521–530 of 662 posts
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I’d be more interested in giving my state detailed info, letting them run programs. The country can have aggregate data.
That would probably not be constitutional. I don't think the states are unable to run their own census, but the Constitution requires a federal one.
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Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”. https://www.rangevoting.org/CompChart.html#votsysts
RCV completely solves the “spoiler candidate” problem, which is a huge issue limiting choice and innovation in the two-party-dominated US. Approval Voting remains susceptible to spoilers. In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhet…
The 2022 Alaska special election is a great example of RCV failing where approval voting wouldn't. And FairVote had the nerve to say it showed Alaskans understood and could use the system.
> Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around
It's a lot easier to claim the system is rigged when the voting system is much more complex in a way that most voters will not understand.
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If someone says the holocaust happened, do you demand evidence of the claim? Because that’s exactly what you’ve done here
Can you give an example of an extermination program which was thwarted by a lack of accurate census data? "The Nazis used a data source to implement an extermination program" is not a statement which proves that your problem was the existence of a data source.
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You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).
Vote strategically. Candidates notice btw. So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters th…
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That's a very strong statement. I'm absolutely no fan of ICE or indefinite detention of people based on where they were born, but I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states. Nor do I see that in our future.
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> I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much. Compressing it makes it slightly worse, but some people think it makes it easier to understand. I tend to think that's silly; people can understand "score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10" perfectly well. But approval voting would still be a significant improvement over FPTP, and even over RCV. > That doesn't solve my…
> Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate. Let's call those candidates A B X Y. I don't see the issue. I vote my…
It doesn't have to be that convoluted, all it takes is for the eliminated candidate to be a moderate so their votes go in two different directions. But you're right that I messed up that example; the percentages are wrong.
The problem case is when your second most favored candidate would otherwise be eliminated first and you need to prevent that by causing your most favored candidate to be eliminated instead, because the second best candidate has a better chance in the next round.
Suppose the candidates you dislike, X and Y, are the first choice of 40% and 25% of people respectively, and then A and B split the remainder evenly. X and Y are the two extremists -- on opposite sides of each other, with the moderates A and B in the middle. You favor A but A leans in the direction of X and B leans in the direction of Y.
If B is eliminated first then half of B's support goes A but half goes to Y, Y is still ahead of A and then A is eliminated next. If A -- your preferred candidate -- is eliminated first, half their support goes to B and the other half to X but Y gets nothing. Y then loses to B and the final round is X vs. B rather than X vs. Y. And the elimination of Y puts all their support behind B since X is the opposite extreme. But only if you rank B above A even though that's not what you'd have preferred.
> Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.
But now you're no longer using RCV/IRV. Score voting is a Condorcet method.
> Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy.
Except that doesn't really help them because doing that also makes it more likely that their least favorite candidate wins, which is a significant incentive not to do it. The only reason to do that is if you're confident your favored candidate could only lose to your second choice, in which case it was really a two candidate race to begin with.
> Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.
It doesn't matter if they're in the same party or not. If you're using a voting system that allows more than two parties to be viable then you'll have similar candidates running from similar parties. "Force the election to be one candidate from each of two major parties" is FPTP and it's terrible.
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Germany follows the law extremely strictly, even more than the USA. If there's no law that says they can't do this, they can do it. Common sense rarely enters the picture in German legal battles
In the US these kinds of scam fail to be legal on the basis of contract law which is way more nuanced than "can't do this"... I am not talking about common sense I am talking about things like informed consent and consideration.
I "enumerated" for the last census. Trust in my community was already not high* and I had lots of interesting encounters. I really believed the rather invasive data I was collecting with a friendly face would be used and handled responsibly. I feel for the poor souls that'll sign up to go door to door for 2030 now that the firewalls against weaponizing and monetizing all of our sensitive government data has been torn…
I did similar and you summarized the feelings well. It's really sad and hard to rebuild that trust And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.
Parties are not universally evil, when I malign them in this way it is in full acknowlegment that organization is the nearly singular path to "effect on target" as regards society-scale politics. What I mean is the party per se becomes a superorganism that has always as its first priority self-preservation (a la homeostasis) and it is very worth remembering this when subsuming oneself into their structure.
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I don’t understand why gerrymandering would require privacy violation, or how differential privacy would stop it.
Gerrymandering is most effective when you know exact voting patterns of each household so you can draw the lines to get the result you want. Differential privacy blurs those boundaries and provides more room for the partisan hacks to make a fatal mistake.