be significantly better than just RCV though.
EDIT: After some reading, I retract my statement, Ranked has a bunch of glaring flaws and can be worse sometimes.
Care to elaborate? Ranked choice isn’t perfect, (a perfect voting system is mathematically impossible : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow’s_impossibility_theorem ) but I don’t see where it would be worse than FPTP.
Among other things discussed ITT, ranking your second candidate higher can result in your first candidate loosing in basically a spoiler effect.
I assume you mean ranking your second choice lower can make your first choice win? I would say that’s actually a great advantage of RCV, it means moderates have more chance to win. Someone who’s liked by everyone but is nobody’s favorite can win.
No, ranking your second higher can make your first (and second) loose. The spoiler effect still exists, except it punishes moderates instead of extremists. If the orange party gets larger than the yellow party, it becomes an election between the greens and oranges, despite most people being okay with yellow. The compromise is unlikely to win.
I though FPTP was so aweful that basically anything is better, but a few variants of ranked voting are nearly as bad for selecting prefered candidates, and encourage extremism, while being more complex (difficult to trust) and possibly a fraud risk (because all votes need to be processed together, double checking and anti-tampering is more difficult).
You mean like explained here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ ? That’s indeed not ideal, but I would say still absolutely better than FPTP?
That said, approval voting does look better to me.
Yes, that. It’s kust burying the spoiler a little deeper, causing a bad situation at the most important time.
Just that is still better than FPTP, but it’s not that much netter, is more complicated, and needs to be switched to. I’d bet that if IRV was implemented without good explanation (which it won’t get), it would become the scapegoat for the loosing parties (especially the loosing major party).
There’s also the potential security flaws of needing all the votes in one place to be counted, which significantly reduces the number of hands the votes pass through, which may allow larger scale fraud.
If we’re going to go through with switching systems and adjusting how we vote, the new system needs to be a clear and significant improvement to avoid being blamed for everything.
But I haven’t really looked into these systems deeply, so there’s lot’s of nuance I’m missing. Something with a better Condorcet result would be nice though.
That’s what is frustrating it is very marginally better yet consuming all the discourse, probably bc it would not dramatically change election results.
So, I understand what approval voting is, but I’m not sure I follow with “fiver member districts”. Is this referring to something like congressional districts, but instead of electing one person they elect five? Or maybe it means breaking a constituency into a huge number of tiny 5 voter districts?
EDIT: Seems like maybe combining districts that only have 1 representative into larger districts that elect 5 representatives?
Yeah 5 member districts is just saying that every legislative district elects 5 members at the same time instead of just 1. You assign winners using a proportional method so that the winners parties/opinions totals look like the general population. In a simple example, if a district has voters that are 40% blue, 40% red, and 20% yellow, 2 winning candidates should be blue, 2 should be red, and 1 yellow.
Having multiple winners and assigning seats proportionally gets rid of the winner-take-all problem, which encourages a two party system regardless of what voting system you use.
Sounds like a parliamentary system with extra steps.
The only thing that makes a parliamentary system such is that the head of state is elected by the legislature. Single-seat districts can and do exist under parliaments.
Sounds like you want the Fair Representation Act
Thought it doesn’t go all the way with approval voting, It’s still just a PR-STV, but still a massive step.
👆👆👆
Here’s what you should know: You’re not getting it anywhere that needs it.
Could be a way to get blue states more left representation, which is still needed in a lot of ways. The dems still have a bunch of people beholden to corporations
The only people that it’s confusing for are those who fear a 3rd part option. Preference 1, preference 2 preference 3 is all the end voter needs to know. If they can handle the myriad of different ballot formats out there that’s not asking too much
Yep. I have three brothers. My dad used ranked choice voting for us when we were kids all the time on “flavors” of things we needed to buy: ice cream, candy, toothpaste, etc. We understood it with no issues.
it was amusing seeing the look on a friend’s face when my dad would barge into the room with 5 different toothpastes and ask, “which of these do you like the best?” Followed shortly by “which of these do you like 2nd best?”
Next step should be universal mail in voting. Ranking 3 or more choices per contest will make voting take twice as long or more and it will discourage people from voting when they see lines wrapped around the building.
I’m actually surprised we don’t have more in the way of e-voting somehow. We file countless sensitive docs online each day including tax returns, and outside of the occasional technical glitches we don’t hear of massive complaints of fraud the way people go on about it with elections regardless of in person or by mail. Yeah, putting it all online has its risks, but it shouldn’t be impossible.
For most any sensitive document multiple parties can maintain their own copies and even encrypt them if they feel like it and there’s plenty of ways to verify their authenticity. This can’t as easily be applied to voting because you also want anonymity. Cryptographic systems do exist to provide a high level of confidence in integrity and anonymity but misapplication of any step of the process can completely ruin the entire thing. This happens in computer systems all the time. Seemingly secure programs suddenly have massive holes because a new exploit was discovered.
Paper systems are much more difficult to exploit or foul up. Obviously election mishaps happen all the time but I haven’t heard of any such that would alter an outcome AND do not get caught prior to certification.
I live in a RCV country (Ireland), and it’s got its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, you can always make sure that your vote will count. In addition, RCV tends to push the final result towards the political centre, with fringe extremist parties getting less popular vote than in other voting systems. The biggest drawback is that once a party gets entrenched near the centre, ir’s very hard to dislodge it. Ireland had been governed for over 100 years by the same two parties - sometimes alone, other times (like now) in a coalition.
- “Your vote always counts”
- “Governed by the same two parties”
- “Sometimes in a coalition”
Right now, for the US, your vote doesn’t count if you vote 3rd party. We only have two political parties and they vehemently oppose each other (mostly in the House and SC).
Sounds like RCV would just fix the part where 3rd party voting typically is throwing away your vote.
I really wish IRV advocates would stop lying about things like:
since voters can feel free to support them without fear of inadvertently helping a candidate they definitely don’t want to win.
There is absolutely a spoiler effect in IRV, and it isn’t just theoretical – it happened in one of the elections the article praises as successful.
Any election system works well with only two choices. IRV improves very slightly on plurality and works well with many choices, provided only two of them matter. But as soon as you get three competitive candidates, exactly the thing many election reformers want to see, really counterintuitive things start to happen.
It would be vanishingly rare to have a tie. If three are left, one will have gotten the fewest votes and their votes would be divided between the two remaining according to the preference of the voter, leading to one of them winning
I usually promote approval for its simplicity and intuitiveness. STAR also seems respectably decent, and a significant improvement over plurality and IRV.
Ranked choice didnt save the nyc mayoral election
Ranked Choice has some fundamental flaws that make it a very poor replacement for the broken system that is First Past the Post.
I’ll list the flaws in no particular order, but each one is enough of an issue that RCV should never be used in a real election.
First is election security. All ballots cast in an RCV election must be tabulated in a central location. This means that a malicious actor could introduce extra ballots, and those ballots would likely be counted.
This has happened before. There was no malice in the 2021 NYC Mayoral race, but there were extra ballots that were counted.
The next issue is one of counting procedure. It’s confusing as hell. I know it is because in Alameda County, the wrong candidate was actually sworn in before anyone noticed the issue.
Then there was Burlington in 2009. The Condorcet winner was eliminated in the second round. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Condorcet winner is also called the Pairwise Winner, in that if you were to take all candidates and pair them off, the Condorcet winner should win every matchup.
This leads to a discussion of Monotonicity. RCV is one of the only voting systems ever designed that fails monotonicity.
An election method is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot).
I’ll spell this out a bit because it’s fucking amazing, in RCV it’s possible to make a candidate lose by ranking them higher on a ballot.
Then there are issues of ballot spoilage (incorrectly filled ballots) at rates about twice that of simple Plurality. These rates tend to be higher in low income or marginalized areas.
The next issue is Ballot exhaustion. Say you only get 5 choices on a ballot that has 6 or 7 candidates. You rank your 5 and the first round sees your second choice eliminated. Then your third, then your fourth, then your fifth, and finally your first.
Your ballot is thrown out and is not counted at all. Now, RCV rules say that the winner must have 50% of the vote, but that’s 50% of the final vote. Your ballot doesn’t count anymore.
There are studies that say that ballot exhaustion rates can be up to 18% of the initial votes cast. So the final winner can be liked by just 41.1% of the initial voters.
There’s also the issue of those eliminated candidates. Say your first choice was eliminated early. Then your second might have had that extra vote to stay in, and eventually win. But no, your ballot was gutted down the middle before being thrown out.
There are still more issues with RCV, but this is already an essay, so I’ll leave it at that.
There is a better option. A few actually, but the one I currently prefer is called STAR. It’s simple and it’s actually good at all the things RCV claims to be good at.
I don’t doubt that RCV has flaws. But we know that FPTP has flaws. So the question then becomes, Is RCV or FPTP the better voting system? If RCV is a better voting system than it should be pushed for and supported because of that fact.
Perfect is the enemy of good. It is relevant in life and in politics.
For example, If someone is so obsessed with making sure your comment is completely accurate and factual that they end up deleting and never posting the comment, then that comment will not help anyone. Or for another example, I shouldn’t wear a mask because it won’t fully protect me or others from coronavirus. Doing something even is if it is an imperfect improvement is better than doing nothing.
I believe an RCV system is better than FPTP and therefore support it. I also would support STAR for the same reason.
Why not say you would support IRV or better, especially multi member districts and proportional results? Why put so much effort in trying to push against the facts about IRV? Frankly if IRV gets put in place and people are not aware of its strange chaotic behavior it will get repealed, which isn’t my conjecture its reality.
Why not say you would support IRV or better, especially multi member districts and proportional results?
I do and I did. See my last paragraph. Sure, I used different words than you did but I was trying to imply the same thing.
Why put so much effort in trying to push against the facts about IRV?
I did no such thing. Don’t strawman me by putting works in my mouth.
Frankly if IRV gets put in place and people are not aware of its strange chaotic behavior it will get repealed, which isn’t my conjecture its reality.
That is your conjecture, unless you give an example of that happening. I will grant you that it is conceivable that such a circumstance happen, but that doesn’t make it not a conjecture.
I guess my point is that it isn’t really helpful for us to argue about different voting systems when we largely agree that we need to move away from a FPTP system. It just serves to promote division. Unless we are actually doing the groundwork of pushing for different voting systems, arguing about the details of the different systems is just not needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_use_of_instant-runoff_voting?wprov=sfla1
Both Canada and the US had and repealed irv in multiple jurisdictions.
Your whole post is to tell everyone to chill on the criticism of IRV, its not a strawman its your actions.
I guess my point is that it isn’t really helpful for us to argue about different voting systems when we largely agree that we need to move away from a FPTP system. It just serves to promote division. Unless we are actually doing the groundwork of pushing for different voting systems, arguing about the details of the different systems is just not needed.
Right there, you just did it.
IRV is not a good enough solution to promote, imo. I don’t agree with you and you are actively hurting the adoption of a proportional system, the only election system that results in a meaningful number of parties. STV is fine, IRV is not.
I don’t agree with you and you are actively hurting the adoption of a proportional system
Kinda low to attack me and not the argument. That is otherwise known as an ad hominem.
It’s pretty clear your treating this as a pissing match and I have no interest in that.
You had me until STAR. STAR is just approval voting with extra steps, since min/maxing your ballot is the easiest way to game it, and, perhaps I’m missing something, but I have no idea how a runoff is actually supposed to stop it. Seems like a waste to give a middling score to someone I’d want in the 2nd place spot. I’m open to alternatives to RCV, but I don’t see STAR as an improvement.
I actually think a major part of the problem in US politics is that the balance of power is effectively upside down compared to most modern democracies.
Here in Ireland for example, we have three levels just like you: the Dáil is like the House of Representatives, the Seanad is the senate, and we both have presidents. However the head of government here is the leader of the largest party in the Dáil, and the other two are really figureheads. It means that other parties are way more involved in government and lessens the tendencies for a single figurehead to run rampant, changing stuff to suit himself every 4-8 years.
Ireland also uses PR, but we’ve actually gotten quite good at the vote counts, and we probably don’t have the same threat of bad actors in some other countries.
It’s the same in the UK - parliament is the actual government, while the House of Lords and the king are at this stage vestigial. But they use fptp, which is making it difficult to remove a minority government for the last dozen years or so.
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I’ll make it simple. RCV is broken and bad, and in some ways worse than the broken and bad system we already have.
There are better systems that are not broken. My current favorite is STAR.
