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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
[+] [-] kibwen|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] HaloZero|5 years ago|reply
Source: https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV) Section: Ballot Measures 2020
[+] [-] glafayette|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ScottBurson|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] godelski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oehpr|5 years ago|reply
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.
Anyway thanks for making this.
[+] [-] Jarwain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] twblalock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|5 years ago|reply
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:
https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/IFV_2020.pdf
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...
[+] [-] godelski|5 years ago|reply
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).
[0] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-first...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
[2] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/
[3] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
[4] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
[+] [-] elihu|5 years ago|reply
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.
Anyone know the full story here?
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, as I understand it, it turns out the problem is basically unsolvable: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/14245
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
Florida 2000:
[+] [-] sigstoat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burlesona|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6chars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakala6790|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austincheney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est31|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireBeyond|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
I don't think this is a panacea, but i really like this more the current system.
[+] [-] Kosirich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dllthomas|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] burlesona|5 years ago|reply
If you’re interested in the consequences of First Past the Post voting and why we need change so bad, I strongly recommend this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44244963-breaking-the-tw...
[+] [-] torresjrjr|5 years ago|reply
Also, I hope it's STV.
[+] [-] justnotworthit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethn|5 years ago|reply
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].
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/#NonDic
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/november/devlin-ranked-v...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_German_presidential_ele...
[+] [-] dane-pgp|5 years ago|reply
It's ironic that the Republicans complained that independent voters were not having their votes counted.
[+] [-] seibelj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eucryphia|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tdeck|5 years ago|reply
> 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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_group?wprov=sfla1
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|5 years ago|reply