121–130 of 476 posts
Downside with RCV is it really doesn't do anything it purports to do, but major upside is it encourages voter education. Which, IMHO, is by far the biggest problem with American politics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)
> I don’t like tank [sic] choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. Why do you consider that the "wrong" outcome?
A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don't want to research beyond 3 candidates, don't! I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidat…
There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.
Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal. That 3rd party candidate almost never has a chance at winning. Neither does the alternative from your own party.
Stacked ranking simply allows you to say "I hate both candidates from the major parties, and I'd rather have this other person in office, but since I have to pick one of the two of them, I guess I'll pick X."
Personally I don't see much benefit for this system, opposed to approval voting.
We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation. One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy. It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang. In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work…
Worth noting Australia is still generally a 2-party system in the lower house (1 representative each area) but less so in the senate (where each state elects the top 12 senators). Australians still look at envy at the New Zealand and German systems of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...
Open lists are better, but I believe they still have the problem that they make it unclear where representatives' mandates come from, especially if a representative can resign and be automatically replaced by someone lower on the list without a by-election.
Other problems exist with list-based systems, such as treating independent candidates differently to candidates with established parties, and the possible use of "decoy lists"[1].
The best implementation I've seen of MMP, though, is that used in Baden-Württemberg, which avoids party lists by filling the proportional seats with the candidates who came closest to winning the elections in their local districts.[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_list
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additional_member_system#Decoy...
It gets rid of "I wanna vote for X, but they don't have a chance" and thus leads to more honest votes. IMO the major downside is complexity.
Here's my obligatory plug for approval voting. Approval is the "checkboxes instead of radio buttons" voting method. Select any, instead of select one. Vote for whoever you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. It gets rid of a lot of the drawbacks of FPTP while retaining its simplicity, unlike IRV. I've always wanted to get people to vote on voting systems with a variety of voting methods and see what wins…
For example, in 2016, plenty of people wanted Sanders more than Clinton. Who are they supposed to "approve?" Many of them would note their preference by just approving Sanders and not Clinton, which is the opposite of what a voting system is supposed to help achieve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most western democracies don’t have a problem with fraud allegations in voting. It’s really only the US. And even there, the allegations are mostly a political ploy to push for policies that disenfranchis voters of other parties. Which again doesn’t exist in other Western democracies.
French had massive mail voting fraud in 1975, after which they banned it. The entire point of elections is proving your government is trustable, you can't trust your government with it because then it's like a self signed certificate, circular trust problem. Who rigs elections in Russia? The government. Who is most likely to rig elections? The government. You can't trust government with elections, and just because th…
A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don't want to research beyond 3 candidates, don't! I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)
> an obscure candidate has won when too many top vs fixates split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes That’s the point. The compromise candidate won. If the top candidates had spent less time mud slinging they may have remained in others’ top two or three.