I'm very proud of my state. We also voted to legalize marijuana.
RCV was especially relevant to Maine because our Republican governor, Paul LePage, won his seat -- twice -- with around 35%-45% of the vote, primarily due to votes being split between the Democratic and Independent candidates (a.k.a The Spoiler Effect).
To me, LePage and his path to election and re-election closely mirrors Trump and his campaign. He ran on "telling it like it is", "being a businessman, not a politician", and "draining the swamp". He has said some really horrible things about minorities and his fellow politicians, he's vetoed a record number of bills, and he's held very controversial policy stances.
The Democratic candidate came in 3rd place with only 19%. I believe that makes the Democrats the "spoiler" in that election. To not recognize it as such is to prop up the 2-party system.
I'd love to start a group (or get involved with one if there is one) to bring this to my adopted state of Washington.
Though I often groan at the "laboratories of democracy" turn of phrase, it is kinda cool to see this stuff implemented somewhere. It means there's a model we can use to bring it to where we live.
People complain about the electoral college, that it gave the win to Trump, even though he had fewer votes. They're right, they should complain about it. However, they should also realize that in most state elections, governors across the country win elections with less than majority support, just like you mentioned. So this is not just a one time catastrophe. Far from it.
It's time to get rid of the FPTP voting system. It only serves to elect people with minority support. Heck, if the Republican party didn't use FPTP in its primary, it's likely Trump wouldn't have been the nominee. But they used it precisely because they wanted to make the primary less democratic, and they thought their main guy, Jeb Bush, would be the one winning with 40% of the Republicans' votes, while all the other candidates would split the vote. I bet they will reconsider that strategy now.
Even Clinton, which won the popular vote, only had support from 48% of the voters - less than the majority. So even if she won, in my book, it would still not be democratic, because perhaps in a two-round voting system or in an RCV system, Clinton would preserve the 48%, and Trump would get 52% if the Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and write-in voters would've all gone to Trump. We just don't know, and the only way to know that a candidate is indeed liked by at least 50%+1 of the voters, is to have a system that shows that. The FPTP voting system doesn't.
We had record high turnout this year, when much of the country had low turnout. Perhaps because of the important ballot items such as this one. I also think Maine's splitting up our electoral votes helps, too. I say this as someone from the 2nd district who hates that Trump got our vote!
Hey, I'm also from Maine! There's at least two of us here!
I voted against the initiative, mostly because as I understand it, it still doesn't necessarily create majority candidates and because there's a good chance it's in violation of the state constitution.
While may not agree on how an alternate voting system should work, I am glad that we can finally acknowledge the system we have in place desperately needs fixing.
Thankfully, the ridiculous, unenforceable gun control initiative that was funded by out-of-state interests was also rejected. I'm very proud of my home state.
IRV is not really a good voting system. It's better than plurality, but it still doesn't really allow viable third parties. If a third party ever catches on, they could steal first votes away from a major party, and cost both of them the election. Demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8
I would recommend a condorcet method, or approval voting. Condorcet methods in particular have a lot of nice mathematical properties and are close to optimal with honest voters. I think it's the most likely to allow third parties to actually get elected. You can see some results of simulated elections with different voting systems here: http://rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.pnghttp://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
They claim that just approval voting is the same level of improvement from plurality voting, as plurality voting is from monarchy. Based on the massive voter satisfaction index improvement. It really is crazy that we still use plurality voting.
Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual.
Basically, vote for ALL of the candidates of whom you approve.
Whoever gets the most approval (votes) wins.
Simple.
With a paper system such as we have in the UK, then if you don't like any of the candidates you can use a blank ballot paper to record your DISapproval, with the option that if the disapproval ballots exceed the winning total of approval votes then a new election should be called with a new slate.
Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
Pitting "ranked choice" versus "approval" (versus "range") voting is not really the way to think about it. Consider a "relaxed" version of ranked choice where voters are allowed to give multiple candidates the same rank. (Sometimes voters really do have no preference between two candidates.)
Approval voting then is just a "restricted" subset of "relaxed ranked choice". That is, any preference expressed in an approval voting ballot can also be expressed in a relaxed ranked choice ballot. Similarly, relaxed ranked choice voting can be considered a restricted subset of range voting. And our traditional "single choice" voting can be considered a restricted subset of all of them.
And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems.
So, clearly range voting is in some sense the best (or tied for the best) ballot, in the sense that it allows the voter to express a range of preferences that is a superset of the other systems.
But there is also the issue of ballot simplicity. Some people might prefer the simpler ballots of the approval system, or even the traditional single choice system. But since those ballots have corresponding "range voting" ballots, you can deploy a "range voting" election while allowing voters to use the kind of ballot they are comfortable with.
Indeed you can imagine the idea of a "progressive ballot" in which the voter starts of with a simple "single choice" ballot, and can optionally refine their preferences with an approval ballot, then a ranked choice ballot, then, ultimately a "range" ballot.
I've actually implemented such a thing [1].
[1] http://macd.tk/pollplace - Note, this is running on an underpowered test server not intended for public use, so be gentle.
I've seen the data (at least from the organizations that support approval voting), and it seems to deliver the most optimum results.
However, I have some concerns. The way I see the two voting systems is like this:
Advantages approval voting:
- much simpler
- eliminates spoiler effect
- may give third-party candidates better chances in most elections
- reduces negative campaigning, since the winner would have to be "approved" by like 70% of the country in typical elections.
Disadvantages AV:
- the winner may be someone who was #2 on 80% of the country's wishlist. So 51% of country won't love the candidate, as they may with RCV or two-round voting systems, but also the other 49% won't hate the candidate (perhaps only 20% will). So from that point of view, it would be "better". But it would be someone most are just content with.
- I believe even the organizations supporting it admit that it would lead to "centrist" leaders. Perhaps in most situations a centrist is preferable, but what if the country has gone in the wrong direction for 2 decades, and it needs a completely new direction? Would a centrist still be enough? Or would the approval voting system and people pick exactly the guy that is willing to go in a different direction this one time? I'm not sure what would happen in this scenario.
Advantages RCV:
- eliminates spoiler effect
- also reduces negative campaigning, because a candidate would need some of the opponent's voters, too, to rank them as #2 on their list.
- easier transition to multi-winner RCV system for state legislature and Congress - and this alone is much bigger than just using approval voting system. Proportional representation beats all single-winner voting systems, including approval voting
Disadvantages RCV:
- it may eliminate spoiler effect, but other than that, it won't do much else to help third-parties. The main two parties would likely still be elected for a long time, at least until population's thinking about at least one of the the two parties changes in a major way
- a bit more complicated to understand how votes are counted by the average person, and a higher number of "lost" votes (I believe 5% or so, compared to about 1% or less for AV).
I believe both could also be used strategically - as in rank #1 the person you think is more likely to win with RCV, or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people.
So I would qualify the two as: AV would be a great improvement over FPTP, while RCV would be a moderate, but still well worth it and welcome improve, for the fact that it would eliminate spoiler effect alone. However, if single-winner RCV makes it much more likely that multi-winner RCV (STV) is also adopted for state legislature and Congress, then I would definitely choose RCV over AV, because the ultimate goal should be to adopt proportional representation in the US.
I think proportional representation coupled with a limit of $200 of individual donations and a ban on any other political donations would greatly improve democracy in the US, and these are the main changes Americans should fight for, if they want all of the other issues (as Lessig often says) to be solved as well. First fix democracy and change the system to a better one, so that the people that actually represent you get to pass laws in your favor for whatever issue you (the People) want.
> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual
No, Approval Voting only makes any sense when approval has concrete meaning, as in a case wherected you are voting on a group activity, and voting "approve" on an alternative is also a binding commitment to participate if that option is chosen (or, conversely, voting not to approve is a binding waiver of participation.)
> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual.
Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates.
So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates.
> Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
It's misleading to refer to a Condorcet winner as the "optimum" result - the Condorcet criterion is one criterion that an election method can satisfy, but it does not guarantee the "optimum" result by any other criterion.
It's also doubly-misleading to refer to the Condorcet winner right after advocating approval voting, which does the exact opposite.
Wikipedia has a really comprehensive article [1] on this type of voting, but for most purposes of discussion this is the relevant paragraph:
"Proponents of IRV note that by reducing the spoiler effect, IRV makes it safe to vote honestly for marginal parties, and so discourages tactical voting: under a plurality system, voters who sympathize most strongly with a marginal candidate are strongly encouraged to instead vote for a more popular candidate who shares some of the same principles, since that candidate has a much greater chance of being elected and a vote for the marginal candidate will not result the marginal candidate's election."
It's generally viewed as a means of gradually stepping away from some of the problems of a two party system.
This is really exciting electoral reform. I don't think our current system captures the diversity of political opinion now, and we could really use a couple more parties. Like a democratic party that is anti establishment or a republican party which is not particularly religious but more libertarian.
And maybe if we had more parties, voters wouldn't be so tribal. There's a deep sense of "us vs them" now in America. It's good guys vs bad guys, and whatever their side says, our side cannot believe. It leads to complete nonsense like climate change denial. But if there were many parties, your 25% couldn't be against the other 75%. You'd have to recognize your perspective is just one of several and you have to look for common ground.
I use to live in Australia where they had preference with runoff and NZ has MMP (which CGP Grey also covers in the same series).
The American system is pretty terrible. Keep in mind it was never meant to be democratic. It was always symbolic. That's why we have the electoral college...just in case the government wanted to throw out the peasants suggestions. On 22 occasions in US history, electors have ignored their pledge and voted against their state's decision.
America was setup for rich property owners to vote. It wasn't until the last century minorities and women were added.
Arrow's impossibility theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
is often trotted out in the discussion of RCV and similar systems. It seems to me that the problem with mentioning that theorem is that if you admit that every system for judging among more than 3 choices has some flaw, and that flaw makes the system anti-democratic because it allows tactical voting, then why not admit that the status quo is worse, under the same framework, and therefore admit that something else other than plurality voting should be used?
I wish they also enacted multi-winner ranked choice voting (also called Single Transferable Vote) for legislature. Fair representation beats winner-takes-all systems every time, because it guarantees more than just two parties get to be in charge, much like in parliamentary systems (which also use some kind of fair/proportional representation voting system). But it's still a good start, and maybe other states will take a look at both, and choose a better system next time.
By the way, this is exactly the sort of thing Sam Altman should be fighting for, along with joining Wolf-Pac, Represent.Us, and others to get money out of politics. Not try to use GOTV tactics to get people to vote for his preferred candidate. That is, if Altman still cares about this, and the "improve democracy thing" he pushed for earlier wasn't just a one time ruse to get people to vote for Clinton.
If Altman is serious about improving democracy, these right here are by far the best ways to do it - way better than just trying to "increase turnout" in an election. Because for one, fair representation voting systems increase turnouts by default, because people feel better represented and have more reasons to go out and vote, and second, STV also eliminates gerrymandering, which would also greatly improve democracy by making seats less safe.
Ireland currently uses a PR-STV system, and if you ask any Irish person about their politicians, you will probably get an ear-full.
STV pushes majors parties to sit on the political middle, where they might not collect as many '1's', but will collect a lot of 2s,3s,4s, etc, as more divisive parties/candidates will be ranked highly by a segment of the population but very lowly by the rest.
One desirable property of FPTP is that if you want to maximize the chances of your candidate being elected, you should vote for your candidate first before all other candidates. In IRV, sometimes you should not vote for your candidate first before all other candidates. Is that okay?
Here are some interesting diagrams of the results of applying various voting algorithms including IRV: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
I'm really not sure people realize how chaotic and unpredictable ranked choice voting can be, and how easily it can be gamed.
For example, there are scenarios where it's better to put your favorite candidate in #3. You pick #1 to help an undervoted candidate and therefore, causing one candidate to drop off. Same for #2. By the time the choice comes to #3, your minority candidate has suddenly managed to eliminate stronger opposition just by playing numbers.
We've seen this scenario happen repeatedly in all countries and counties that have tried this approach.
There's a reason ranked choice voting is hardly ever used anywhere: it's really not such a good idea.
Would someone explain the counterpoint that this will, "further disenfranchise voters by using the recounted ballots of the loser to determine the winner"? I can't understand how counting voter's second and third choices until a majority agree on a candidate could be seen as disenfranchisement.
Have a look at how the UK's 2011 referendum was fought. The No campaign frequently made the charge that people who voted for marginal parties (their example was usually the far right BNP) have votes which "count twice" because the votes must be recounted/resorted. (We still use paper ballots).
The party which can afford a larger number of candidates will be at an advantage, because if they don't catch the primary vote they (almost certainly) get the secondary, the tertiary, the quaternary, etc.
I'm not sure it can be explained. To borrow a phrase from economics, moving to instant runoff has always seemed Pareto efficient to me. Which would mean that there are no possible counterpoints.
San Francisco, Oakland and 1-2 other Bay Area cities have had this for a while. I think it works well, and the electorate and politicians are getting used to it.
The implementation, at least here in Oakland, is a bit clunky. When there are only two candidates, they still let you pick your first, second and third choice...
Having it at state level opens things up to a whole different level. Now a popular and/or centrist third party candidate can realistically get elected as US senator, and that's real power.
Why does it cost nearly a million dollars to print new ballots and update the firmware in existing ballot machines?
Specifically regarding the ballot machine update, if the installers are charging ridiculous prices when I'd bet others would be willing to start an open source project that met security needs
It's actually quite concerning to see the media attention that IRV has received as a result of Maine passing the RCV measure. A much better voting system (across many different metrics for what a "better" voting system means) is range voting. For a comparison of the differences between the two, see here[1].
Why is it concerning? As I understand it, Range Voting supporters object that IRV performs poorly (in terms of Bayesian regret) because voters don't understand how it works. Maybe the attention will help to educate voters and improve its performance. Also, isn't it enough to improve on the status quo?
This is amazing news. I'm now wondering how voter training will work?
I feel like a lot of people might get it backwards and mark the third party as their second or third choice. Also the mainstream candidates with the most money would have an incentive to spread misinformation.
Here in Australia, volunteers for the political parties hand out 'how to vote cards' at polling places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How-to-vote_card . It's not a perfect system,[1] but it should be enough to prevent most people from completely messing up their vote. (Especially in the US, where voluntary voting presumably means that those who turn up are motivated to make their vote count.)
[1] The most obvious risk is misinformation -- e.g. someone claiming to be from Party A, handing out Party A branded leaflets that actually direct people to vote for Party B -- but in practice that doesn't seem to be a significant problem. I'm sure it happens at small scales online, but in person it's hard to get away with, so at least the information seen immediately before voting is accurate. (Though admittedly I have heard of one or two borderline cases, e.g. cards with colour themes chosen to misleadingly hint that they're associated with a particular party.) What is prevalent is 'preference trading' between political parties, as a significant number of voters do seem to more or less blindly follow their party's suggested ordering. This is arguably a problem, but it doesn't usually get too crazy, as preference deals between ideological enemies both look bad and can easily backfire.
If anyone is interested in using Single Transferable Vote for unofficial uses, I recently wrote an implementation in Elixir and wrapped it in a small JSON API. It is a toy in its current state (it uses cookies to see if people have voted and the link to close an election can be somewhat easily found even if you are not the creator of the election) but we use it around or office for a few things and I would be interested in continuing work on it if anybody would like to jump in. I have an instance of this running on my site; ping me if you'd like to try it.
Maine's governor's "winning" coalition may have something to do with this ballot proposition having passed, since he never won a majority of the vote (an impossibility with ranked choice voting). The 2010 election where he won with 38% was particularly egregious.
Something to consider: Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections. Another way of saying it: They lost a nationwide vote once in the last quarter century.
Generally I support the electoral college, but those are undemocratic results.
Also: In the 2014 House of Representatives elections, Republicans won 51.2% of the vote (per Wikipedia) yet held the largest majority in the House since WWII (IIRC).
EDIT: In the 2012 House of Representatives elections, Democrats won more votes (48.8 - 47.6%) but fewer seats (201-234).
If I were to change the system, I would have ballots ask 10 or 20 or so questions based on issues, and each party gives their own response to each question.
The voters then choose their answers they favor for each question, and they can choose multiple answers they agree with, and a point goes to the party for each answer.
The party that gets the most total points among all voters wins, they then decide the people to run that position.
We really have to focus on issues politics, instead of people politics.
I think this is a mistake, but probably not for the reason you think.
We need to stop thinking about politics so statically. Positions on issues can and should change as new information becomes available. Your current preferred position on an issue is really just a rather poor proxy for your preferred method of problem-solving or thought process that reached the conclusion of your preferred position.
You want to elect the person that "thinks and learns in your preferred manner", so that when they are asked to reach a conclusion on a totally unexpected issue, they reach the "correct" conclusion.
I'd almost rather just have all candidates take an IQ test or something and then elect the top scorers.
That seems like it would reward strategic dishonesty and be ripe for abuse. For example, right now if a candidate says they're in favor of passing Generic Placeholder Policy, but I believe they're lying about it, I can vote against them. But if that's part of their official platform and "Do you approve of GPP?" is an official question on the ballot, how do I respond?
This sort of thing is very vulnerable to the exact phrasing of the questions, though.
This sort of thing already happens to some extent with ballot initiatives in the US, and they are rife with misleading verbiage to trick people into voting a certain way when they would have voted differently if the proposal were honestly presented.
Put another way, there are various party platform bits where I may agree with what they _say_ but not what they _mean_. And vice versa.
I think the bigger problem with that proposal is that politicians can and do lie, both about the positions they hold, and about the likelihood of them being able to implement their proposals.
Character matters, though. Some might argue it matters more than a checklist of policy positions.
On the other hand: a label like "democrat" or "republican" in many ways accomplishes what you suggest. Many people just vote the party line knowing what the party typically stands for.
I'd approve of some other systems even more, but this is better than the usual.
Maine has also had voluntary public campaign financing since 1996, strengthened a bit in 2015 http://www.maine.gov/ethics/mcea/ ... I'd be really curious to read an up-to-date analysis of its impact, and prospects in combination with RCV.
[+] [-] kevlar1818|9 years ago|reply
RCV was especially relevant to Maine because our Republican governor, Paul LePage, won his seat -- twice -- with around 35%-45% of the vote, primarily due to votes being split between the Democratic and Independent candidates (a.k.a The Spoiler Effect).
To me, LePage and his path to election and re-election closely mirrors Trump and his campaign. He ran on "telling it like it is", "being a businessman, not a politician", and "draining the swamp". He has said some really horrible things about minorities and his fellow politicians, he's vetoed a record number of bills, and he's held very controversial policy stances.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/controversial-gov-paul-...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/06/samantha_bee_...
Edit: I never meant to imply blame of any candidate in creating the Spoiler Effect, and as such I modified my comment to reflect this.
[+] [-] tanderson92|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frondo|9 years ago|reply
I'd love to start a group (or get involved with one if there is one) to bring this to my adopted state of Washington.
Though I often groan at the "laboratories of democracy" turn of phrase, it is kinda cool to see this stuff implemented somewhere. It means there's a model we can use to bring it to where we live.
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
It's time to get rid of the FPTP voting system. It only serves to elect people with minority support. Heck, if the Republican party didn't use FPTP in its primary, it's likely Trump wouldn't have been the nominee. But they used it precisely because they wanted to make the primary less democratic, and they thought their main guy, Jeb Bush, would be the one winning with 40% of the Republicans' votes, while all the other candidates would split the vote. I bet they will reconsider that strategy now.
Even Clinton, which won the popular vote, only had support from 48% of the voters - less than the majority. So even if she won, in my book, it would still not be democratic, because perhaps in a two-round voting system or in an RCV system, Clinton would preserve the 48%, and Trump would get 52% if the Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and write-in voters would've all gone to Trump. We just don't know, and the only way to know that a candidate is indeed liked by at least 50%+1 of the voters, is to have a system that shows that. The FPTP voting system doesn't.
[+] [-] mjhoy|9 years ago|reply
We had record high turnout this year, when much of the country had low turnout. Perhaps because of the important ballot items such as this one. I also think Maine's splitting up our electoral votes helps, too. I say this as someone from the 2nd district who hates that Trump got our vote!
[+] [-] aRationalMoose|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r_smart|9 years ago|reply
I voted against the initiative, mostly because as I understand it, it still doesn't necessarily create majority candidates and because there's a good chance it's in violation of the state constitution.
I don't mind that it passed though.
[+] [-] k_lander|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
IRV is not really a good voting system. It's better than plurality, but it still doesn't really allow viable third parties. If a third party ever catches on, they could steal first votes away from a major party, and cost both of them the election. Demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8
I would recommend a condorcet method, or approval voting. Condorcet methods in particular have a lot of nice mathematical properties and are close to optimal with honest voters. I think it's the most likely to allow third parties to actually get elected. You can see some results of simulated elections with different voting systems here: http://rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.png http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
They claim that just approval voting is the same level of improvement from plurality voting, as plurality voting is from monarchy. Based on the massive voter satisfaction index improvement. It really is crazy that we still use plurality voting.
[+] [-] Wildgoose|9 years ago|reply
Basically, vote for ALL of the candidates of whom you approve.
Whoever gets the most approval (votes) wins.
Simple.
With a paper system such as we have in the UK, then if you don't like any of the candidates you can use a blank ballot paper to record your DISapproval, with the option that if the disapproval ballots exceed the winning total of approval votes then a new election should be called with a new slate.
Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
[+] [-] bluecaribou|9 years ago|reply
Approval voting then is just a "restricted" subset of "relaxed ranked choice". That is, any preference expressed in an approval voting ballot can also be expressed in a relaxed ranked choice ballot. Similarly, relaxed ranked choice voting can be considered a restricted subset of range voting. And our traditional "single choice" voting can be considered a restricted subset of all of them.
And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems.
So, clearly range voting is in some sense the best (or tied for the best) ballot, in the sense that it allows the voter to express a range of preferences that is a superset of the other systems.
But there is also the issue of ballot simplicity. Some people might prefer the simpler ballots of the approval system, or even the traditional single choice system. But since those ballots have corresponding "range voting" ballots, you can deploy a "range voting" election while allowing voters to use the kind of ballot they are comfortable with.
Indeed you can imagine the idea of a "progressive ballot" in which the voter starts of with a simple "single choice" ballot, and can optionally refine their preferences with an approval ballot, then a ranked choice ballot, then, ultimately a "range" ballot.
I've actually implemented such a thing [1].
[1] http://macd.tk/pollplace - Note, this is running on an underpowered test server not intended for public use, so be gentle.
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
However, I have some concerns. The way I see the two voting systems is like this:
Advantages approval voting:
- much simpler
- eliminates spoiler effect
- may give third-party candidates better chances in most elections
- reduces negative campaigning, since the winner would have to be "approved" by like 70% of the country in typical elections.
Disadvantages AV:
- the winner may be someone who was #2 on 80% of the country's wishlist. So 51% of country won't love the candidate, as they may with RCV or two-round voting systems, but also the other 49% won't hate the candidate (perhaps only 20% will). So from that point of view, it would be "better". But it would be someone most are just content with.
- I believe even the organizations supporting it admit that it would lead to "centrist" leaders. Perhaps in most situations a centrist is preferable, but what if the country has gone in the wrong direction for 2 decades, and it needs a completely new direction? Would a centrist still be enough? Or would the approval voting system and people pick exactly the guy that is willing to go in a different direction this one time? I'm not sure what would happen in this scenario.
Advantages RCV:
- eliminates spoiler effect
- also reduces negative campaigning, because a candidate would need some of the opponent's voters, too, to rank them as #2 on their list.
- easier transition to multi-winner RCV system for state legislature and Congress - and this alone is much bigger than just using approval voting system. Proportional representation beats all single-winner voting systems, including approval voting
Disadvantages RCV:
- it may eliminate spoiler effect, but other than that, it won't do much else to help third-parties. The main two parties would likely still be elected for a long time, at least until population's thinking about at least one of the the two parties changes in a major way - a bit more complicated to understand how votes are counted by the average person, and a higher number of "lost" votes (I believe 5% or so, compared to about 1% or less for AV).
I believe both could also be used strategically - as in rank #1 the person you think is more likely to win with RCV, or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people.
So I would qualify the two as: AV would be a great improvement over FPTP, while RCV would be a moderate, but still well worth it and welcome improve, for the fact that it would eliminate spoiler effect alone. However, if single-winner RCV makes it much more likely that multi-winner RCV (STV) is also adopted for state legislature and Congress, then I would definitely choose RCV over AV, because the ultimate goal should be to adopt proportional representation in the US.
I think proportional representation coupled with a limit of $200 of individual donations and a ban on any other political donations would greatly improve democracy in the US, and these are the main changes Americans should fight for, if they want all of the other issues (as Lessig often says) to be solved as well. First fix democracy and change the system to a better one, so that the people that actually represent you get to pass laws in your favor for whatever issue you (the People) want.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
No, Approval Voting only makes any sense when approval has concrete meaning, as in a case wherected you are voting on a group activity, and voting "approve" on an alternative is also a binding commitment to participate if that option is chosen (or, conversely, voting not to approve is a binding waiver of participation.)
[+] [-] chimeracoder|9 years ago|reply
Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates.
So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates.
> Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
It's misleading to refer to a Condorcet winner as the "optimum" result - the Condorcet criterion is one criterion that an election method can satisfy, but it does not guarantee the "optimum" result by any other criterion.
It's also doubly-misleading to refer to the Condorcet winner right after advocating approval voting, which does the exact opposite.
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|9 years ago|reply
"Proponents of IRV note that by reducing the spoiler effect, IRV makes it safe to vote honestly for marginal parties, and so discourages tactical voting: under a plurality system, voters who sympathize most strongly with a marginal candidate are strongly encouraged to instead vote for a more popular candidate who shares some of the same principles, since that candidate has a much greater chance of being elected and a vote for the marginal candidate will not result the marginal candidate's election."
It's generally viewed as a means of gradually stepping away from some of the problems of a two party system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
[+] [-] dangjc|9 years ago|reply
And maybe if we had more parties, voters wouldn't be so tribal. There's a deep sense of "us vs them" now in America. It's good guys vs bad guys, and whatever their side says, our side cannot believe. It leads to complete nonsense like climate change denial. But if there were many parties, your 25% couldn't be against the other 75%. You'd have to recognize your perspective is just one of several and you have to look for common ground.
[+] [-] Heliosmaster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tantalor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|9 years ago|reply
The American system is pretty terrible. Keep in mind it was never meant to be democratic. It was always symbolic. That's why we have the electoral college...just in case the government wanted to throw out the peasants suggestions. On 22 occasions in US history, electors have ignored their pledge and voted against their state's decision.
America was setup for rich property owners to vote. It wasn't until the last century minorities and women were added.
[+] [-] cardiffspaceman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
By the way, this is exactly the sort of thing Sam Altman should be fighting for, along with joining Wolf-Pac, Represent.Us, and others to get money out of politics. Not try to use GOTV tactics to get people to vote for his preferred candidate. That is, if Altman still cares about this, and the "improve democracy thing" he pushed for earlier wasn't just a one time ruse to get people to vote for Clinton.
If Altman is serious about improving democracy, these right here are by far the best ways to do it - way better than just trying to "increase turnout" in an election. Because for one, fair representation voting systems increase turnouts by default, because people feel better represented and have more reasons to go out and vote, and second, STV also eliminates gerrymandering, which would also greatly improve democracy by making seats less safe.
http://www.wolf-pac.com/
https://represent.us/
STV by CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
Droop method for STV is probably preferable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRc630BSTIg
Also preferred by FairVote:
http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vot...
[+] [-] herge|9 years ago|reply
STV pushes majors parties to sit on the political middle, where they might not collect as many '1's', but will collect a lot of 2s,3s,4s, etc, as more divisive parties/candidates will be ranked highly by a segment of the population but very lowly by the rest.
[+] [-] anonymoushn|9 years ago|reply
Here are some interesting diagrams of the results of applying various voting algorithms including IRV: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[+] [-] hota_mazi|9 years ago|reply
For example, there are scenarios where it's better to put your favorite candidate in #3. You pick #1 to help an undervoted candidate and therefore, causing one candidate to drop off. Same for #2. By the time the choice comes to #3, your minority candidate has suddenly managed to eliminate stronger opposition just by playing numbers.
We've seen this scenario happen repeatedly in all countries and counties that have tried this approach.
There's a reason ranked choice voting is hardly ever used anywhere: it's really not such a good idea.
[+] [-] syphilis2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehwalrus|9 years ago|reply
The referendum was roundly rejected.
[+] [-] microcolonel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanleydrew|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
The implementation, at least here in Oakland, is a bit clunky. When there are only two candidates, they still let you pick your first, second and third choice...
Having it at state level opens things up to a whole different level. Now a popular and/or centrist third party candidate can realistically get elected as US senator, and that's real power.
[+] [-] spqr0a1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spynxic|9 years ago|reply
Specifically regarding the ballot machine update, if the installers are charging ridiculous prices when I'd bet others would be willing to start an open source project that met security needs
[+] [-] z1mm32m4n|9 years ago|reply
[1]: http://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html
[+] [-] lambertsimnel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
I feel like a lot of people might get it backwards and mark the third party as their second or third choice. Also the mainstream candidates with the most money would have an incentive to spread misinformation.
[+] [-] retsibsi|9 years ago|reply
[1] The most obvious risk is misinformation -- e.g. someone claiming to be from Party A, handing out Party A branded leaflets that actually direct people to vote for Party B -- but in practice that doesn't seem to be a significant problem. I'm sure it happens at small scales online, but in person it's hard to get away with, so at least the information seen immediately before voting is accurate. (Though admittedly I have heard of one or two borderline cases, e.g. cards with colour themes chosen to misleadingly hint that they're associated with a particular party.) What is prevalent is 'preference trading' between political parties, as a significant number of voters do seem to more or less blindly follow their party's suggested ordering. This is arguably a problem, but it doesn't usually get too crazy, as preference deals between ideological enemies both look bad and can easily backfire.
[+] [-] kylestlb|9 years ago|reply
"Rank candidates in order of preference. E.g., #1 - most preferred, #2 - second-most preferred..."
The counting system (to me) is more complicated than the voting process.
[+] [-] carrigan|9 years ago|reply
STV Algorithm: https://github.com/carrigan/elixir-stv Phoenix API: https://github.com/carrigan/vote-service
[+] [-] davexunit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanderson92|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
Generally I support the electoral college, but those are undemocratic results.
Also: In the 2014 House of Representatives elections, Republicans won 51.2% of the vote (per Wikipedia) yet held the largest majority in the House since WWII (IIRC).
EDIT: In the 2012 House of Representatives elections, Democrats won more votes (48.8 - 47.6%) but fewer seats (201-234).
[+] [-] mozumder|9 years ago|reply
The voters then choose their answers they favor for each question, and they can choose multiple answers they agree with, and a point goes to the party for each answer.
The party that gets the most total points among all voters wins, they then decide the people to run that position.
We really have to focus on issues politics, instead of people politics.
[+] [-] stanleydrew|9 years ago|reply
We need to stop thinking about politics so statically. Positions on issues can and should change as new information becomes available. Your current preferred position on an issue is really just a rather poor proxy for your preferred method of problem-solving or thought process that reached the conclusion of your preferred position.
You want to elect the person that "thinks and learns in your preferred manner", so that when they are asked to reach a conclusion on a totally unexpected issue, they reach the "correct" conclusion.
I'd almost rather just have all candidates take an IQ test or something and then elect the top scorers.
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bzbarsky|9 years ago|reply
This sort of thing already happens to some extent with ballot initiatives in the US, and they are rife with misleading verbiage to trick people into voting a certain way when they would have voted differently if the proposal were honestly presented.
Put another way, there are various party platform bits where I may agree with what they _say_ but not what they _mean_. And vice versa.
[+] [-] baddox|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malz|9 years ago|reply
On the other hand: a label like "democrat" or "republican" in many ways accomplishes what you suggest. Many people just vote the party line knowing what the party typically stands for.
[+] [-] mlinksva|9 years ago|reply
Maine has also had voluntary public campaign financing since 1996, strengthened a bit in 2015 http://www.maine.gov/ethics/mcea/ ... I'd be really curious to read an up-to-date analysis of its impact, and prospects in combination with RCV.