91–100 of 638 posts
As long as the first-past-the-post voting system is used in the US such movements will go nowhere. Unsurprisingly ranked-choice voting is mentioned as their first core value.
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The US already received a more politically palatable form of UBI when the automatic child tax credit hit. Couples making up to 400k get money direct deposited every month per child. 0% chance this will ever be rescinded. I would say Yang introduced an issue single-handedly into the conversation and it was implemented quite quickly without any discussion because of the unique pandemic situation. Will be interesting to…
Yes, I got my child tax credit early. Moving application of a credit I normally get anyway up 6 months is exactly the same thing as UBI. Good point. I'm sure I'm going to appreciate this April 15th 2022 when my liability is much larger than usual because my credit was already paid out.
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Approval voting is simpler, doesn't require ballots to change and has the same effect in practice (but not in theory). I'd be surprised if an average person finds ranked choice voting to be simpler to understand than approval or FPTP.
Yeah, this is one huge advantage of approval voting. The main issue with approval voting though is that it's much harder for individuals to use when voting. It's tricky to figure out when to bullet vote vs not bullet vote. Simplicity to use != simplicity to count I think ranked choice is in that sweet spot where it is reasonably simple to use and simple to count.
The only advantages ranked choice have over approval are entirely theoretical. Another advantage approval has is that it trends towards moderation.
Approval isn't perfect though (personally I prefer STAR, but it requires ballots to change).
I was excited about Yang’s candidacy in the NYC mayoral election, but it didn’t take very long to see that he was out of his depth. In the end, he didn’t even rank in my top 5 (NYC has ranked choice now). Why does he keep running for top positions? He clearly doesn’t have a record of success as an executive, either in private or public sectors. He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start…
He also seems weirdly inflexible, for someone who wants a job that involves unpleasant choices all day, every day.
Big time fail not making cannabis legalization a top-line plank in their platform. It's overwhelmingly popular, and because this party (like every third party) is doomed to be a spoiler at best, they could attract enough voters with cannabis legalization to perform (optimistically) in the high single digits instead of the high fractions of a digit. High single digits is enough to swing elections, which is enough to f…
We just went through a simple first-past-the-post election in the US that a significant percentage of voters believe was rigged. This is the simplest system imaginable, the data is easily available to verify it was not rigged.
Do we really think the average american will be able to grok how ranked-choice voting works? Imagine for a moment the reaction from people when their candidate appears to be "winning" and then ends up 3rd after the "recalculation."
I feel like the first priority of a voting system needs to be transparency and being easy to understand, RCV isn't that. Maybe works well on small scale, I highly doubt it's a good idea nationally.
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The main issue is that third parties often have the opposite effect that their supporters want. They draw voters from the more aligned main party, causing that aligned main party to lose elections. Third parties hurt the interests of their own supporters. There are good reasons why the Democratic Party tends to support the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party tends to support the Green Party [1]. 1. https://www…
They provide a very important mechanism that allows for the main party to fail in a way that it otherwise couldn’t. The only way for a “good” (according to the constituency) idea to succeed is if the “bad” ones fail. If bad ideas are prevented from failing, then the efficiency of the entire system declines. In the two party system, the only ways for a party to fail are via apathy (not bothering to vote at all), and t…
Look at groups like the Squad, the Tea Party and Trump. These groups are/were able to achieve substantial changes in party platform by working through the primary system and have shifted politics much more than the third parties in the US ever did.
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This isn't necessarily true. The nuance in the third party vs. aligned party is by definition the distinction between them. Depending on what you prioritize an effective third party can force the aligned party to change. From the point of view of the third party supporter, this would be exactly what you would want. In other words, an effective third party can be a great catalyst toward making some minor (or major) ch…
Not in a First-Past-The-Post voting system, which is used in most of the US (&afaik, in all presidential elections). The 1PPP systems systemically trend to metastable 2-party states. Of course 3rd parties will have distinctions from their closer main parties, but it is almost impossible that a 3rd party will triangulate exactly between the two major parties. This means that in practice, a vote for a 3rd party is effe…