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Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

The two party system is decidedly broken. Primaries force us into accepting evil or awful because we've been convinced that at least it's the lesser evil and that we should be happy for that.

Bring about instant runoff voting or a similar system and you strip parties of their power and we rid ourselves of self-serving incumbents quickly.

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California doesn't have party primaries.

There's a June election and the top two vote winners go on to November, even if from the same party. That's why California has a chance to prevent a second Feinstein in Kamala Harris. It will be two Democrats in November: drug prosecutor Harris and grassroots liberal Loretta Sanchez.

This is new though.

That's a start, but until you can let people stop having to pick between voting their conscience and voting out of fear, the parties and incumbents can still wield a lot of power, IMHO. Having an election that lets people rank their preferences could remove the voting out of fear and let us actually focus on voting for our hopes and our ideals.

That's just a recognition of reality, though. The Democrats are so dominant these days the party primary is the election. They thought it might be nice to hold the election on election day.

> Bring about instant runoff voting or a similar system and you strip parties of their power and we rid ourselves of self-serving incumbents quickly.

Agreed. I believe score voting is the best option. It's remarkable easy to understand (just rate each candidate, like you rate movies or whatever), minimizes voter regret, avoids spoilers/splits, and avoids the two-party rule we suffer with our current plurality voting model.

I prefer score voting to ranked voting for one simple reason: the voter is free to vote any way he or she chooses. It is not necessary to rank the candidates. If you are equally in favor of two or more candidates you can express that with score voting (give them the same score). Ranked voting requires that you rank candidates.

https://electology.org/score-voting

Those are all really good points – I wasn't necessarily focused on IRV – but, rather, the idea that there are many better options than the current single choice system that would allow people to more freely express their preferences without fear that they'd be "throwing their vote away" or "letting someone else win" by voting they way they really wanted to.

Thanks for the pointer to score-voting – I think I probably agree with your take on its superiority.

I like to point people to https://modernballots.com/

It's great because it has good shiny examples and serves as a practical and superior alternative to sites like Survey Monkey for those common office elections such as "Where should we go for team lunch?".

>we've been convinced that at least it's the lesser evil and that we should be happy for that.

I've always thought every ballot should have the option of:

[ ] None of the above, choose new candidates.

That is a sentiment I share at times, however, as a score voting advocate, I'd like to point out that the consolidation of candidates we see over the course of a campaign, and possibly the small size of the initial field of candidates as well, are largely caused by our plurality voting model. I call it "forced field consolidation" [1] and feel it's a poisonous effect of plurality voting. It causes rifts between the electorate as voters are repeatedly forced to select one and only one candidate at the expense of all others; creating a highly polarized voter landscape.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/more-on-score-voting

People also have to wonder how a candidate can receive the most votes and still looses the election.

* 1824: John Quincy Adams won over * 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes * 1888: Benjamin Harrison * 2000: George W. Bush

All these presidents won without the votes. Hayes was chosen by The House.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

Added later:

The article you presented on approval and score voting is interesting and I like the idea. I have believed for some time that we need to do away with the party system and let each candidate stand or fall on their own merit.

I don't really fit into any party as I am an independently conservative liberal libertarian with social and anti social leanings.

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