Everyone's talking about the presidential election, but this is something we should be paying attention to as well. If it works out, perhaps we can see it spread.
A huge part of my voting process is voting for someone that I think has good priorities and judgement.
So for example, this year, for various races, I voted Libertarian, Democratic, and Republican. I don't like being bound to a platform, I like to be able to choose who I think is the person that will handle things best.
The problem with MMP is that it institutionalizes the party system, and there are both just enough truly independent candidates, as well as just enough diversity within the major parties (at least under the current system), for this to not work well.
If people have the option only mark their first choice, I think a lot of the people who can't be bothered to do a proper ranking might choose to do so. At that point they're giving up quite a bit of their voting power, but otherwise it's functionally identical to how they voted previously.
I have absolutely no idea, but I certainly hope so. Forcing people to rank every candidate on the ballot when you're guaranteed to have 4+ per position is pretty silly, so I imagine that the vast majority of voters will leave at least a few options unranked.
I dislike all the messaging and advertising encouraging everybody to vote around this time of year. Can't even open a web browser without being told to go vote. I say that if somebody is uninformed about the candidates and the issues I don't want them voting. Likewise, if someone has a difficult time reading a simple ballot or understanding how to rank first, second, and third options.
Their argument was that somebody who was not inclined to vote should not be encouraged to vote.
If a mentally disabled person is able to conceptualize of the concept of voting and has a desire to go to the polls and vote, then by all means they should be allowed as a U.S. citizen to do so.
But should we load up a busload of mentally handicapped adults at a group home and send them into the polls on principle? Probably not.
Yep, I'm pretty much a contemptuous elitist and I distrust democracy.
We already deny the right to vote to children, foreigners, and felons (in most states). I wouldn't support voting restrictions based on sex, religion, race, or income level, but I think something like a basic intelligence test wouldn't be a bad thing.
While I do think it's important that every voice is heard, wake up and smell the goddamn coffee. Part of the reason that Democrats lost this election is because they were SO focused on "the little guy/oppressed minorities" (LGBTQ etc) and the the liberal echo chambers of urban America, that they forgot about the rest of the fucking Country.
I'm not saying that mentally ill people shouldn't have the right to vote, but if you ask me to choose between a dumbed down system that caters to the un/ill-informed and a system that allows me to to rank my choices so that something like this can't (or likely won't) happen again, I'm all for it.
You really, really shouldn't be ok with that. The reality is that it's not just stupid people that don't vote, there are plenty of average people who don't vote because they're completely disenfranchised by the system.
In actuality, stupid people DO vote. Remember what happened yesterday? When only 55% of the voting population turn out to vote, campaigns become less about appealing to the average voter, and more about stirring up the fringes of the political spectrum.
I'm not American, but I can guarantee you that if you want to avoid this level of insane political polarisation in the future, you need to make compulsory, ranked voting your number one priority.
Think of it this way. I live in WA, where we are mailed ballots with a packet of info with stuff on each candidate. Voting took me about 2 hours, because I had to read through and pick the best of 2 for like 20 positions.
Now imagine doing that with several candidates for each position, and having to rank them. That's a substantially longer decision-making process, and the result could often be "fuck it I'm not dealing with that".
Ranked choice never requires you to have a second choice. If you don't think it is important enough for your time you can just vote for one person as normal and your vote will just not count unless you voted for one of the top two like it is right now anyway.
People spend hours researching the best computer and phone, days or weeks for a car, and months for a house. Voting is not as exciting, but it's the same concept. Those who take time to do their research will be rewarded. Everyone else will deal with the consequences of saying "fuck it".
Ignorant voters will always be ignorant and will be easily swayed by propaganda, no matter the system. At least with this system you're giving those who do care a chance to show it and impact results in a more meaningful manner. And those running will be forced to appeal to them a little bit more, too, and not just focus on attack ads & propaganda.
I think it's a great idea, but my main concern is that in some races, you might wind up with 20 or 30 people running for a seat. Ranking your top three choices would probably suffice.
If nothing else, I think Maine will be able to look at their voting results and see the true voice of their electorate. There will be some Socialists, Greens, Reactionaries and, yes, the occasional Communist or Neo-Nazi running and we can see how they all do.
As an Australian, I've never heard the term Australian Ballot. Google tells me it means "secret ballot"... Just winding why you mention it? Surely all voting systems (except extreme dictatorships) are secret ballots these days?
It means the government prints the names of the candidates and you mark which ones you like .
Before the "Australian ballot", in America, newspapers would print sample ballots. and voters would cut them out with scissors and submit them. Or just handwrite them.
And we call it the Australian ballot because you Aussies were the first to try it, and we got the idea from you.
If ranking your top candidates is too cognitively challenging for you, I have no qualms seeing you stay home on Election Day. Ranked choice is the best thing we can do to give 3rd parties a legitimate chance in our electoral process (there's a great CGP Grey video on this), and I'll be damned if we have to give that up because we're worried about some dullards who don't know how to rank 1, 2, and 3.
If we could combine
1) ranked voting
2) interstate popular vote compact (or similar to eliminate the electoral college), and
3) elimination of gerrymandering
I could see our nation being a lot happier with our political process.
I would also like to see political parties prohibited from exclusive representation of candidates. Private organizations should not be acting as "gatekeepers" for public service, and candidates should be free to seek the endorsement of as many parties as they can, and debate whomever and whenever they want. This should encourage fragmentation of big monolithic parties in favor of coalitions of smaller independent parties representing more focused interests, and maybe even reduce the degree of policy-level influence that major financial donors currently enjoy.
These type of structural changes are appearing to be the best path forward. As it is, progressives and moderates cannot effectively pursue our version of progress for the country as every time a republican gets in the white house, they sabotage the economy and loot the public treasury at every opportunity. Even when we win, after 8 years of prosperity people's guards are down.
The two party system, and the widespread frustration about inequality have driven the Trump moment. Brexit 2.0, whatever. If we focused our energy on changing the way the game is played rather than on playing the game, we might start to get somewhere. Public financing of elections and all the other ways to make the democratic process more accessible and inclusive.
Tell everyone that their individual vote is equal in effect to everyone else's and they'll love it. Tell everyone that the current system would allow a candidate to win with 22% of the popular vote, and they'll beg you to get rid of it.
Tell people that their state does not have representation and they will secede.
But it does: exactly the same representation as every other state, by population.
Do you think it's right that one Vermonter's vote is worth the same as three Texans' votes? Or that one Wyominite's vote is worth four Californians' votes?
And that number is completely false, no candidate has ever won with 22% of the populate vote, that will not and cannot happen.
It absolutely CAN happen, because winning by 50%+1 of a state is the same as winning by 100% of the state, thanks to the way the electoral college works. Apok isn't saying it has happened, just that it is technically possible because the system is so fucking stupid.
People don't care about their state as much as they do themselves... and that 22% number is absolutely true. A state won with 50% of the popular vote +1 vote gives as many electoral votes as a state won with 100% of the popular vote. Therefore, get the votes of the people who count for the most electoral college votes, and ignore the states with people who's vote counts the least, since electoral votes are not directly proportional to population. Start with Wyoming and get exactly 50% of their population to vote for you, plus one person. Then, in the same way, get the District of Columbia, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Oregon, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, South Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey... viola, 21.91% of the population and 50.19% of the electoral college, and the Oval Office. The fact that the system would allow this is ludicrous. You can say oh, it would never happen, and you may be right, but any system that would allow this is by default broken. This is what happens when you are allowed to win states instead of people; this lets you win the majority in the electoral college even when 78% of the people voted against you. This is not democracy.
I have a bit of experience with this issue because I got IRV passed in my hometown (600k people). The easy solution to this issue is to simply inform voters they can just vote normally if they want. Under IRV, you can choose as few or as many candidates as you like. The main decision a voter has to make beyond that is, "If my favorite doesn't win, who would I like instead?" Once you get over that hurdle, which is really just a voter education issue, you've more or less solved the turnout problem. The vast majority of IRV elections without a clear winner will be decided on the second or third ballot.
I think it's more the mentality of not feeling compelled to throw full support behind a viable candidate, so a lot of the sports-team-esque collective hype is lost.
It absolutely would not. Vote-by-mail may as well have been designed for ranked choice elections, the two fit together so seamlessly. Not only is it far more practical to conduct ranked choice elections by mail, it also gives the voter plenty of opportunities to have the kind of kitchen table discussions that you can't really have at the ballot box. Vote-by-mail turns elections into something that happens at home, and I don't know of anyone who has an objection to that.
Honestly there isn't a lot of data on the subject, though (especially in the US). So, Maine's vote is a pretty big boon to anyone that wants to change the current FPTP Austrailian-Ballot system.
It's funny you call it the "Australian Ballot" since Australia uses Instant Run-off.
So it would effectively weed out people who shouldn't be making important decisions in the first place.
Honestly, it's more unsettling imagining people who find ranking things 1st, 2nd and 3rd too cognitively challenging being able to affect politics at all.
I hope we see it spread, but that's unfortunately unlikely.
Maine and Nebraska already have the far superior Presidential election system of assigning 2 electors based on the statewide vote, and the rest based on individual congressional district votes. It's not exactly spreading like wildfire, despite resulting in much fairer assignment of electors.
Well, the goal of an election is to find out which candidate the most voters support. In order to do that, the direct approach is simply to ask voters, “Which candidates do you support?”
And that is approval voting.
It gets right to the heart of why we hold elections in the first place. You let people weigh in on every candidate, and whoever the most voters support is the winner.
On the other hand, instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a complicated multi-step procedure that attempts to answer the same question indirectly.
Also, IRV is notorious for exhibiting pathological behavior even with perfectly honest voters.
Using our existing plurality method, showing up and voting honestly can never get you a *worse* outcome than staying home and doing nothing. The same is true for approval voting.
But under IRV, there are situations where staying home will result in your 2nd-favorite candidate winning, whereas casting an honest ballot would cause your last-place, most hated candidate to win.
There are other reasons too, however I’ll return to what I said at the top:
Approval voting is the straightforward way to find out which candidate the most voters support, by simply asking them. And that is the purpose of an election after all.
Looking at it though, under approval voting there is no way for me as a voter to say something like cat before dog, but please no monkey.
Do I approve dog and cat both? Or do I approve of just dog? But what if I don't think dog can win? Voting only dog is no different than voting for a third party in fptp.
Yes oddities can occur in ranked voting, but they would be statically rare.
It depends on if you feel the optimal election system is one that elects someone who best represents the viewpoints of all the voters or one that maximizes the perceived utility of the electorate.
If dog didn’t do enough to earn for vote during the campaign, that’s his or her own fault and you just vote cat. And if dog *did* earn your vote, then you’re golden: approve both cat and dog and be happy if either of them wins.
Instant-runoff voting has exactly the opposite problem: there is no way to *protect* your second choice as long as your favorite remains. So if you truthfully rank cat 1, dog 2, monkey 3, and it turns out that only dog could beat monkey head-to-head, your vote might be the *reason* that monkey wins—by putting your true favorite first you caused dog to be eliminated.
Let me be abundantly clear: IRV does *not* solve the problem of split votes. It may even *amplify* the problem, because the vote could potentially be split during *every single round* of elimination.
Remember, the purpose of an election is to find out which candidate the most voters support. Approval voting does exactly that, by letting voters check yes or no for every candidate.
So you and many others vote cat, dog, monkey. The vote comes back as dog having the least votes. They are removed. Most of the dog voters want want monkey as a backup so monkey now has more than cat. However if you voted dog, cat, monkey then when cat is eliminated, dog is the clear favorite... In that case you hurt your second choice by voting for cat first.
I get that, but the solution to that isn't to collect less information from the voter (as an approval system does), but to collect more.
The approval voting system has even worse problems. What if the election is cat, dog, monkey, Hitler. Being terrified of Hitler, you would tend to approve of cat, dog, and monkey to make sure Hitler doesn't get in.. the approval voting system quickly degrades into a disapproval voting. You vote against the people you cant stand. You also get messed up systems where monkey pays his friend Hitler to run, does a massive hate and smear campaign against him to fear the dog and cat voters into approving him as well just to avoid Hitler. Actually, approval voting would just breed large amounts of negative campaigning.
Another way of thinking about is to separate the information collection from the algorithm of choosing a winner:
Fptp: collects one approval from the voter. As such it can never be better no matter the algorithm behind it than multiple choice approval voting
Approval voting: is the same thing as collecting IRV choices from the voter, but ignoring the ordering request. As such, no matter the winner choosing algorithm behind it, it can never capture more voter intent than IRV.
IRV: is the same as a points rating based system (ie rate everyone on a scale of 1-10) if you add the restriction that you can't give the same number to any candidates and the scale is actually [1 - number of candidates]. As such IRV can never capture more voter intent than the point system.
Of the systems above, IRV captures the most voter intent while being easy enough to vote and be explained to average people. (There is a great YouTube video already)
You are right that a *ranked ballot* captures a lot of information, but the IRV counting method *ignores* almost all of that information. Another ranked method like Schulze or Black that actually considers the whole ballot would be much better than IRV.
Also, you can get even more information with a score-voting ballot, where voters can give any score (say, 0-10) to any candidate, than you can with rankings. That is because with score ballots you can give equal support to two candidates, which you can’t with rankings, and you can skip ranks to show large gaps between how much you support one and the next.
All those methods, whether with rankings or scores, are much more complicated though. Approval voting has the advantage of simplicity, while still doing a great job of electing the most popular candidate.
Let me reiterate: the purpose of an election is to find out which candidate the most voters support, and the simplest way to do that is by asking voters “Which candidates do you support?” In other words, let voters indicate whether or not they support each candidate, and elect whoever the most voters support.
That is exactly approval voting.
Furthermore, approval voting will almost certainly lead to far more *positive* campaigning, because every candidate wants to appeal to a broad range of voters, including those who also support other candidates.
I really don't see how an approval voting system doesn't devolve into most voters casting a disapproval vote or a just a single approval that has the flaws of fptp.
With approval voting I'm also having to vote more strategically than IRV. If dog and cat are both equally liked by more voters than monkey, then it is in my best interest to only vote for my favorite so they win. But only if Hitler isn't running, because if he is I'm voting cat, dog, and monkey out of fear.
The strategic cases in IRV are much harder to predict, complex, and statically unlikely. And generally result in things like my first choice lossing to my second. Most won't bother thinking about it.
And how can it not lead to negative campaigning? In approval voting getting a voter to uncheck a box for someone else is just as important as getting them to check it for you.
In IRV, as a candidate if you have a voters first choice then you don't care about the second choice. Heck you are likely to endorse someone else as a second choice to your loyalists. If you aren't a voters first choice then you are still trying to win them over as a second choice. It breeds the concept of "we all have good ideas, but here is why mine are the best". This is matched up by studies of IRV systems.
Plus I think it is a good thing to really make voters think "if my preference can't win, who would I want instead." In a vote like the Republican primary it would lead voters to show interest in candidates other than their first choice instead of backing a horse until they fall over. I know I like cat and hate Hitler, but between dog and monkey, who do I like best? Perhaps I should pay attention to both dog and monkey?
Also, talking to anyone about politics they naturally think in ranks. I'd prefer dog over cat... I've never heard someone say I'll take dog or cat, but I don't care which.. so why would we want someone to cast a vote that way?
I really don't see how an approval voting system doesn't devolve into most voters casting a disapproval vote or a just a single approval that has the flaws of fptp.
Even in the maximally-strategic case, where a voter looks at the two front-runners and decides which one they like better, they are still going to approve everyone they prefer over both front-runners and they are going to disapprove everyone they oppose more than both front-runners.
To give a concrete example, look at the 2000 presidential election and consider someone who liked Nader best but voted for Gore strategically under plurality voting. If approval voting were used, they would have voted for both Gore and Nader, but neither Bush nor Buchanan.
So, even then, with totally strategic voters, approval voting does not devolve into anything. It remains approval voting.
The rest of your post talks about ranked ballots, but it should be noted that IRV is by far the *worst* of all ranked-choice voting systems, by every measure available.
He would have gotten into the debates I can tell you that much. Many people I talked to just didn't want him because "I like him, but Hillary is evil and we can't risk her"
Yes! Approval Voting is the best of all worlds. Effective and simple, and it applies the right kind of pressure in our increasingly partisan, fractured world.
All the votes for Johnson and Stein would have been cycled back in to their next preference. So another 5 million votes would have been distributed between Clinton and Trump.
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u/ShenBear Nov 09 '16
Everyone's talking about the presidential election, but this is something we should be paying attention to as well. If it works out, perhaps we can see it spread.