Following in Maine's footsteps, both Massachusetts and Alaska have ballot measures this year to determine whether the states will adopt RCV for various elections. I believe that anything beyond FPTP is necessary for a healthy democracy in the long run, so I'm crossing my fingers that this can be the beginning of a trend among the states.
> Alaskans for Better Elections collected enough signatures to put Ballot Measure 2 to a vote this November. If passed, this ballot measure will implement several changes, including: 1) "top four" blanket primaries for state and congressional offices, where all candidates would appear on the same primary ballot and the top-four vote getters would advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation; 2) ranked choice voting in the choice among four candidates on the November ballot, with write-in candidates permitted; 3) ranked choice voting in the presidential election among all candidates who have qualified for the ballot and any write-in candidates
> After a multi-year educational campaign led by Voter Choice Massachusetts, an initiative will appear on the ballot as Question 2 that, if passed, would implement ranked choice voting for Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate and U.S House general and primary elections, state primary and general elections, and county offices, beginning in 2022. The initiative is supported by Yes on 2 for Ranked Choice Voting.
(Notably the MA bill doesn't include implementing RCV for the presidential election, but honestly that's not as big a deal as it could be given that the bill does apply to the federal legislative elections; the only reason the presidency has gotten so out of control is because a complicit legislature has allowed it to happen.)
This! For single-winner elections I think approval voting is the best method.
(Score voting is in theory slightly better with non-strategic voters, but in practice many people vote strategically in which case the added complexity isn't worth it)
Looked it up just now - Approval voting is basically when you can pick more than one candidate off the list, all with equal weights. The candidate with most votes wins.
It is a simple scheme, but it's too simple.
In reality a voter will prefer one candidate over others and may have a secondary choice so not to see their vote lost. The approval voting means that if your candidate has a decent chance of winning, you will need to vote for this candidate only and no one else. That is, your voting will depend on how well your candidate is doing.
An alternative - if I can't have A, then I want B - is the ranked voting. It maps directly on what a voter wants and it doesn't require adjusting their voting strategy based on the standing of their preferred candidate.
> In reality a voter will prefer one candidate over others and may have a secondary choice so not to see their vote lost. The approval voting means that if your candidate has a decent chance of winning, you will need to vote for this candidate only and no one else. That is, your voting will depend on how well your candidate is doing.
All voting methods are affected by strategic voting. Approval voting, however, is relatively little affected by it compared to many other voting methods, such as ranked voting methods.
> An alternative - if I can't have A, then I want B - is the ranked voting. It maps directly on what a voter wants and it doesn't require adjusting their voting strategy based on the standing of their preferred candidate.
Ranked voting methods, while better than the first-past-the-post most of the world uses today, tend to suffer from many deficiencies. And while not a technical objection per se, excessive complexity eroding trust in democracy is a pretty big one as well.
For a nice overview, see https://ncase.me/ballot/ . In particular, see the chart showing the Bayesian regret simulations for different voting methods. In the presence of strategic voters, approval and score voting are the best methods, whereas with 100% honest voters score voting wins.
So go range or STAR. The appeal of approval over these is the simplicity while maintaining most properties. I prefer STAR then range then approval. But these are all very close. There's a bigger gap to Condorcet (a class of ranked systems), then big gap to IRV (RCV), then a small gap to FPTP/plurality.
There's a lot more to this than than just these simple options. I suggest you look more into the subject before forming strong opinions. The subject is highly complicated and there is no global optima. There's a lot more to be concerned about besides VSE and solving the spoiler effect (which IRV/RCV doesn't do btw).
Ranked doesn't actually perfectly map. Consider the case where you like two candidates equally? You can't express this with ordinal systems, but you can with cardinal. There are plenty of non-binary selection systems in cardinal votings that allow for more expressiveness. The thing is that this expressiveness doesn't get you much while it adds complexity (granted, not much). But cardinal systems are also fairly resistant to strategic voting (one of those factors that matters).
> Consider the case where you like two candidates equally
This is an exceptionally improbable case though. Between two choices there's always one that's better. Unlike when you need to select the worst, when all options may be equally bad.
With an ordinal voting method if you vote A > B > C you're stating that the difference between A and B is the same as the difference between B and C. Which is a poor match to reality.
You could just approve A, or A & B. People will set different criteria. The reason equality is a feature is because you can't be infinitely expressive. Let's say that we're using a 5 point scale. If A is 4.9 and B is 4.8 and C is 2, some voters will express both A and B as 5 while some will split. They will do this because they are strategizing (one thing STAR handles well). But the key here, like said before, is that you can express how much more you like A and B over C. This can have major results on the election (also, this ability makes practicality simpler. Less prone to errors because you are scoring candidates and not ranking. So you can have an infinite number of candidates with no added complexity. You can make "mistakes" like scoring or "ranking" the candidates the same value. There are a lot of advantages to the reduced complexity. And you're not making any trades in features, only upgrades).
I think the idea is that across voters, the average difference in preference for A vs B is revealed by choice of voting strategy along the lines you're mentioning. If your preference for A is strong enough that you want to secure a vote solely for A then that choice of strategy does so. But if you want to preserve votes for A and B both, you can do that. Presumably someone else would feel differently, and it would be reflected in expected voting patterns.
No system is perfect, but at the same time, at some point "strategic voting" becomes revealed preference. The issue is how well a voting system encodes these things.
I mean score collapses into approval, so it isn't that big of a deal. I still prefer STAR of the three but I wouldn't be very vocal about voting math if we have approval because it is good enough for me to shut up except among other nerds.
Also, not to be too self-promotional, but I also made a simple site for running polls using Ranked-choice voting. I was surprised that it was tricky to find a nice SurveyMonkey-esque site that did Borda Counts and Instant Runoff voting so I made my own. Hope some other voting geeks can enjoy it - https://poller.io
I think it is unfortunate that Instant Runoff Voting (commonly called Ranked-Choice Voting, though it is not the only system for counting ranked ballots) is getting all the buzz these days. Someone posted this link to a very nice explanation, complete with spiffy simulations, then deleted their comment: https://ncase.me/ballot/
Approval Voting is much simpler to implement and use than IRV, and much less prone to produce anomalous results. More discussion can be found here: https://electionscience.org/
I think the Marquis de Condorcet got the entire field off on the wrong foot with a conceptual framework in which voting is about expressing preferences between candidates. Voting theorists have tended ever since to think in terms of preferential voting. The result is an unconscious bias to the effect that a voter's evaluations of the candidates tend to be roughly evenly spaced: that the gap between their first choice and their second is roughly equal to that between their second and third, etc. You can hear that bias, for example, in this statement from FairVote.org:
[A]pproval voting [has the] practical flaw of not allowing voters to support a second choice without potentially causing the defeat of their first choice.
It's true in AV that if you vote for two candidates, your ballot contributes equally to the potential victory of either; you don't get to say which you prefer. But calling this a "flaw" assumes that you couldn't be somewhat indifferent between those two candidates, at least relative to the degree of your dislike for the other(s). That assumption is pervasive, albeit implicit, in the arguments I have seen made against AV, and it is indeed nothing but an assumption.
A much better conceptual framework is to imagine an N-cube, where N is the number of candidates, and each voter's position as a point in that cube. Then the problem of designing a voting system becomes that of identifying which corner the mean of the positions of the voters is closest to. In principle a voting system could allow each voter to supply a real number in [0, 1] for each candidate, and we could simply add them up and see which is largest. In practice it makes more sense to quantize the space to some extent. Score Voting gives the voter a set of possible values, e.g., integers in [0, 10]. Approval Voting boils that down to the bare minimum of {0, 1}. (My opinion is that once the electorate is large enough, there is little benefit to allowing more than two choices; the greater quantization noise of AV gets averaged out.)
Armed with that, we can now look back at the preferential systems. Is there a way to interpret a preferential ballot in the N-cube framework? Yes, there is. We cut the unit N-cube up along diagonal hyperplanes; for instance, in 3 dimensions (i.e. for a 3-candidate race), the X=Y plane, the Y=Z plane, and the X=Z plane. This gives us 6 prismatically shaped regions. We compute the barycenter of each — the center of mass, under the assumption of uniform density — and look at their coordinates. These turn out to be permutations of [1/4, 1/2, 3/4] — a linear sequence. In short, what falls out of this exercise is equivalent, modulo linear transformation, to the Borda Count.
So the Borda Count optimizes for the case in which the voters' positions cluster near the barycenters of those regions: where their evaluation of the middle candidate, in a 3-candidate race, is about halfway between those of the other two. If you listen closely to the arguments presented by preferential-voting advocates, you can hear them assuming that this is likely to be the case. But there's no reason it should be, and in practice I haven't observed that it tends to be.
Let's not belabor the bottom line here: any form of voting produces better results than winner-take-all/FPTP, whose only benefit is sheer simplicity of implementation (which was crucially important, once upon a time; these days, much less so). What matters at this moment in history is getting off of FPTP, and I'll throw in with whatever scheme has the most momentum. Even if that means different states end up with different approaches, that's fine--maybe that's even great (laboratories of democracy and all that).
It deeply frustrates me to see essays like this written without saying in big bold words at the top "Id take almost anything over fptp" People not deeply familiar with the voting system world see this stuff and think to themselves "Wow. I guess there's no best voting system." Rather than what they should be thinking: "Oh wow, we have the worst voting system that forces bipartisan politics, we're burning alive from the inside AHHHHHHHH"
So before we get into comments like "If the primary reason you fail a criterion is simply because your voting system just says more about a voters actual preferences, thus creating the potential for conflict, it is a weak failure when compared to a voting system that avoids that failure by simply lacking that information."
We should always first, and last say: "I'd take nearly anything over FPTP"
And anyone not doing this is not helping. As someone who has lived through 3 failed voting reforms in my province, I need to make it painfully clear to those not doing this. You are NOT helping.
I don't know whether you'll see this belated reply, but anyway: I have had some sympathy with your position, as you can see in my sibling comment, BUT as I read more about IRV, I am actually coming to disagree. Look at this page, especially the chart near the bottom: https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i... What this says is that in simulation, given mostly tactical voters, IRV doesn't do any better than PV (FPTP). This surprised me, but I'm starting to see why, as the rest of that page explains.
Here's another: https://www.rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html The most telling argument here, I think, is that a century of IRV hasn't freed Australia from two-party domination.
I wouldn't take IRV over FPTP. We've done it in the past and switched back. It also doesn't solve the problem. All it does is slightly increases the VSE but doesn't accomplish much else. IRV isn't great at allowing a new party to appear when major parties diverge from voter consensus.
This isn't something you take several steps towards the right direction. If we take a step and it doesn't work, people are going to stop stepping in that direction and look for other optimization methods. You have to make a large enough step that the loss function actually decreases.
Out of curiosity how long did you have it for? Because voting reform can not fix the damage of a legacy of FPTP the moment it is instituted, it's going to take 4 or 5 elections before
1. the public figures out how it works
2. parties start appearing that arn't getting crushed by other network effects
3. that an understanding of what a strategic vote looks like in the new system is widespread and existing parties start playing the new game.
And since election cycles are often something like... 4 years. You'd need a voting system in place for maybe 20 years before anything positive would start to happen, and that would apply to any voting system put forward.
Like. These systems are for the far flung future of the country. Not... next election.
It was not national, but some cities and states had it for awhile.
As to the time frame: remember that Australia has had it for 100+ years. They are dominated (>80%) by 2 parties (even though they have the MAJOR advantage of proportional representation through their parliament). One can say similar things about Ireland, though the domination isn't nearly the same and there are 3 strong parties (they use a variant of IRV called STV).
But remember that neither the math nor the 100+ year experiment has shown that IRV won't collapse into a two party system. You'll find plenty of references through this thread and sources as to why if you search for "approval" (and "monotonicity criterion"). The thing is that the problem is rather complex. We don't just want it so you don't waste your vote, we don't want that to happen with ANY candidate (favorite betrayer criterion). We want other parties to rise up with no disadvantage. We want our voting to be expressive (STAR and score are substantially more expressive that IRV). We want high voter satisfaction efficiency (VSE) -- IRV doesn't do much better than FPTP. We want the system to be resistant to strategic voting. And we want the voting system to be dead simple. Frankly IRV doesn't fit these criteria. Approval fills every category but isn't extremely expressive. Score and STAR are at worst approval voting and at best much more expressive than ordinal (ranked) systems.
But basically everything you're pointing out is well acknowledged and I won't challenge it. More what I'm suggesting is that Hasan and CGP Grey didn't do their research but drove the hype. There is no optimal system for voting, unfortunately, but there are pretty dang good ones. When the experts say cardinal, I'm going with that.
Agreed. There are numerous alternative voting systems out there, but I would say "The best alternative to FPTP is the one that has the strongest chance of happening".
With that in mind, I think it is worth looking at which voting reform proposals have been rejected before, and what argument their opponents used. My impression is that cost and complexity tend to be the biggest persuaders, so strategically it makes sense to support a voting system where the ballot marking and counting processes are as familiar as possible.
As a concrete proposal, I suggest a system where people fill in ballots exactly as in FPTP, and the results are counted in exactly the same way, but then the candidate with the least votes gets to reassign their votes to another candidate of their choice, and so on until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
So the losing candidates get empowered to speak for their voters? An interesting suggestion, but I think the voters would prefer to allocate their votes themselves — this is what IRV is.
The fear is that an incremental improvement that doesn't solve the major problem (the inability for a more representative party to gain traction) will cause people to revert back to FPTP.
The justification for this is that America did exactly this (not at a national level). As well as that Ireland and Australia are still dominated by two parties, and Australia has had IRV for 100+ years.
Sometimes incremental improvements are actually a step backwards. Specifically when people get over hyped and put too much faith into it.
But I also have to ask, if we already have a better tasting cake and it costs as much as the plain cake, why not take the better one? It isn't more expensive and doesn't take more work. It is just better.
My criticism of RCV is more basic: in RCV, ranking someone too high can in some cases cause them to lose. That's really weird, and we probably shouldn't use any voting system that has that property (i.e. it fails the monotonicity criterion).
Problems generally arise when there is a third candidate who is competitive with the other two. Generally, it's safe to vote for your preferred candidate if they're either in a strong position and will probably win or they have no hope of winning. In between those poles, you might be harming your candidate if you put them first in a 3-way (or more) contest.
Approval voting solves the third party spoiler problem better than RCV does, and it doesn't introduce any weird new problems. Therefore, I think it's a better option than RCV for anyone considering a switch from first-past-the-post. (Range voting and STAR voting are also pretty good.)
Perhaps I am suffering a failure of imagination, but in what circumstance does "ranking someone too high .. cause them to lose"?
Edit: Found this[0] talking about it; what remains unclear to me is whether this should be seen as "this hurts my candidate" over "this result better reflects the electorate".
That's an example. One can argue about whether the "bad" candidate should have actually won in that scenario, but what's strange is when you have a situation where the "good" candidate would have won if only some group of voters hadn't put them first.
I think at the root of it is that removing the candidate with the least number of first-place votes is kind of an arbitrary way of eliminating candidates. Maybe that candidate should have been eliminated, but maybe they were an ideal compromise candidate, tolerated by most voters even if not their first choice.
Perhaps RCV might be significantly improved if one were to eliminate by borda count instead of least-first-place-votes, but that's not the system that's been advocated widely in recent years.
I spent some time looking at voting systems, and also in attending a conference on voting systems 15 years ago.
Elections require a few things - one of them being transparency. Another is trust.
Thus while elegant mathematical solutions such as the one you presented, may be more accurate, they are also impossible for the lay man to understand. And for journalists to explain. For many this erodes the transparency,leading to mistrust.
This is the core reason why simple, but explainable approaches are preferred.
That's the best argument for Approval Voting. It's very simple: you just vote for or against each candidate independently. The votes are tallied, and whichever candidate has the most votes wins. It's much simpler than IRV with its multiple rounds. It's even simpler than Plurality Voting (aka "FPTP") because it doesn't require you to pick a single favorite.
Anyway, I'm writing for the HN audience here, not for general consumption :-)
Not sure where to post this, but does anyone know why RCV is getting so much attention in voting reform efforts? Approval voting seems so clearly superior in UX and performance characteristics that I'm confused it isn't even getting discussed in a lot of places. RCV is on the ballot in our district and I felt compelled to vote for it but I didn't feel totally comfortable with it because it seemed like approval voting wasn't even discussed.
My hope is that this might be a foot in the door to moving to approval (the voting machines would be able to handle either) but my guess is there might also be less of a chance of doing so if there's already been a change.
People have strong preferences for one candidate over another. Approval voting takes that preference from voters, which instinctually seems like a very unattractive system.
E.g., let’s say I’m a “moderate” in the US in 2008. I would like either Obama or McCain to win but I have a strong preference for Obama and I do not like any of the third parties. Approval voting doesn’t allow me to express this very common preference.
s/Approval/STAR (or range)? At worse these are approval, at best they are more expressive while still being substantially simpler than any ranked method (which requires multi rounds). I'd argue that STAR and range are more expressive than ranked because you can actually specify how much more or less you like a candidate than another. You can't express this in a ranked system.
The phrase "one person, one vote" is also the root of much mischief. While we certainly want everyone to have equal influence over the outcome, the fact is, in a race with more than two candidates, you're always voting for some of them and against others. With two candidates, this fact can be glossed over, because you're always voting for one and against the other one; there are no more possibilities. But with more than two, "one person, one vote" suggests that you should only be able to vote for one of them, overlooking the fact that this forces you to vote against all the others. You're still casting N votes about N candidates; they're just subject to the rule that only one of them can be affirmative. In that light, it is clear that the rule is utterly arbitrary.
The correct motto, I submit, is "one person, one candidate, one vote". Approval voting falls directly out of that. Every AV ballot has the same amount of influence over the result as every other, because they're all points on a hypersphere whose center coordinates are all 1/2. That is, they all represent points equally far from the point of indifference.
in quantitative marketing, the equivalent sort of discussion centers around revealed preferences and (choice-based) conjoint analysis. because of that, i'm partial to score voting with something like a 7-point scale (e.g., absolute best, good, acceptable, average, unenthusiastic, unfit, absolute worst).
but for any of this to matter, we need more than 2 choices, so the bigger issue is breaking the stranglehold of the two-party system (either by getting rid of parties, or adding many more legitimate parties to the fold), which also means we need serious campaign reform (which the supreme court seemingly opposes, and might oppose even more soon).
Unfortunately CGP Grey is wrong. RCV (IRV) has been used in Australia for 100+ years. Ireland uses it. We've already had it in America. We've done enough experimenting. The thing to get excited about is Approval and STAR. Let's interested try cardinal voting systems instead of ordinal. They are also substantially simpler.
"The Schulze method (/ˈʃʊltsə/) is an electoral system developed in 1997 by Markus Schulze that selects a single winner using votes that express preferences. The method can also be used to create a sorted list of winners. The Schulze method is also known as Schwartz Sequential dropping (SSD), cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping (CSSD), the beatpath method, beatpath winner, path voting, and path winner.
The Schulze method is a Condorcet method, which means that if there is a candidate who is preferred by a majority over every other candidate in pairwise comparisons, then this candidate will be the winner when the Schulze method is applied."
Condorcet methods get discussed a lot but they are pretty complicated. I believe that they are discussed because they maximize VSE, such as Schulze. I'll reference my comment in this thread because the VSE link has what I'm talking about. The problem is they are less resistant to strategic voting (though much better than IRV and plurality). But let's just keep it dumb and simple with cardinal systems. Approval is dead simple and gets you pretty much all the way there on most of the criteria. If you want to add a little bit of complexity, STAR makes things even better because it gives you some more specificity (and slightly improves upon score/range). Every time we talk about electronic voting everyone always brings up the matter of simplicity, well, that matters here too. With approval and score you're literally just creating a matrix. STAR you have two rounds (top two from the previous round). Ordinal methods are pretty complex and much more prone to mistakes because of such. You don't need a PhD to understand approval (it is actually how I solve the "where should we eat" problem).
Let's be real: plurality is trivial, approval is dead simple, score is easy, IRV is so so, Schulze is complex. That is, in determining the winner.
In plurality you just count the number of votes. Largest number wins. max(sum(votes)
In approval you just count the number of approvals. Candidate with the most approval wins. (max(sum of columns(votes))
Score you actually have to create a matrix!
IRV you have recursion!
Schulze you have both and graph theory!
I just don't see the appeal. Sure, it has a slightly better VSE than STAR if everyone is voting 100% honestly (that condition is a key part!) but it just isn't appealing when you consider other criteria. Especially when we talk about simplicity. Approval is essentially trivial but also has a lot of other criteria going for it. How much does VSE matter? Especially if you still aren't combating spoilers (I'll give you that Schulze does better than IRV at spoilers).
Come on, just look at the wikipedia page for the Schultze method. There are matrices, graphs, and stuff. That might be fine for a technical community like Debian, but for a society filled with average Joes and Janes, not so much. Democracy needs trust, including the average person being able to understand how something as fundamental as voting works.
That's one of the main reasons my favorite is approval voting.
To expand on your point: there is one specific point that CGP Grey gets wrong in his IRV/RCV videos, which is that he says the system is not worse than first-past-the-post in any way.
On the contrary, FPTP adheres to the monotonicity criterion, which means you can't harm your preferred candidate's chances of winning by voting for them. In RCV, you actually can cause your preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too high in some situations.
As far as I know, approval voting is strictly equal to or better than FPTP on any reasonable voting system criterion, which I think makes it a better option. Also in its favor is that it's simpler and doesn't tend to eliminate compromise candidates who weren't anyone's first choice. Range and STAR are also both good systems.
What criteria is Approval not better than Plurality? Only one I can think of is simplicity (although I'd argue that plurality is only slightly simpler).
But approval doesn't have the favorite betrayer like ordinal (RCV/IRV/Condorcet) does. As far as I'm aware, cardinal systems are all like this. They are much more resistant to spoilers.
> I'd argue that plurality is only slightly simpler
I've actually heard it argued that Approval is simpler (for the voter) because all valid FPTP ballots are valid in Approval, but not the converse. There is definitely some benefit to a system that makes invalid ballots less likely (although that doesn't guarantee that the voter's intention is captured).
The difference in complexity for counting ballots, however, should not be understated. For elections with a paper trail, if you are putting each ballot in a single pile with other similar ballots, then Approval voting can require hundreds of piles. This can delay the process and add to the cost. Jurisdictions which rely on electronic vote counting can avoid this, but that introduces its own trust/legitimacy problems.
> I've actually heard it argued that Approval is simpler (for the voter) because all valid FPTP ballots are valid in Approval, but not the converse.
Voting systems can actually be optimal in two candidate systems. It is when you introduce more candidates that things get complex.
> For elections with a paper trail, if you are putting each ballot in a single pile with other similar ballots, then Approval voting can require hundreds of piles.
This would be poor counting. You need the same number of ballots as FPTP. You just sum multiple columns instead of a single column. The process isn't much different. This is actually the major advantage of approval over even other simple but better systems like score or STAR. It is dead simple to count and understand. Compare any of these to IRV/RCV (what the post is about) and they've got huge complexity problems. But Ireland is able to handle the many rounds of counting you need for IRV and they do it with paper ballots. Remember that Ireland and Australia already have IRV and I'm pretty sure Australia didn't have computers a hundred years ago. (I don't advocate for IRV btw)
> This would be poor counting. You need the same number of ballots as FPTP. You just sum multiple columns instead of a single column.
I'm not saying you need more ballots to implement Approval voting, I'm saying that FPTP has the nice property (when counting paper ballots) that the votes can be put into piles, where the weight of each pile is roughly proportional to the number of votes for the candidate whose votes are in that pile.
Of course, FPTP votes aren't actually counted using measuring scales, but the fact that this isn't possible with Approval voting is an indication that "just sum multiple columns" is a slightly more laborious and error-prone step than you make it sound, at least for humans counting paper ballots (which I believe is a necessary property of trustworthy elections).
Oh I see what you're saying. But I will point out that they successfully do IRV with paper ballots which includes many rounds of moving said ballots around. You wouldn't have nice piles with Approval, but it wouldn't be too hard. You're always going to have to add a little complexity to get benefits. The thing though is that Approval is the least amount of complexity we can add, and it gives surprisingly a lot of benefits. Maybe sorting would be a little more straight forward with Score or STAR voting since you can bin them on the highest score. These do have more benefits too and are actually preferred over Approval.
I think you're in agreement with me, unless I somehow said something backwards. I think that approval is equal to or better than plurality (FPTP) in every criteria I'm aware of.
(One criteria you could argue about is later-no-harm; IRV passes, but approval voting does not. It's kind of silly though to say that it's safe in RCV to put lower ranked options below your first choice when in RCV it isn't even always safe to put your first choice first. FPTP adheres to later no harm by not allowing you to vote for anyone but your first choice in the first place, so one could reasonably say that Approval isn't really worse than FPTP, except as a sort of technicality.)
I believe we're in agreement. I was coming to your defense since there seemed to be some confusion among readers who didn't like your extension. Maybe wording?
But yeah, I think on basically every metric cardinal is better than ordinal methods which are better than plurality. The whole IRV push seems odd to me when approval (or STAR) is both simpler, responds better to spoilers (the main concern?), and obtains a substantially higher VSE. I don't think IRV solves enough of the problems to make a meaningful difference (I've brought up Australia a lot in this thread).
I don't know about Australia but in Ireland most elections are done with proportional representation and the method is called Single Transferable Vote in that context (and has different properties). According to Wikipedia only the president (a role with little power) and by-elections are single candidate.
STV is IRV (well slight variant: Single Winner STV). Fair Vote has muddled the name by calling it Ranked Choice Voting. This is dumb because there is a class of voting methods where you rank people (ordinal).
Ireland is doing better than Australia in terms of party control.
> IMO, this is a great way to do it and the proportional representation part is more important than the details of voting method.
And I 100% agree with this. The math does too. That's why I advocate so hard for a better voting system. In America we don't have that advantage (I want that too!). But everyone thinks that if we get IRV in Bernie could win. That's not how it works out.
Hey this is great! I've been looking for a decent poll site like this!
Some things I would like:
Could you randomize the initial order to avoid donkey votes?
I'd like it if there was an option to allow invited participants to add their own choices. For communal voting like "where shall we have breakfast" letting people add things would be good.
Also it would be nice to be able to drag some of the choices into a "I'm not voting for this" box or something. Or maybe just start all the options in the "I'm not voting for this" box and let people move them over? Not sure what would be easier.
Definitely planning to randomize the order. This is next on my todo list whenever I get back around to this site.
Adding your own choices is tricky UX-wise, because if person A votes, then person B votes and adds a new choice, person A's vote never took the new choice into account. When using this personally with friends, I've just aggressively solicited ideas beforehand to get around this. Definitely not a perfect solution though.
I really like the "I'm not voting for this" idea. Also, that would let you just click your votes in order, rather than having to sort a list. Will explore this idea!
When it comes to learning about voting schemes, I will always link to this: https://ncase.me/ballot/. Interactive simulations comparing different voting methods really tickle the nerd in me.
The conversation in this thread demonstrates why first-past-the-post voting is so hard to replace. There is no consensus on which alternative system to replace it with.
On the contrary, it shows that so many people with differing views share a common goal of replacing FPTP. I'm sure all the people here opposing FPTP would eagerly accept any of the alternatives being proposed, if it had a credible chance of being implemented in their jurisdiction.
The real barrier is that a change to the voting system would have to be approved by a party that is winning under the current system. Convincing a party to agree to any change is much harder than picking one of the many good options.
Also, I hope you don't mind if I mention that your point is eerily analogous to a dictator saying "We can't introduce democracy, because then people would disagree on who the leader should be."
In practice, the decision-makers within a major party would look at which option would benefit them more than the other major party, and then a commitment to introduce that system would be added to their party platform, with it being implemented the next time they win an election.
For example, if the Democrats were afraid that the Green party would split their vote, they might support RCV. Therefore, arguably, the best strategy for bringing about voting reform might be to vote for the Green party, even if you don't support any other Green party policies, or any Democrat policies.
Are you asking the public or experts? Because I'd argue that a big reason there isn't consensus in the public is they don't even know about cardinal methods. With experts, I think most would approve of any cardinal. But of course nerds are going to squabble. That's what we do.
Changing to Rank Choice voting is on the Referendum Ballot in Massachusetts this election. I'm in the city of cambridge which has a form of it for local elections already
I think its a good idea. Though Cambridge takes a long time to deliver results (Usually its 9 winners of about 27 candidates.) .
If your interested in the state ballot question, it 2 of 2:
See the states voter guide which is pretty decent:
Also info on "right to repair" (ballot question 1 of 2)
edit: you can kind of see how cambridge does "Proportional Representation" which is a little different. We still have to rank our candidates 1..n. on the ballot. the results pages show how its tallied: https://www.cambridgema.gov/election2019/official/Council%20...
For a more interesting experiment Fargo had an election with Approval Voting[0].
Unfortunately RCV (IRV) doesn't solve many of the problems that it claims to do. One of the claims is that IRV prevents spoilers, which is objectively false[1][2]. We're pretty interested in the Favorite Betrayal Criterion to prevent this[3]. We also see that IRV has a fairly poor voter satisfaction efficiency (VSE)[4][5].
It really feels like people just watched the CGP Grey videos on election science and dug no further. Even Arrow himself said that cardinal voting (Approval, score, STAR) is probably the likely answer. They also tend to be much simpler as they only are single rounds and resistant to people accidentally "ranking" two candidates equally (which you might actually favor two candidates equally and these methods let you express that).
I knew about Fargo using approval voting (and I think that's awesome), but it surprised me that they used it in a multi-winner election. Using approval voting for multi-winner can work, but it'll tend to produce winners who are ideological clones of each other, rather than something more like proportional representation.
To give an example of what I mean, suppose 51% of the city is solidly for party A, and 49% is solidly for party B. If you run an election with two candidates of party A and two candidates of party B, and everyone votes according to their partisan preferences, then both the party A candidates win rather than, say, one A and one B.
There are some proposed methods that extend approval voting to do something closer to proportional representation by weighting the votes of voters who have gotten one of their candidates elected less than ones who haven't, but I don't remember all the specific details.
That said, I think this makes sense if having multiple winners is unusual (like there were two seats up this election rather than one because someone left office before their term was up), or if there's a bunch of commissioners who are replaced in stages like U.S. Senators, and it would be weird to make results proportional within each "class" but not proportional overall.
> Even Arrow himself said that cardinal voting (Approval, score, STAR) is probably the likely answer.
Cardinal systems are mathematically better by some criteria but have the extreme problem, that those criteria overlook, that their is no clear mapping from real preferences to honest ballot markings (and, similarly, no clear interpretation of what any given set of ballot markings mathematical analysis which assume that there is some real underlying thing which maps neatly to ballot markings on cardinal ballots may find that cardinal voting systems are good at aggregating that mythical thing, but we know from experience with rating systems that markings in cardinal systems aren't consistent for similar preferences but instead vary, for similar relative preferences and absolute opinions on the rated subjects, by culture and subculture. And you can't really argue that that would be mitigates in practice by people learning voting techniques that are efficient in achieving goals under such systems, because that is too complex of a function of other voter’s expected markings to be tractable. (There are situations where the markings on cardinal ballots can be concretized in terms of prices people are will to pay for or to avoid certain outcomes, and where those become concrete binding mutual commitments among voters, those systems have clear utility. But in general public elections they aren't.
Where you have multiple winners naturally (which includes elections of Presidential electors, which are always at least 3 per state), proportional systems (whether party-list or candidate-centered like STV) are the natural solution, as multiwinner elections are fundamentally easier than single-winner.
Voting itself, yes. Which is why Arrow (who is being referenced in that post) is hedging. But just because there is no global maxima doesn't mean there aren't better solutions than others. It depends on the criteria that you're looking for. While Cardinal systems don't maximize VSE like Schulze or RP do (which also don't get 100%!) they much better counter strategic voting as well as are dead simple. If you read a few of the links I posted or watch a few of the videos they explain some of these concepts.
But yes, voting math (social choice theory) is hard. No one is going to combat you on that.
Not that it matters this time, there being no third party candidates of note in Maine. If Florida had ranked voting in 2000, Al Gore would be President.
Florida 2000:
Bush 2,912,790
Gore 2,912,253
Nader 97,488
Buchanan 17,484
Browne 16,415
Others < 6,000
I’m Australian and I consciously vote very differently. My first votes are for small parties that are very unlikely to get elected but who’s campaign largely rests on an issue I support.
This encourages the other, more popular parties to adopt that issue if they see these parties are popular.
Otherwise I’d just vote for the “best” and most popular.
I'd like to point out that Australia is still dominated by two parties even with the benefit of the parliamentary system (giving proportionate seats to other parties). This forces two major coalitions which isn't extremely different.
This is true in the lower house, but not in the upper house (the senate) where there are 5 significant parties holding seats (counting the LNP coalition as one party and the Centre Alliance as a significant party) plus some independents, and no natural majority across any combination[1].
I said "dominate" not "absolute control." I mean you're talking 14 candidates between 5 parties, with 9 from Green (5 between 4). By "dominate" I mean that the 2 parties (Coalition + Labor) control ~82%. Even America isn't 100% controlled by Dems + Repubs, but it is the proportion that is the problem. Really, that the parties are not representative and there is a lack of mechanism for a ore representative party to start and gain power. I'd argue that the same is true for Australia in that respect.
I should also point out that I mentioned a specific advantage.
I just want to point it out because I strongly advocate for cardinal systems like Approval or STAR (I also like proportionate representation). The big reason is that we have a 100+ year experiment that disprove Fair Vote's (the one pushing RCV/IRV) largest claim: "solving the spoiler effect." The math doesn't side with the claim either, but Australia is a fantastic experiment. So if we're going to do something new, why not better? Especially if better is also simpler (approval is near trivial).
They can vote for candidates other than the top 2 without wasting their vote. Because when any candidate is eliminated, their votes flow to each voter’s next preference. That encourages co-operation between coalitions of candidates instead of polarization of only 2.
i don't know or (in this case) care what would be different. (and i say that as a fan of RCV and similar).
i'm just tired of people positing counterfactual worlds, and assuming whatever tiny little change they make will have no ramifications except for the one that they want. it is sloppy thinking.
You can't get a winner for ranking (or even ordinal) when you made people vote singular. These numbers give us no insight into how much or how little voters liked/approved of the other candidates. It is likely that Nader voters would have also approved Gore, but it also wouldn't be surprising if Gore voters approved Nader and he came out on top. It gets much trickier than just assigning votes over.
It's also possible that some Nader voters wouldn't have entered a second choice, or that the balance of 1st and 2nd choices between Nader and Gore would have resulted in a non-monotonic outcome (i.e. some group of voters cause, for instance, Gore to lose to Bush because too many of them entered Gore as their first choice; that can actually happen with RCV, which is why I am uncomfortable having the integrity of our democracy depend on that particular voting system).
> Gore to lose to Bush because too many of them entered Gore as their first choice; that can actually happen with RCV
How does this happen?
The only scenario I can see where this happens is if Nader received more votes than Gore, and those Gore voters didn't put Nader second. But then the problem isn't too many voters putting Gore as their first choice, it's too few!
Yes, despite Fair Vote's claim IRV doesn't solve the issue of spoilers. Despite the 100+ years of experimentation and despite the math. I'm always confused why there isn't a bigger push for methods like Approval and STAR. They are dead simple and solve the issues. The conspiracy theorist in me (joking) says its because it would actually change things where IRV won't.
I think part of it is that people tend to be laser-focused on the problem they're having right now and not the problem they're going to have.
For instance, RCV (aka IRV) is great solution to the problem that a minor candidate siphoned a few votes away from a major candidate and swung the results of a national presidential election several times in recent memory. If voters who really wanted to vote for Nader could have also voted for Gore, maybe Bush wouldn't have won, and that election would have better reflected the will of voters.
The problem that RCV is not prepared to deal with is what happens if people actually start voting for Green or Libertarian or Democratic Socialist or whatever in large enough numbers that they actually have a chance of winning elections. At that point, you run into problems and RCV starts producing nonsensical results. The voters learn from this that it's not actually safe to vote for third party candidates, and the two party system remains in place. It's a little bit better because you don't have minor candidates swinging elections, but it's still a duopoly.
I think that is a fair assessment. My big fear is that we'll implement IRV and then when we run into the next problem (let's be real, the next election) people will say "well that didn't work" and discount voting systems as being part of the solution.
I mean we've literally done this in America (though not nationally). We've had IRV before. People turned against it. So I don't think my fear is unjustified since there's historical precedent.
Australia has IRV (has for 100 years) and is still dominated by two parties even though they have the advantage of proportionate representatives through their parliamentary system. And in reality they have their two coalitions.
What worries me is that CGP and Hasan have large audiences but look to have done surprisingly little background research into the topics and alternatives. And let's be real, voting math is hard and unintuitive. It is overly constrained and there is no global optima/easy answer. I don't expect the average person to look more than surface level, but I do expect more from groups like HN.
Yeah, that's also my take: if you introduce a weird new voting system and voters don't like it, it's not just one step in a progression of incremental reform that will eventually lead us to a smoothly-functioning democracy. Rather, voters will just demand we revert back to the old system because (as far as they can see) that fancy voting nonsense is all junk. Then we'll be stuck with FPTP until either democracy fails outright or the previous attempt at reform has been forgotten, perhaps in a hundred years or so, and someone tries again. When you're changing the basic mechanisms of voting, you don't get any do-overs.
I am optimistic that within the last couple of years, it seems that any online conversation about RCV among even moderately technical/nerdy groups of people seems to almost always include someone bringing up the downsides of RCV and the better alternatives. I used to kind of dread RCV discussion threads because I felt like I ought to explain the problems, but it's very technical and abstract. Now I usually find someone has already written what I would have said, often in a more concise, clear way.
I don't think that is obviously true. Stein and the Green Party finished behind the Libertarian Party by a signification margin.
What states would have switched? In Wisconsin Clinton + Stein did outpoll Trump alone (by ~10K votes), but the Libertarian party had another 106K votes that would have been allocated and it's not hard to imagine Trump getting more than Clinton of them.
It was a similar story in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
I just deplore winner takes all in a states electoral college. California and Washington are not completely blue just as Texas is not completely red. They are actually more purple than half the rest of the country. The electoral college results should reflect this appropriately.
The issue is that if there is a 60/40 state, if the party holding the 60% decided to give 40% of the electoral college members to the smaller party, they'd lose 40% of a state's college members for little gain. Who would harm themselves? Only places that have a long term difference in legislature and presidential election votes would consider it. That being said, Texas could strike a deal with California or something that they both implement it at the same time. If the right states made a deal, nothing would change in the makeup of the parties, and the dealmaking states would attract more attention from presidential candidates trying to care for their issues.
Washington and California are already signatories. Naturally, it's the red states that are dragging their heels, as they feel like they have the most to lose.
If Texas manages to finally flip during this presidential election, though, I'd say all bets are off and the NPVIC might finally become law of the land.
I don't think it is meaningful if Texas flips, only if it becomes a swing state. If Trump looses Texas he will already have lost the election a long time ago so it doesn't really matter.
Note that some states with almost similar number of electoral votes are going in the other direction. Florida is becoming more safe red all the time, and PA is a swing state and might become safe red at some point.
That's what it flipping would mean. TX was purple. Then it became red. Its demographic trends[0] show it coming into play again.
The good news is that under a national popular vote, a Republican could probably survive a narrow popular vote loss in Texas or Florida and still win the presidency, because every GOP vote in those states would still count toward a national popular vote majority.
Swing state and flipping is (or can be thought of as) different things. The democrats can possibly win Texas this year, and Beto was fairly close. But if Biden wins Texas the election is already long over, he will have won more than 270 delegates for sure. If you look at the snake chart here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ you can see Texas if 6/7 states away from being the swing state for this election. Currently if Texas goes democratic there is realistically no path for republicans to win a presidential election.
To say it a different way, at some point if the democrats gets popular enough they win every state. That doesn't mean that every state is a swing state, just that people are fed up with that party.
Long term the demographics are not looking good for Texas GOP, based on current voting trends. Most likely the party will adept and come up with new policies to attract different voters. Or you know suppress the vote and rig the elections.
It’s great video and it seems a fair and honest explanation of the electoral college. I completely disagree with the idea of a national popular vote subverting the interests of an electorate. Just as the video explained the concept of US government is republican, representative, and based upon compromise opposed to purely popularity which is a democracy. The fear is that a collective mob will dictate priorities to a disenfranchised minority without a balanced recourse, which sounds like something close to separate yet equal.
“Collective mob”, aka the majority of the population? Remember the government was setup as a republic to ensure a minority of the population, landowning white males, retained power regardless of demographics. By-and-large people of color, the poor, and women were not allowed to vote.
That isn't historically accurate. The constitution intentionally imposed representational government to ensure dual-federalism as a necessary means to supersede the prior government, Articles of Confederation.
> I completely disagree with the idea of a national popular vote subverting the interests of an electorate.
Citation needed. The electoral college does not represent the interests of the electorate more than a popular vote does.
We don't go ask, say, Catholics which presidential candidate they prefer, and then award the winner the entire Catholic vote (including those who have been disenfranchised from voting, or who didn't vote). Yet we do that with states.
As a case in point look at the state of Washington. Two counties comprise all aspects of the state's politics, due to their population size and density relative to the rest of the state, often in stark contrast to the rest of the state. The majority of the states residents are thus represented, but the majority of districts and communities comprising that state are not.
I don't care about the feelings of districts. Districts don't have feelings, or wants or interests. I care about people. People have feelings, wants, and interests.
A district, like a religious orientation, is not a hive mind, where a minority of people who vote for the most popular candidate should be able to co-opt the voting power of the rest.
Under a popular vote, counties besides King and Snohomish would have representation, instead of being ammunition used by those two.
> I don't care about the feelings of districts. Districts don't have feelings, or wants or interests.
I disagree. A rural agricultural community has very real security and economic concerns very different from a high density urban community. Those feelings are very real. Under a purely popular vote those concerns are instantly and conveniently discarded. That concern is the principle benefit of representational government and that concern is essential.
I'm not sure about this. Two problems for California right now is that it is seen as a blue state so is on the shit list of the GOP, and that it is not a swing state so it doesn't get any influence during elections.
If CA would award the electoral college votes proportional it would force both parties to take it seriously. It would also make each vote more meaningful and listen to the voters.
It would obviously be bad for the democratic party, but good for the state and the people living there. And perhaps it would make other states take the same choice to be relevant again. Although some red states are becoming unintentionally relevant like Texas that is actually not a safe state this election.
You're not wrong, which is part of the issue with the electoral college. If it's a 60/40 state, each candidate should simply receive that share of the popular vote.
I think the suggestion is that states shouldn’t get to decide how to act depending on whether they would “harm themselves,” but rather that the people should get to decide.
"No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."
Article 1, Compact 3 of the US Constitution.
That's the basis of questioning the legality of the NPVI
Wikipedia has quite a good overview[0] of the constitutionality issues.
It may be that the NPVIC has to be replaced by an informal agreement, where the states that support the Compact all simultaneously but "unilaterally" change their system for appointing electors to one that implements a national popular vote. The trigger for this would that enough states have passed motions of intent to support this change "at some point". That would seem like no more of a Compact than one state lowering its sales tax when it notices a nearby state doing the same.
Hmm, this is interesting: As part of concerns about whether the NPVIC would shift power from the federal government to state governments, at least two legal scholars have suggested that the NPVIC would require explicit congressional approval because it would remove the possibility of contingent elections for President being conducted by the U.S. House of Representatives under the 12th Amendment.
First off, I would tend to consider the potential need for a contingent election as a bug, not a feature. But that aside, the claim seems wrong. It is certainly possible in principle for a popular-vote election involving the whole country to result in a tie; it's just extremely unlikely. But perhaps the wording of the NPVIC doesn't stipulate that in the event of a tie, the participating states' electors will be allocated so as to generate an Electoral College tie as well, if possible — and what happens if it isn't possible?
Note that states are allowed to decide how to allocate their electoral college votes, with Maine and Nebraska being the two that currently avoid winner-take-all.
Washington under current system had all 12 EC votes go to Clinton. Except 4 of them were faithless and voted for Colin Powell (and I believe someone else) instead. That being said, Washington is only just over one-third red.
I really like to think this would allow for politicians who can straddle party loyalties and gather enough votes from multiple parties at once and be viable ... rather than go through the single party extrude process where one must be all one thing or all the other to be viable.
I don't think this is a panacea, but i really like this more the current system.
When this subject comes up I get reminded how electoral system is something that we don't really learn about during education.
Yes, we get thought 'democracy is important','voting is important' and later on in high school we probably had a subject that covered democratic processes, but non of it went to the depth that this thread (and links) go to.
Winner takes all, majority system is so ingrained in us all the way from the kindergarten when we probably had to choose which cartoon we were going to watch or later in school when choosing class president.
I would gladly pay to see what would the results of my counties or countries election be with different voting systems (strange that pollsters don't try to do that).
IDK to what extent foreign politics gets discussed in the states, but I think it's worth noting that political culture in a lot of places has been shifting to a more multiparty norm.
Emphasis on culture. While voting systems and mechanics obviously play a huge role, political culture is (IMO) a very big factor... perhaps the deciding factor. Here (in Ireland) we have moved from a "two party with exceptions" system to a full multiparty system within a few elections. It now take >2 parties to form a majority. This isn't an uncommon story.
A point I made recently to American friends who are in favour of these kinds of changes was: The US has tons of elected positions. That is a lot of surface area that these changes can grow on.
There's this notion of "choice-induced preference change", where making a decision to choose X over Y changes your preferences such that you now more strongly prefer X to Y.
I'm not sure to just what degree it's
1) real,
2) of meaningful size, and
3) occurs as a result of casting a vote; but with some possible answers to those questions, it should be the case that given the same outcome to an election the most voters will be the happiest with it if they chose it by approval voting.
I'm not sure what to do with that observation, but I think it's interesting.
Ranked-choice voting (and its Arrow equivalents) necessarily gives the worst outcome of any voting scheme, specifically it matches the least voting preferences[0][1].
Two-outcome FPTP on the other hand does not fall to Arrow’s impossibility theorem. This is the system most states in the USA effectively have.
Intuitively, the least remarkable candidate will be elected because the opposing sides will reciprocally downgrade the candidates perceived as better. For instance Hitler was a result of an alternate voting scheme [2].
> The case hinged on 988 signatures collected by two circulators who were not registered to vote in the towns they circulated petitions in prior to beginning their work. Dunlap argued that should invalidate the signatures they gathered, while Republicans charged that the secretary of state was wrongly disenfranchising voters.
It's ironic that the Republicans complained that independent voters were not having their votes counted.
It’s ironic that you think any political party is above doing every last possible thing to win. No political party anywhere on earth has principles above getting elected. If you believe the democrats are any better, perhaps research machine politics. It is a naked power struggle from top to bottom on all sides.
A recent study[0] found that the Republican party is three times worse than the Democrats in terms of respecting the norms, principles, and practices of democratic countries. (The data was based on a survey of 2000 experts from around the world.)
I'm not saying this proves that the Democrats are better, but I do think it's too simplistic to say that every single party in the world is exactly as corrupt/authoritarian as every other party in the world.
Looking at www.globalpartysurvey.org it seems very biased to fit US politics. They classify US democrats as economically very left globally, the same spot as Scandinavian social democrats, that is far from reality. It might be a reasonable metric for other countries than US, but I don't trust it for US politics since it seems to be overfitting for the authors biases of where the American parties should be.
Check slide 24 here, the US Democrats are on almost exactly the same spot as the Swedish Social Democrats (edit or look at 25, it is clearer):
A: vox isn't a valid news source for this kind of news.
B: "a survey of 2000 experts from around the world" is not a valid way to collect such data
And finally the actual article says:
"Its closest peers are, almost uniformly, radical right and anti-democratic parties. This includes Turkey’s AKP (a regime that is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), and Poland’s PiS (which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment)."
Since concluding the Republican party is like those is ridiculous on it's face, one can only conclude this survey is garbage if it generates such results.
To be specific: the survey isn't measuring how the Republican party actually is. Rather it's measuring how these experts think the Republican party is - informed mainly by a liberal American media.
I've seen it over and over: Decide how you think the opponent will behave, then criticize them, in advance, as if they have already behaved that way.
Think about it: Do you think Republicans would "jail journalists" and "threaten judges with criminal punishment"? Next, think Did Republicans actually do that? And consider why your opinion on what you think they would do doesn't match what they actually did.
If Trump sued for libel every time (which, IMO, he should, to provide some negative feedback to the system that's otherwise unstable), he'd put half the press in the country out of business by now.
But he does not "threaten journalists and the media with criminal punishment", which is what I was pointing out. And if we were to react to name calling, they've called him far worse.
And an even lower bar for the "free press": to refrain from driving the country towards a full blown civil war to generate clickbait, and maybe even consider doing serious reporting again, for the first time in 20 years. Trump is not entirely wrong. The US press is full of radical propaganda at this point because it's good for "engagement". People have been radicalized because of it. People died because of it.
Trump actively milks it, witness his coziness with FOX and, when they weren't sufficiently sycophantic, OANN, which, while not being state-funded, comes as close as possible to the propaganda arm of the Trump government, and he actively encourages it.
So forgive us if we take "The press are the enemy of the people" from Trump with a grain of salt, when his sentiments are more accurately "The press that don't support me, the President, unequivocally and uncritically, are the enemy of the people".
Everything other than FOX and OANN are propaganda arms of the DNC though, and they are _actively lying_ to the people about literally everything, all the way to "austere religious scholars" and "revered military leaders". If you were only watching CNN you wouldn't even know there have been riots in Portland nearly every night for almost 4 months.
Well, they apparently aren't taking his "threats" seriously then. Just watch any of his pressers, and compare it to those of Joe Biden. Oh, I forgot, Joe Biden doesn't have any pressers where questions aren't pre-approved in advance.
> vox isn't a valid news source for this kind of news.
Argumentum ad hominem.
> Since concluding the Republican party is like those is ridiculous on it's face,
Why?
> Do you think Republicans would "jail journalists" and "threaten judges with criminal punishment"?
They may not (yet) be doing those specific things. However, the article goes on to state which "anti-democratic" things they're actually doing:
"Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have shown disdain for procedural fairness and a willingness to put the pursuit of power over democratic principles. They have implemented measures that make it harder for racial minorities to vote, render votes from Democratic-leaning constituencies irrelevant, and relentlessly blocked Democratic efforts to conduct normal functions of government."
There are additional examples of this in the article:
"For example, Republicans won about 50 percent of the US House vote in North Carolina in 2018’s election. That translated into 70 percent of House seats due to heavily gerrymandered districts. Wisconsin Democrats won every statewide election in 2018 but did not win majorities in either chamber of the state legislature. While Democrats are also at a disadvantage due to concentration in urban areas, gerrymanders share much of the blame."
"North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who chaired the state redistricting committee that put together a map so racially contorted that it was struck down in court in 2016, openly professed the power politics behind extreme gerrymandering in a speech on the statehouse floor."
"Lewis is notable mostly for his unusual honesty. Republicans believe they ought to win elections, and are doing everything in the power to make that the case — including changing the rules to stack the playing field in the favor. The effect is a party committed to an anti-democratic creed outside the norm of advanced Western democracies that insists that it is the true guardian of American democracy."
Unlike your assertion that these experts are only going off what "liberal media" tells them, they seem to be looking at what's actually happening. And it's deeply concerning.
That "small bit" is the entire thing. The problem with the vox article is it's rating the Republicans based on their image (specifically their image with liberal media), not their actions.
And you did the exact same thing. Are you even aware you did that?
Comparing Republicans to Turkey’s AKP or Poland’s PiS is absurd on it's face, yet vox doesn't seem aware of that.
And "Argumentum ad hominem" is not a valid rebuttal here, because every word vox says on this subject can not be taken as fact, yet you have quoted large sections of it. Even the study they have quoted can not be used, because vox chose the study to quote.
Saying "vox isn't a valid news source for this kind of news" is another way of saying "you need to start over if you want to analyze Republicans", this vox article is not a valid starting point.
> The problem with the vox article is it's rating the Republicans based on their image (specifically their image with liberal media), not their actions. And you did the exact same thing. Are you even aware you did that?
If you read my entire comment, or the entire article, you'll find that to not be the case. The rating is based entirely on actions, not "liberal media reporting".
Look up which party has flagrantly gerrymandered countless districts in the last 20 years... there may be a few that have been redrawn by democrats, but the super-majority have been redrawn by republicans to amplify republican votes. It’s not even a close race regarding who is actually cheating to get elected. Also note that it was a conservative majority of the Supreme Court that said Federal Courts cannot interfere in partisan gerrymandering (a 5-4 vote). Also note which party challenged partisan gerrymandering.
I think different organizations have constraints that lend them to prioritizing different values. Because more of the population supports democrats, especially oft-disenfranchised groups, it’s in the party’s interests to expand the rights of voters.
It’s similar to how Apple can value privacy more because they are a hardware company.
You could look at this cynically and say that these organizations are all amoral agents who only behave according to their incentives. You’d be right. Another way to look at it is that these organizations are tools for humans, and their differing constraints mold them to be useful to further certain values. I don’t naively support democrats because I believe they are better people. I support them because their values align better with the world I want to live in.
Yeah, just like how every company is just a struggle to make money on all sides. Every corporation is ethically the same. Just because some companies knowingly launder money for cartels doesn't make them any worse than any other company. Starting the opioid epidemic for money? You would've too if you were smart and savvy enough.
In fact, every person is simply motivated to maximize comfort, minimize pain and procreate. It's a rat race through and through. All people are the same. Child killers and doctors. No difference.
Any simple extension of your miserable idea seems foolish. I'd hate to have to live in your mind.
You clearly never lived in Chicago or NYC. These Democrats make Republicans look like angels. They hire their friends as contractors, they do a poor job, then get paid to fix it. You're the ignorant one if you actually think one party is any better.
> It’s ironic that you think any political party is above doing every last possible thing to win.
Political parties don't do anything, people in them do. The people in those parties, for the most part, do indeed have limits to what they will do to win. The ones that don't are sociopaths who unfortunately sometimes amass undeserved power. But I see no evidence for the kind of universal assertion of amorality you're making here.
> No political party anywhere on earth has principles above getting elected.
That just treats politics as some kind of nihilistic team sport, which I reject and it's unsupported by any evidence. Parties have platforms. According to https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-ke... politicians do try to keep most of their platform promises.
> If you believe the democrats are any better, perhaps research machine politics.
I don't understand your point here. It appears that you're defending Republicans doing... something? By saying that the Democrats did... something?
> It is a naked power struggle from top to bottom on all sides.
That stance seems in direct contradiction to the enlightenment principles upon which the United States was founded. The peaceful transition of power between opposing parties has been very much a hallmark of the US republic for many decades, and a principle to which most of us adhere.
Preferential voting just rewards vote buying and ginger groups, look at the recent New Zealand election. The successful economic reform incumbents were voted out by a minority party led by the ex President of the International Union of Socialist Youth with a populist party on a platform of slashing immigration.
> A ginger group is a formal or informal group within an organisation seeking to influence its direction and activity. The term comes from the phrase ginger up, meaning to enliven or stimulate. Ginger groups work to alter the organisation's policies, practices, or office-holders, while still supporting its general goals. Ginger groups sometimes form within the political parties of Commonwealth countries
Not completely true. I worked in Wellington for a stint, and held a (mail-in) ballot from one of my friends in my own hands, and it was an absolute shitshow. Some local races absolutely used ranked choice, and not only that - you had to rank every single candidate or your vote wasn't counted.
It was my friend's ballot - she was in her early 20s, and she laughed and said "no wonder nobody fucking votes." She didn't vote in the election, and it kind of stuck with me.
Any election reform has to take into account the amount of work you're asking of voters, and it's what led me to eventually support approval voting over ranked systems.
The details of the two bills, from https://www.fairvote.org/rcv_2020_ballot_measures:
> Alaskans for Better Elections collected enough signatures to put Ballot Measure 2 to a vote this November. If passed, this ballot measure will implement several changes, including: 1) "top four" blanket primaries for state and congressional offices, where all candidates would appear on the same primary ballot and the top-four vote getters would advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation; 2) ranked choice voting in the choice among four candidates on the November ballot, with write-in candidates permitted; 3) ranked choice voting in the presidential election among all candidates who have qualified for the ballot and any write-in candidates
> After a multi-year educational campaign led by Voter Choice Massachusetts, an initiative will appear on the ballot as Question 2 that, if passed, would implement ranked choice voting for Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate and U.S House general and primary elections, state primary and general elections, and county offices, beginning in 2022. The initiative is supported by Yes on 2 for Ranked Choice Voting.
(Notably the MA bill doesn't include implementing RCV for the presidential election, but honestly that's not as big a deal as it could be given that the bill does apply to the federal legislative elections; the only reason the presidency has gotten so out of control is because a complicit legislature has allowed it to happen.)