Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential election, court rules
bangordailynews.com
bangordailynews.com
The details of the two bills, from https://www.fairvote.org/rcv_2020_ballot_measures:
> Alaskans for Better Elections collected enough signatures to put Ballot Measure 2 to a vote this November. If passed, this ballot measure will implement several changes, including: 1) "top four" blanket primaries for state and congressional offices, where all candidates would appear on the same primary ballot and the top-four vote getters would advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation; 2) ranked choice voting in the choice among four candidates on the November ballot, with write-in candidates permitted; 3) ranked choice voting in the presidential election among all candidates who have qualified for the ballot and any write-in candidates
> After a multi-year educational campaign led by Voter Choice Massachusetts, an initiative will appear on the ballot as Question 2 that, if passed, would implement ranked choice voting for Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate and U.S House general and primary elections, state primary and general elections, and county offices, beginning in 2022. The initiative is supported by Yes on 2 for Ranked Choice Voting.
(Notably the MA bill doesn't include implementing RCV for the presidential election, but honestly that's not as big a deal as it could be given that the bill does apply to the federal legislative elections; the only reason the presidency has gotten so out of control is because a complicit legislature has allowed it to happen.)
Source: https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV) Section: Ballot Measures 2020
[0] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-first...
(Score voting is in theory slightly better with non-strategic voters, but in practice many people vote strategically in which case the added complexity isn't worth it)
It is a simple scheme, but it's too simple.
In reality a voter will prefer one candidate over others and may have a secondary choice so not to see their vote lost. The approval voting means that if your candidate has a decent chance of winning, you will need to vote for this candidate only and no one else. That is, your voting will depend on how well your candidate is doing.
An alternative - if I can't have A, then I want B - is the ranked voting. It maps directly on what a voter wants and it doesn't require adjusting their voting strategy based on the standing of their preferred candidate.
There's a lot more to this than than just these simple options. I suggest you look more into the subject before forming strong opinions. The subject is highly complicated and there is no global optima. There's a lot more to be concerned about besides VSE and solving the spoiler effect (which IRV/RCV doesn't do btw).
Ranked doesn't actually perfectly map. Consider the case where you like two candidates equally? You can't express this with ordinal systems, but you can with cardinal. There are plenty of non-binary selection systems in cardinal votings that allow for more expressiveness. The thing is that this expressiveness doesn't get you much while it adds complexity (granted, not much). But cardinal systems are also fairly resistant to strategic voting (one of those factors that matters).
This is an exceptionally improbable case though. Between two choices there's always one that's better. Unlike when you need to select the worst, when all options may be equally bad.
All voting methods are affected by strategic voting. Approval voting, however, is relatively little affected by it compared to many other voting methods, such as ranked voting methods.
> An alternative - if I can't have A, then I want B - is the ranked voting. It maps directly on what a voter wants and it doesn't require adjusting their voting strategy based on the standing of their preferred candidate.
Ranked voting methods, while better than the first-past-the-post most of the world uses today, tend to suffer from many deficiencies. And while not a technical objection per se, excessive complexity eroding trust in democracy is a pretty big one as well.
For a nice overview, see https://ncase.me/ballot/ . In particular, see the chart showing the Bayesian regret simulations for different voting methods. In the presence of strategic voters, approval and score voting are the best methods, whereas with 100% honest voters score voting wins.
No system is perfect, but at the same time, at some point "strategic voting" becomes revealed preference. The issue is how well a voting system encodes these things.
Also, not to be too self-promotional, but I also made a simple site for running polls using Ranked-choice voting. I was surprised that it was tricky to find a nice SurveyMonkey-esque site that did Borda Counts and Instant Runoff voting so I made my own. Hope some other voting geeks can enjoy it - https://poller.io
Some things I would like:
Could you randomize the initial order to avoid donkey votes?
I'd like it if there was an option to allow invited participants to add their own choices. For communal voting like "where shall we have breakfast" letting people add things would be good.
Also it would be nice to be able to drag some of the choices into a "I'm not voting for this" box or something. Or maybe just start all the options in the "I'm not voting for this" box and let people move them over? Not sure what would be easier.
Anyway thanks for making this.
Definitely planning to randomize the order. This is next on my todo list whenever I get back around to this site.
Adding your own choices is tricky UX-wise, because if person A votes, then person B votes and adds a new choice, person A's vote never took the new choice into account. When using this personally with friends, I've just aggressively solicited ideas beforehand to get around this. Definitely not a perfect solution though.
I really like the "I'm not voting for this" idea. Also, that would let you just click your votes in order, rather than having to sort a list. Will explore this idea!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
"The Schulze method (/ˈʃʊltsə/) is an electoral system developed in 1997 by Markus Schulze that selects a single winner using votes that express preferences. The method can also be used to create a sorted list of winners. The Schulze method is also known as Schwartz Sequential dropping (SSD), cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping (CSSD), the beatpath method, beatpath winner, path voting, and path winner.
The Schulze method is a Condorcet method, which means that if there is a candidate who is preferred by a majority over every other candidate in pairwise comparisons, then this candidate will be the winner when the Schulze method is applied."
In plurality you just count the number of votes. Largest number wins. max(sum(votes)
In approval you just count the number of approvals. Candidate with the most approval wins. (max(sum of columns(votes))
Score you actually have to create a matrix!
IRV you have recursion!
Schulze you have both and graph theory!
I just don't see the appeal. Sure, it has a slightly better VSE than STAR if everyone is voting 100% honestly (that condition is a key part!) but it just isn't appealing when you consider other criteria. Especially when we talk about simplicity. Approval is essentially trivial but also has a lot of other criteria going for it. How much does VSE matter? Especially if you still aren't combating spoilers (I'll give you that Schulze does better than IRV at spoilers).
That's one of the main reasons my favorite is approval voting.
On the contrary, FPTP adheres to the monotonicity criterion, which means you can't harm your preferred candidate's chances of winning by voting for them. In RCV, you actually can cause your preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too high in some situations.
As far as I know, approval voting is strictly equal to or better than FPTP on any reasonable voting system criterion, which I think makes it a better option. Also in its favor is that it's simpler and doesn't tend to eliminate compromise candidates who weren't anyone's first choice. Range and STAR are also both good systems.
But approval doesn't have the favorite betrayer like ordinal (RCV/IRV/Condorcet) does. As far as I'm aware, cardinal systems are all like this. They are much more resistant to spoilers.
(One criteria you could argue about is later-no-harm; IRV passes, but approval voting does not. It's kind of silly though to say that it's safe in RCV to put lower ranked options below your first choice when in RCV it isn't even always safe to put your first choice first. FPTP adheres to later no harm by not allowing you to vote for anyone but your first choice in the first place, so one could reasonably say that Approval isn't really worse than FPTP, except as a sort of technicality.)
But yeah, I think on basically every metric cardinal is better than ordinal methods which are better than plurality. The whole IRV push seems odd to me when approval (or STAR) is both simpler, responds better to spoilers (the main concern?), and obtains a substantially higher VSE. I don't think IRV solves enough of the problems to make a meaningful difference (I've brought up Australia a lot in this thread).
I've actually heard it argued that Approval is simpler (for the voter) because all valid FPTP ballots are valid in Approval, but not the converse. There is definitely some benefit to a system that makes invalid ballots less likely (although that doesn't guarantee that the voter's intention is captured).
The difference in complexity for counting ballots, however, should not be understated. For elections with a paper trail, if you are putting each ballot in a single pile with other similar ballots, then Approval voting can require hundreds of piles. This can delay the process and add to the cost. Jurisdictions which rely on electronic vote counting can avoid this, but that introduces its own trust/legitimacy problems.
Voting systems can actually be optimal in two candidate systems. It is when you introduce more candidates that things get complex.
> For elections with a paper trail, if you are putting each ballot in a single pile with other similar ballots, then Approval voting can require hundreds of piles.
This would be poor counting. You need the same number of ballots as FPTP. You just sum multiple columns instead of a single column. The process isn't much different. This is actually the major advantage of approval over even other simple but better systems like score or STAR. It is dead simple to count and understand. Compare any of these to IRV/RCV (what the post is about) and they've got huge complexity problems. But Ireland is able to handle the many rounds of counting you need for IRV and they do it with paper ballots. Remember that Ireland and Australia already have IRV and I'm pretty sure Australia didn't have computers a hundred years ago. (I don't advocate for IRV btw)
I'm not saying you need more ballots to implement Approval voting, I'm saying that FPTP has the nice property (when counting paper ballots) that the votes can be put into piles, where the weight of each pile is roughly proportional to the number of votes for the candidate whose votes are in that pile.
Of course, FPTP votes aren't actually counted using measuring scales, but the fact that this isn't possible with Approval voting is an indication that "just sum multiple columns" is a slightly more laborious and error-prone step than you make it sound, at least for humans counting paper ballots (which I believe is a necessary property of trustworthy elections).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Republic_of_I...
IMO, this is a great way to do it and the proportional representation part is more important than the details of voting method.
Ireland is doing better than Australia in terms of party control.
> IMO, this is a great way to do it and the proportional representation part is more important than the details of voting method.
And I 100% agree with this. The math does too. That's why I advocate so hard for a better voting system. In America we don't have that advantage (I want that too!). But everyone thinks that if we get IRV in Bernie could win. That's not how it works out.
Approval Voting is much simpler to implement and use than IRV, and much less prone to produce anomalous results. More discussion can be found here: https://electionscience.org/
I think the Marquis de Condorcet got the entire field off on the wrong foot with a conceptual framework in which voting is about expressing preferences between candidates. Voting theorists have tended ever since to think in terms of preferential voting. The result is an unconscious bias to the effect that a voter's evaluations of the candidates tend to be roughly evenly spaced: that the gap between their first choice and their second is roughly equal to that between their second and third, etc. You can hear that bias, for example, in this statement from FairVote.org:
[A]pproval voting [has the] practical flaw of not allowing voters to support a second choice without potentially causing the defeat of their first choice.
It's true in AV that if you vote for two candidates, your ballot contributes equally to the potential victory of either; you don't get to say which you prefer. But calling this a "flaw" assumes that you couldn't be somewhat indifferent between those two candidates, at least relative to the degree of your dislike for the other(s). That assumption is pervasive, albeit implicit, in the arguments I have seen made against AV, and it is indeed nothing but an assumption.
A much better conceptual framework is to imagine an N-cube, where N is the number of candidates, and each voter's position as a point in that cube. Then the problem of designing a voting system becomes that of identifying which corner the mean of the positions of the voters is closest to. In principle a voting system could allow each voter to supply a real number in [0, 1] for each candidate, and we could simply add them up and see which is largest. In practice it makes more sense to quantize the space to some extent. Score Voting gives the voter a set of possible values, e.g., integers in [0, 10]. Approval Voting boils that down to the bare minimum of {0, 1}. (My opinion is that once the electorate is large enough, there is little benefit to allowing more than two choices; the greater quantization noise of AV gets averaged out.)
Armed with that, we can now look back at the preferential systems. Is there a way to interpret a preferential ballot in the N-cube framework? Yes, there is. We cut the unit N-cube up along diagonal hyperplanes; for instance, in 3 dimensions (i.e. for a 3-candidate race), the X=Y plane, the Y=Z plane, and the X=Z plane. This gives us 6 prismatically shaped regions. We compute the barycenter of each — the center of mass, under the assumption of uniform density — and look at their coordinates. These turn out to be permutations of [1/4, 1/2, 3/4] — a linear sequence. In short, what falls out of this exercise is equivalent, modulo linear transformation, to the Borda Count.
So the Borda Count optimizes for the case in which the voters' positions cluster near the barycenters of those regions: where their evaluation of the middle candidate, in a 3-candidate race, is about halfway between those of the other two. If you listen closely to the arguments presented by preferential-voting advocates, you can hear them assuming that this is likely to be the case. But there's no reason it should be, and in practice I haven't observed that it tends to be.
Elections require a few things - one of them being transparency. Another is trust.
Thus while elegant mathematical solutions such as the one you presented, may be more accurate, they are also impossible for the lay man to understand. And for journalists to explain. For many this erodes the transparency,leading to mistrust.
This is the core reason why simple, but explainable approaches are preferred.
Anyway, I'm writing for the HN audience here, not for general consumption :-)
The correct motto, I submit, is "one person, one candidate, one vote". Approval voting falls directly out of that. Every AV ballot has the same amount of influence over the result as every other, because they're all points on a hypersphere whose center coordinates are all 1/2. That is, they all represent points equally far from the point of indifference.
As I like to say: "I approve of preferential voting, but I prefer Approval Voting" :-)
With that in mind, I think it is worth looking at which voting reform proposals have been rejected before, and what argument their opponents used. My impression is that cost and complexity tend to be the biggest persuaders, so strategically it makes sense to support a voting system where the ballot marking and counting processes are as familiar as possible.
As a concrete proposal, I suggest a system where people fill in ballots exactly as in FPTP, and the results are counted in exactly the same way, but then the candidate with the least votes gets to reassign their votes to another candidate of their choice, and so on until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
The justification for this is that America did exactly this (not at a national level). As well as that Ireland and Australia are still dominated by two parties, and Australia has had IRV for 100+ years.
Sometimes incremental improvements are actually a step backwards. Specifically when people get over hyped and put too much faith into it.
But I also have to ask, if we already have a better tasting cake and it costs as much as the plain cake, why not take the better one? It isn't more expensive and doesn't take more work. It is just better.
So before we get into comments like "If the primary reason you fail a criterion is simply because your voting system just says more about a voters actual preferences, thus creating the potential for conflict, it is a weak failure when compared to a voting system that avoids that failure by simply lacking that information."
We should always first, and last say: "I'd take nearly anything over FPTP"
And anyone not doing this is not helping. As someone who has lived through 3 failed voting reforms in my province, I need to make it painfully clear to those not doing this. You are NOT helping.
This isn't something you take several steps towards the right direction. If we take a step and it doesn't work, people are going to stop stepping in that direction and look for other optimization methods. You have to make a large enough step that the loss function actually decreases.
1. the public figures out how it works
2. parties start appearing that arn't getting crushed by other network effects
3. that an understanding of what a strategic vote looks like in the new system is widespread and existing parties start playing the new game.
And since election cycles are often something like... 4 years. You'd need a voting system in place for maybe 20 years before anything positive would start to happen, and that would apply to any voting system put forward.
Like. These systems are for the far flung future of the country. Not... next election.
As to the time frame: remember that Australia has had it for 100+ years. They are dominated (>80%) by 2 parties (even though they have the MAJOR advantage of proportional representation through their parliament). One can say similar things about Ireland, though the domination isn't nearly the same and there are 3 strong parties (they use a variant of IRV called STV).
But remember that neither the math nor the 100+ year experiment has shown that IRV won't collapse into a two party system. You'll find plenty of references through this thread and sources as to why if you search for "approval" (and "monotonicity criterion"). The thing is that the problem is rather complex. We don't just want it so you don't waste your vote, we don't want that to happen with ANY candidate (favorite betrayer criterion). We want other parties to rise up with no disadvantage. We want our voting to be expressive (STAR and score are substantially more expressive that IRV). We want high voter satisfaction efficiency (VSE) -- IRV doesn't do much better than FPTP. We want the system to be resistant to strategic voting. And we want the voting system to be dead simple. Frankly IRV doesn't fit these criteria. Approval fills every category but isn't extremely expressive. Score and STAR are at worst approval voting and at best much more expressive than ordinal (ranked) systems.
But basically everything you're pointing out is well acknowledged and I won't challenge it. More what I'm suggesting is that Hasan and CGP Grey didn't do their research but drove the hype. There is no optimal system for voting, unfortunately, but there are pretty dang good ones. When the experts say cardinal, I'm going with that.
Here's another: https://www.rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html The most telling argument here, I think, is that a century of IRV hasn't freed Australia from two-party domination.
Another page with simuations: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
What voting reforms have been attempted in your province?
Problems generally arise when there is a third candidate who is competitive with the other two. Generally, it's safe to vote for your preferred candidate if they're either in a strong position and will probably win or they have no hope of winning. In between those poles, you might be harming your candidate if you put them first in a 3-way (or more) contest.
Approval voting solves the third party spoiler problem better than RCV does, and it doesn't introduce any weird new problems. Therefore, I think it's a better option than RCV for anyone considering a switch from first-past-the-post. (Range voting and STAR voting are also pretty good.)
Edit: Found this[0] talking about it; what remains unclear to me is whether this should be seen as "this hurts my candidate" over "this result better reflects the electorate".
I think at the root of it is that removing the candidate with the least number of first-place votes is kind of an arbitrary way of eliminating candidates. Maybe that candidate should have been eliminated, but maybe they were an ideal compromise candidate, tolerated by most voters even if not their first choice.
Perhaps RCV might be significantly improved if one were to eliminate by borda count instead of least-first-place-votes, but that's not the system that's been advocated widely in recent years.
but for any of this to matter, we need more than 2 choices, so the bigger issue is breaking the stranglehold of the two-party system (either by getting rid of parties, or adding many more legitimate parties to the fold), which also means we need serious campaign reform (which the supreme court seemingly opposes, and might oppose even more soon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
My hope is that this might be a foot in the door to moving to approval (the voting machines would be able to handle either) but my guess is there might also be less of a chance of doing so if there's already been a change.
E.g., let’s say I’m a “moderate” in the US in 2008. I would like either Obama or McCain to win but I have a strong preference for Obama and I do not like any of the third parties. Approval voting doesn’t allow me to express this very common preference.
The real barrier is that a change to the voting system would have to be approved by a party that is winning under the current system. Convincing a party to agree to any change is much harder than picking one of the many good options.
Also, I hope you don't mind if I mention that your point is eerily analogous to a dictator saying "We can't introduce democracy, because then people would disagree on who the leader should be."
For example, if the Democrats were afraid that the Green party would split their vote, they might support RCV. Therefore, arguably, the best strategy for bringing about voting reform might be to vote for the Green party, even if you don't support any other Green party policies, or any Democrat policies.
I think its a good idea. Though Cambridge takes a long time to deliver results (Usually its 9 winners of about 27 candidates.) .
If your interested in the state ballot question, it 2 of 2: See the states voter guide which is pretty decent:
https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/IFV_2020.pdf
Also info on "right to repair" (ballot question 1 of 2)
edit: you can kind of see how cambridge does "Proportional Representation" which is a little different. We still have to rank our candidates 1..n. on the ballot. the results pages show how its tallied: https://www.cambridgema.gov/election2019/official/Council%20...
Unfortunately RCV (IRV) doesn't solve many of the problems that it claims to do. One of the claims is that IRV prevents spoilers, which is objectively false[1][2]. We're pretty interested in the Favorite Betrayal Criterion to prevent this[3]. We also see that IRV has a fairly poor voter satisfaction efficiency (VSE)[4][5].
It really feels like people just watched the CGP Grey videos on election science and dug no further. Even Arrow himself said that cardinal voting (Approval, score, STAR) is probably the likely answer. They also tend to be much simpler as they only are single rounds and resistant to people accidentally "ranking" two candidates equally (which you might actually favor two candidates equally and these methods let you express that).
[0] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-first...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
[2] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/
[3] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
Unfortunately, as I understand it, it turns out the problem is basically unsolvable: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/14245
But yes, voting math (social choice theory) is hard. No one is going to combat you on that.
And yes, but people tend to pay attention to only the maximal value. Just trying not to complicate things.
To give an example of what I mean, suppose 51% of the city is solidly for party A, and 49% is solidly for party B. If you run an election with two candidates of party A and two candidates of party B, and everyone votes according to their partisan preferences, then both the party A candidates win rather than, say, one A and one B.
There are some proposed methods that extend approval voting to do something closer to proportional representation by weighting the votes of voters who have gotten one of their candidates elected less than ones who haven't, but I don't remember all the specific details.
That said, I think this makes sense if having multiple winners is unusual (like there were two seats up this election rather than one because someone left office before their term was up), or if there's a bunch of commissioners who are replaced in stages like U.S. Senators, and it would be weird to make results proportional within each "class" but not proportional overall.
Anyone know the full story here?
I suspect this will be beneficial. We'll see. They could eventually move to a proportional form of approval voting.
Cardinal systems are mathematically better by some criteria but have the extreme problem, that those criteria overlook, that their is no clear mapping from real preferences to honest ballot markings (and, similarly, no clear interpretation of what any given set of ballot markings mathematical analysis which assume that there is some real underlying thing which maps neatly to ballot markings on cardinal ballots may find that cardinal voting systems are good at aggregating that mythical thing, but we know from experience with rating systems that markings in cardinal systems aren't consistent for similar preferences but instead vary, for similar relative preferences and absolute opinions on the rated subjects, by culture and subculture. And you can't really argue that that would be mitigates in practice by people learning voting techniques that are efficient in achieving goals under such systems, because that is too complex of a function of other voter’s expected markings to be tractable. (There are situations where the markings on cardinal ballots can be concretized in terms of prices people are will to pay for or to avoid certain outcomes, and where those become concrete binding mutual commitments among voters, those systems have clear utility. But in general public elections they aren't.
Where you have multiple winners naturally (which includes elections of Presidential electors, which are always at least 3 per state), proportional systems (whether party-list or candidate-centered like STV) are the natural solution, as multiwinner elections are fundamentally easier than single-winner.
Florida 2000:
Bush 2,912,790
Gore 2,912,253
Nader 97,488
Buchanan 17,484
Browne 16,415
Others < 6,000What states would have switched? In Wisconsin Clinton + Stein did outpoll Trump alone (by ~10K votes), but the Libertarian party had another 106K votes that would have been allocated and it's not hard to imagine Trump getting more than Clinton of them.
It was a similar story in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
This encourages the other, more popular parties to adopt that issue if they see these parties are popular.
Otherwise I’d just vote for the “best” and most popular.
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Senators/Senate_...
I should also point out that I mentioned a specific advantage.
I do agree that the dominance of two major parties is mostly bad though.
i'm just tired of people positing counterfactual worlds, and assuming whatever tiny little change they make will have no ramifications except for the one that they want. it is sloppy thinking.
For instance, RCV (aka IRV) is great solution to the problem that a minor candidate siphoned a few votes away from a major candidate and swung the results of a national presidential election several times in recent memory. If voters who really wanted to vote for Nader could have also voted for Gore, maybe Bush wouldn't have won, and that election would have better reflected the will of voters.
The problem that RCV is not prepared to deal with is what happens if people actually start voting for Green or Libertarian or Democratic Socialist or whatever in large enough numbers that they actually have a chance of winning elections. At that point, you run into problems and RCV starts producing nonsensical results. The voters learn from this that it's not actually safe to vote for third party candidates, and the two party system remains in place. It's a little bit better because you don't have minor candidates swinging elections, but it's still a duopoly.
I mean we've literally done this in America (though not nationally). We've had IRV before. People turned against it. So I don't think my fear is unjustified since there's historical precedent.
Australia has IRV (has for 100 years) and is still dominated by two parties even though they have the advantage of proportionate representatives through their parliamentary system. And in reality they have their two coalitions.
What worries me is that CGP and Hasan have large audiences but look to have done surprisingly little background research into the topics and alternatives. And let's be real, voting math is hard and unintuitive. It is overly constrained and there is no global optima/easy answer. I don't expect the average person to look more than surface level, but I do expect more from groups like HN.
I am optimistic that within the last couple of years, it seems that any online conversation about RCV among even moderately technical/nerdy groups of people seems to almost always include someone bringing up the downsides of RCV and the better alternatives. I used to kind of dread RCV discussion threads because I felt like I ought to explain the problems, but it's very technical and abstract. Now I usually find someone has already written what I would have said, often in a more concise, clear way.
How does this happen?
The only scenario I can see where this happens is if Nader received more votes than Gore, and those Gore voters didn't put Nader second. But then the problem isn't too many voters putting Gore as their first choice, it's too few!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant...
Article 1, Compact 3 of the US Constitution.
That's the basis of questioning the legality of the NPVI
It may be that the NPVIC has to be replaced by an informal agreement, where the states that support the Compact all simultaneously but "unilaterally" change their system for appointing electors to one that implements a national popular vote. The trigger for this would that enough states have passed motions of intent to support this change "at some point". That would seem like no more of a Compact than one state lowering its sales tax when it notices a nearby state doing the same.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
First off, I would tend to consider the potential need for a contingent election as a bug, not a feature. But that aside, the claim seems wrong. It is certainly possible in principle for a popular-vote election involving the whole country to result in a tie; it's just extremely unlikely. But perhaps the wording of the NPVIC doesn't stipulate that in the event of a tie, the participating states' electors will be allocated so as to generate an Electoral College tie as well, if possible — and what happens if it isn't possible?
If Texas manages to finally flip during this presidential election, though, I'd say all bets are off and the NPVIC might finally become law of the land.
Note that some states with almost similar number of electoral votes are going in the other direction. Florida is becoming more safe red all the time, and PA is a swing state and might become safe red at some point.
That's what it flipping would mean. TX was purple. Then it became red. Its demographic trends[0] show it coming into play again.
The good news is that under a national popular vote, a Republican could probably survive a narrow popular vote loss in Texas or Florida and still win the presidency, because every GOP vote in those states would still count toward a national popular vote majority.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/28/gop-natio...
[0] At least as long as the Republican Party is adamantly anti-immigrant. https://www.texastribune.org/2019/06/20/texas-hispanic-popul...
To say it a different way, at some point if the democrats gets popular enough they win every state. That doesn't mean that every state is a swing state, just that people are fed up with that party.
Long term the demographics are not looking good for Texas GOP, based on current voting trends. Most likely the party will adept and come up with new policies to attract different voters. Or you know suppress the vote and rig the elections.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_federalism#Constitutional...
Citation needed. The electoral college does not represent the interests of the electorate more than a popular vote does.
We don't go ask, say, Catholics which presidential candidate they prefer, and then award the winner the entire Catholic vote (including those who have been disenfranchised from voting, or who didn't vote). Yet we do that with states.
As a case in point look at the state of Washington. Two counties comprise all aspects of the state's politics, due to their population size and density relative to the rest of the state, often in stark contrast to the rest of the state. The majority of the states residents are thus represented, but the majority of districts and communities comprising that state are not.
A district, like a religious orientation, is not a hive mind, where a minority of people who vote for the most popular candidate should be able to co-opt the voting power of the rest.
Under a popular vote, counties besides King and Snohomish would have representation, instead of being ammunition used by those two.
I disagree. A rural agricultural community has very real security and economic concerns very different from a high density urban community. Those feelings are very real. Under a purely popular vote those concerns are instantly and conveniently discarded. That concern is the principle benefit of representational government and that concern is essential.
If CA would award the electoral college votes proportional it would force both parties to take it seriously. It would also make each vote more meaningful and listen to the voters.
It would obviously be bad for the democratic party, but good for the state and the people living there. And perhaps it would make other states take the same choice to be relevant again. Although some red states are becoming unintentionally relevant like Texas that is actually not a safe state this election.
I don't think this is a panacea, but i really like this more the current system.
Emphasis on culture. While voting systems and mechanics obviously play a huge role, political culture is (IMO) a very big factor... perhaps the deciding factor. Here (in Ireland) we have moved from a "two party with exceptions" system to a full multiparty system within a few elections. It now take >2 parties to form a majority. This isn't an uncommon story.
A point I made recently to American friends who are in favour of these kinds of changes was: The US has tons of elected positions. That is a lot of surface area that these changes can grow on.
There's this notion of "choice-induced preference change", where making a decision to choose X over Y changes your preferences such that you now more strongly prefer X to Y.
I'm not sure to just what degree it's 1) real, 2) of meaningful size, and 3) occurs as a result of casting a vote; but with some possible answers to those questions, it should be the case that given the same outcome to an election the most voters will be the happiest with it if they chose it by approval voting.
I'm not sure what to do with that observation, but I think it's interesting.
If you’re interested in the consequences of First Past the Post voting and why we need change so bad, I strongly recommend this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44244963-breaking-the-tw...
Also, I hope it's STV.
Two-outcome FPTP on the other hand does not fall to Arrow’s impossibility theorem. This is the system most states in the USA effectively have.
Intuitively, the least remarkable candidate will be elected because the opposing sides will reciprocally downgrade the candidates perceived as better. For instance Hitler was a result of an alternate voting scheme [2].
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/#NonDic
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/november/devlin-ranked-v...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_German_presidential_ele...
It's ironic that the Republicans complained that independent voters were not having their votes counted.
I'm not saying this proves that the Democrats are better, but I do think it's too simplistic to say that every single party in the world is exactly as corrupt/authoritarian as every other party in the world.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21449634/republicans...
B: "a survey of 2000 experts from around the world" is not a valid way to collect such data
And finally the actual article says:
"Its closest peers are, almost uniformly, radical right and anti-democratic parties. This includes Turkey’s AKP (a regime that is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), and Poland’s PiS (which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment)."
Since concluding the Republican party is like those is ridiculous on it's face, one can only conclude this survey is garbage if it generates such results.
To be specific: the survey isn't measuring how the Republican party actually is. Rather it's measuring how these experts think the Republican party is - informed mainly by a liberal American media.
I've seen it over and over: Decide how you think the opponent will behave, then criticize them, in advance, as if they have already behaved that way.
Think about it: Do you think Republicans would "jail journalists" and "threaten judges with criminal punishment"? Next, think Did Republicans actually do that? And consider why your opinion on what you think they would do doesn't match what they actually did.
Whereas we, on the other hand, are only the second leading jailer of citizens.
> which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment
Our current President repeatedly threatens journalists and the media with criminal punishment, tying your two points together.
Nope. He verifiably does not. The only time Trumps sued the press was when Melania sued Daily Mail for libel. Daily Mail lost and paid her $2.9M. https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/04/12/daily-mail-melania-tr...
If Trump sued for libel every time (which, IMO, he should, to provide some negative feedback to the system that's otherwise unstable), he'd put half the press in the country out of business by now.
https://cpj.org/reports/2020/04/trump-media-attacks-credibil...
So forgive us if we take "The press are the enemy of the people" from Trump with a grain of salt, when his sentiments are more accurately "The press that don't support me, the President, unequivocally and uncritically, are the enemy of the people".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48696131
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jw5p/the-white-house-is...
Argumentum ad hominem.
> Since concluding the Republican party is like those is ridiculous on it's face,
Why?
> Do you think Republicans would "jail journalists" and "threaten judges with criminal punishment"?
They may not (yet) be doing those specific things. However, the article goes on to state which "anti-democratic" things they're actually doing:
"Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have shown disdain for procedural fairness and a willingness to put the pursuit of power over democratic principles. They have implemented measures that make it harder for racial minorities to vote, render votes from Democratic-leaning constituencies irrelevant, and relentlessly blocked Democratic efforts to conduct normal functions of government."
There are additional examples of this in the article:
"For example, Republicans won about 50 percent of the US House vote in North Carolina in 2018’s election. That translated into 70 percent of House seats due to heavily gerrymandered districts. Wisconsin Democrats won every statewide election in 2018 but did not win majorities in either chamber of the state legislature. While Democrats are also at a disadvantage due to concentration in urban areas, gerrymanders share much of the blame."
"North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who chaired the state redistricting committee that put together a map so racially contorted that it was struck down in court in 2016, openly professed the power politics behind extreme gerrymandering in a speech on the statehouse floor."
"Lewis is notable mostly for his unusual honesty. Republicans believe they ought to win elections, and are doing everything in the power to make that the case — including changing the rules to stack the playing field in the favor. The effect is a party committed to an anti-democratic creed outside the norm of advanced Western democracies that insists that it is the true guardian of American democracy."
Unlike your assertion that these experts are only going off what "liberal media" tells them, they seem to be looking at what's actually happening. And it's deeply concerning.
Exactly. As I said, they are being rated based on what people like you think they will do, not what they actually do.
And you did the exact same thing. Are you even aware you did that?
Comparing Republicans to Turkey’s AKP or Poland’s PiS is absurd on it's face, yet vox doesn't seem aware of that.
And "Argumentum ad hominem" is not a valid rebuttal here, because every word vox says on this subject can not be taken as fact, yet you have quoted large sections of it. Even the study they have quoted can not be used, because vox chose the study to quote.
Saying "vox isn't a valid news source for this kind of news" is another way of saying "you need to start over if you want to analyze Republicans", this vox article is not a valid starting point.
> The problem with the vox article is it's rating the Republicans based on their image (specifically their image with liberal media), not their actions. And you did the exact same thing. Are you even aware you did that?
If you read my entire comment, or the entire article, you'll find that to not be the case. The rating is based entirely on actions, not "liberal media reporting".
Check slide 24 here, the US Democrats are on almost exactly the same spot as the Swedish Social Democrats (edit or look at 25, it is clearer):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oidnej45mx6tyei/Global%20Party%20S...
Political parties don't do anything, people in them do. The people in those parties, for the most part, do indeed have limits to what they will do to win. The ones that don't are sociopaths who unfortunately sometimes amass undeserved power. But I see no evidence for the kind of universal assertion of amorality you're making here.
> No political party anywhere on earth has principles above getting elected.
That just treats politics as some kind of nihilistic team sport, which I reject and it's unsupported by any evidence. Parties have platforms. According to https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-ke... politicians do try to keep most of their platform promises.
> If you believe the democrats are any better, perhaps research machine politics.
I don't understand your point here. It appears that you're defending Republicans doing... something? By saying that the Democrats did... something?
> It is a naked power struggle from top to bottom on all sides.
That stance seems in direct contradiction to the enlightenment principles upon which the United States was founded. The peaceful transition of power between opposing parties has been very much a hallmark of the US republic for many decades, and a principle to which most of us adhere.
I think he's explicitly NOT defending either party. a critique of one is not a defense of the other.
It’s similar to how Apple can value privacy more because they are a hardware company.
You could look at this cynically and say that these organizations are all amoral agents who only behave according to their incentives. You’d be right. Another way to look at it is that these organizations are tools for humans, and their differing constraints mold them to be useful to further certain values. I don’t naively support democrats because I believe they are better people. I support them because their values align better with the world I want to live in.
If you only know the GOP and DNC i can understand why you'd think that
In fact, every person is simply motivated to maximize comfort, minimize pain and procreate. It's a rat race through and through. All people are the same. Child killers and doctors. No difference.
Any simple extension of your miserable idea seems foolish. I'd hate to have to live in your mind.
Preferential voting just rewards vote buying and ginger groups, look at the recent New Zealand election. The successful economic reform incumbents were voted out by a minority party led by the ex President of the International Union of Socialist Youth with a populist party on a platform of slashing immigration.
It uses MMP, where the voter gets to vote for exactly one party list and one candidate for local member. Preferences are not involved.
It was my friend's ballot - she was in her early 20s, and she laughed and said "no wonder nobody fucking votes." She didn't vote in the election, and it kind of stuck with me.
Any election reform has to take into account the amount of work you're asking of voters, and it's what led me to eventually support approval voting over ranked systems.
There's also "Optional Preferential" where the formality rule is "number at least one, and as many as you like".
> A ginger group is a formal or informal group within an organisation seeking to influence its direction and activity. The term comes from the phrase ginger up, meaning to enliven or stimulate. Ginger groups work to alter the organisation's policies, practices, or office-holders, while still supporting its general goals. Ginger groups sometimes form within the political parties of Commonwealth countries