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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

Anything is better than the status quo. Instant Runoff Voting has legit flaws, but it would still be an improvement.

I always point folks at this https://ncase.me/ballot/

I sincerely believe that a better voting system is one of the highest ROI changes we could make towards better government, and some systems are just so simple it’s crazy not to do it.

I personally prefer approval voting, because it’s still trivial to mark, count, and explain (speaking by analogy, it's just switching from radio buttons to checkboxes). It also doesn't have as bad failure modes as some other systems (see the link above for comparisons). But everything’s better than today’s FPTP system.

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The problem is pretty much all systems that make voting more fair also make Republicans win much less, so there's very little bipartisan motivation to make changes.

Maine voters passed it via ballot measure, no partisan politicking required. Likewise, the two states voting on it this year, Alaska and Massachusetts, are also doing so via ballot measure.

Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution says,

> The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

There have been two Supreme Court decisions that have analogized the electorate as a legislative body in ballot measures, referendums, public initiatives, etc. The latest was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_State_Legislature_v._A... [1] In that decision it was the liberals and Kennedy who upheld precedent; all the conservatives would have prohibited direct public votes on Congressional election rules. But now Kennedy and Ginsburg are gone, and their replacements are very likely to vote against precedent if the question comes back to the court. (In fact, IIRC, some justices, like Thomas, don't even like the idea of public initiatives for purely state elections, an argument based on their own peculiar notions of Federalism. Also, if you read the order opinions over the last few weeks by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, some of their arguments seem to be aimed at reversing Arizona.) Roberts might switch his vote to uphold precedent, but Roberts would only make 4 votes, not enough to save it.

If (or, rather, when) SCOTUS prohibits the public from directly legislating their Congressional elections, only Congress could restore the ability, unless the Constitution was amended.

[1] Skimming through the Arizona case, I think the first was Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Oregon, 223 U. S. 118 (1912). But I don't have time to reread the Arizona opinions carefully to refresh my memory.

The makeup of SCOTUS is irrelevant in this case, because before they could hear the case Congress would need to pass a law contradicting these state measures, which could then be challenged up to SCOTUS. No matter what, the ball is in Congress's court here.

Look at the parties in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. Any state legislature (or perhaps even any state legislator) that wanted to challenge their state's initiative-back election laws could sue. I'm not that well versed in election law, but it's also possible any state citizen could do it as well. In any event, just looking at the plaintiffs in the flurry of 2020 election cases shows how easy it would be to bring a case back to SCOTUS.

Er, I feel like you're actually deflating your own argument here. Note that the aforementioned clause in the US Constitution grants no power to Congress to dictate how states perform their own legislative elections. The scenario you're envisioning first requires a state to pass an alternative voting system via ballot, then for the state legislature elected by that voting system to sue the state itself to overturn it (which is guaranteed to be wildly unpopular among the electorate that just passed the ballot measure), then for the case to make it to SCOTUS, who can only overturn it for federal elections, not for any state elections, and especially not in state elections in states other than the one that challenged it. A state politician has nothing to gain and everything to lose by supporting such a measure.

The context here is Federal elections for President and Congress--Maine's Federal Senate race is also via rank-choice, as mentioned in the second paragraph/sentence of the linked article. To another commenter's argument that switching to ranked-choice voting for those elections would require bipartisan support, you had retorted that

> Maine voters passed [ranked-choice voting] via ballot measure, no partisan politicking required. Likewise, the two states voting on it this year, Alaska and Massachusetts, are also doing so via ballot measure.

My point is that for Federal congressional elections the legal capacity to use voter initiatives to institute different voting rules, bypassing partisan state legislatures and Congress, will likely be extinguished in the coming years. The same is likely true for Presidential elections as the relevant constitutional language is nearly identical: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors...."

My comment about Thomas' view (uncited--I could be misremembering the nuances) about who gets to pass laws controlling state legislature elections was merely to suggest how likely he would be to overturn Arizona; his opinion about the Constitution's and SCOTUS' role in dictating/safeguarding a very specific form of representative government extends beyond a simplistic plain text[1] interpretation of the aforementioned constitutional clauses.

[1] I feel like I should point out that no justice, conservative or otherwise, subscribes to a "plain text" philosophy of constitutional interpretation. Conservatives justices tend to espouse either a so-called Original Intent philosophy or Scalia's Original Meaning philosophy, where "Original Meaning" is not the same thing as "plain text". And justices of all political philosophies will make a "plain text" argument when it suits their interpretation. All things being equal (though they rarely are), everybody tends to agree a plain text defense is the best defense.

I come from a country with a civil law system, so please excuse me if I'm misunderstanding things here, but isn't the legal precedent already established? How would something like this come to court again? Same with Roe v. Wade. There's already been a ruling by the Supreme Court, how can there be another one?

The Supreme Court is not prohibited from overturning existing precedent. They just generally choose to operate under a doctrine that says they should try to avoid overturning precedent. Lower courts are more formally bound by precedent from higher courts, but their rulings as constrained by precedent can be appealed up to the level(s) that are empowered to overturn the relevant precedent.

The Supreme Court can overturn precedent. For example, Plessy v Ferguson (which held that segregation was legal) was overturned by Brown v Board of Education (which held that it was not). More recently, South Dakota v Wayfair directly overturned Quill v North Dakota in holding that states can directly charge sales taxes on internet purchases from out-of-state businesses.

(IANAL. As I understand it,) Precedent is generally followed unless there is a difference of circumstance, which could include changing cultural mores.

The most recent U.S. Supreme Court nominee briefly talks about some of the nuances related to precedent here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlchBfW036s

The (old) British legal scholar William Blackstone dives into it in his work "Commentaries of the Laws of England" (Introduction - Section 3) if you want a more thorough understanding of the foundation of precedent in common law.

The Supreme Court is a political institution, none of the members have any obligation to precedent, and they aren't required to be lawyers. There's a lot of pomp and rhetoric around it that implies otherwise, but that's required in order for it to maintain the respect it needs to function.

Oh man, this is a doozy of an explanation to go through, so I won't try. Wikipedia has a good explainer on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

TLDR and very over-simplified:

Legal precedent is established until the laws change. The various legislatures/governing-bodies of the US can change the law whenever they please. When those laws then come into conflict with other laws out there, you have to have a ruling by a court. Sometimes this is intentional.

Which court does the ruling is super complex and sometimes they are not called courts, FYI. Judicial bodies, sometimes called courts, are also super complex. In general, the US legal system is more like the Ancien Régime than anything else, in that we strive to make sure no two people are governed under the same law. Just kidding, sorta. ;)

In the case of SCOTUS, they mostly rule on matters that affect the US constitution, and only if they feel doing so. They then make a ruling, and that becomes the new way the laws work. Sometimes this makes a law null-and-void, sometimes it just sets guidelines on how to make a law function. Again, super complex. There are many other courts in the US that can similarly do things at laws, but SCOTUS gets the most news.

Makes me wonder how federal ballot initiatives might play out, and why they don't exist...

The long and the short of it is there’s no provision in the Constitution. The powers of Congress are a whitelist, and it would be a stretch even for some of the stretchier clauses in there to allow for Federal ballot initiatives.

That said, I wouldn’t support it. I view State-level ballot initiatives as an anti-feature, at least in my native California. Wouldn’t want that crap making it up to the Federal level.

National Initiative is an existing proposal for doing just that which was proposed by Mike Gravel. Tom Steyer included it in his 2020 platform.

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

Well, because two-party systems are an emergent phenomena of First-Past-The-Post voting (Duverger's law), any move away from FPTP would favor third parties.

Almost immediately, the GOP and the DNC would start losing votes to the Libertarian party and the Green party, so they'll both rally against any change to the existing system.

Any major shift toward better voting systems will have to start in local elections where voters are fed up with both parties. Maine is doing an awesome job leading the way on the state-level.

I'm not sure they'd lose elections though.

Agreed. Libertarians will probably put Republicans as preference 2, and similarly for Green -> Dems. It should, however, get more people out to vote, and that's a good thing.

It also gives hard feedback to the parties about their constituent's real politics. If a party wins but sees their votes mostly coming from #2 preferences, the next round of primaries will probably shift further from the center. Similarly, if they see themselves as #1, they can shift back towards the center.

I agree with your first statement, but: "It should, however, get more people out to vote, and that's a good thing." is not necessarily true, though you're presenting it as axiomatic.

Currently, the average voter is poorly informed, the marginal voter is uninformed, and the non-voters are misinformed. I challenge you to read any book about voter ignorance and come away with your current view.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Democracy

you don't have to have perfect information spread throughout a population to make good collective decisions amongst it. it's ok if much of the electorate is somewhat ignorant or poorly informed, as long as that's relatively uncorrelated (i.e., there's no systemic coercion of choice). but that's exactly what parties are designed to subvert to their advantage. so then, what we need to do is to do everything we can to move away from party politics, including better voting mechanisms and removing the outsized influence of money in politics.

The problem isn't systematic coercion of choice, it's widespread popular biases and a general lack of knowledge. If you are interested in improving democratic outcomes, you need to understand the individuals you're encouraging to vote.

> "The problem isn't systematic coercion of choice, it's widespread popular biases..."

what is "widespread popular biases" but systemic coercions?

and no, we specifically don't need to understand individuals, just the systemic coercions (so we can counteract them).

'Systemic coercion' implies outside influence; citizens suffer from a number of internal biases, entirely aside from outside issues. Please just take a look at some of the literature on voter ignorance.

there's no reasonable evidence that people are too dumb/ignorant to make a good electorate. that's primarily ego talking.

and we don't need to correct for internal biases over a population because, by definition, internal biases are uncorrelated. but you said "popular", which is a social bias that correlates beliefs.

It is true if we assume that the point of democracy is to assert collective preferences. We can hope those preferences are informed--indeed, that sounds lovely--but this is not strictly necessary. And under the model that democracy is a collective assertion of preference, having more preference data is a good thing. Informing people is a task left to society, not to the voting system.

Well, if you're a 'democratic fundamentalist', and think that more voting is better, no matter the consequences, then sure, you're right. On the other hand, I think voting is an instrument whose value depends on its results, and that it can be misused.

Okay, but isn't the point that there's no objective way to evaluate those results? If you're limiting people's voting rights in order to get the results you want, then of course you will think less voting is better. It's the political equivalent of begging the question.

The point of democracy is to trust people to be able to make those decisions, and give them the tools to hold their leaders accountable.

I have preferred results, but I can accept a range of democratic outcomes that I see as reasonable. I think most other people take the same view; those 'get out the vote' campaigns are usually targeted towards demographics with predictable preferences, so they're also results-oriented.

I'd rather that electoral outcomes reflect what people would vote for if they were well-informed (which is what the cited book is about). You can predict how more information and understanding would impact voting trends (there are various techniques for this), and the results are not that everyone agrees on everything, but the impact would be an improvement (in my opinion).

I assume this book is largely about American voters? I'd counter that democracies with a hyper-informed and engaged electorate absolutely exist in the world, even if it's just on the local level or just with regard to specific issues.

Also, while a highly educated person might have a much better understanding of foreign affairs, they may have a poor understanding of what it feels like to come home to a decrepit apartment just to watch your children get skinnier. Even though they might be more informed and have better solutions for the problems they care about, they'll prioritize different issues.

If the average voter is poorly informed, the obvious solution to me would be to work on that issue directly, not on chipping away at what little power they have.

It's kind of counter-intuitive, but getting people to turn up to elections is often the first step in getting them to build informed opinions, read up on issues, and take their civic duty seriously. This is what people are hoping for when they try to improve voter turnout; they believe that many of our society's ills could be helped by fostering a more civically engaged populace.

That book uses many American examples, but it is fairly representative of most western democracies. That specific book is actually about ways to improve electoral results (while abandoning some traditional notions of democracy). There are many other books which discuss voter ignorance, and you can take your pick, any of them will give you the same idea.

>"If the average voter is poorly informed, the obvious solution to me would be to work on that issue directly, not on chipping away at what little power they have."

If someone is capable of doing a great deal of damage, the first step is to limit that damage, before teaching them how to do things properly. Educate the marginal and non-voters before you let them wreak havoc on an already troubled system.

>"It's kind of counter-intuitive, but getting people to turn up to elections is often the first step in getting them to build informed opinions, read up on issues, and take their civic duty seriously."

This is actually a variant of one of the first philosophical cases for democracy (though I can't remember who originally made that argument); the only problem is that it isn't true. Just read some of the books on voter ignorance, and you'll see exactly how wrong it is.

Here's a paper that provides evidence that voters are more informed when they have more political power: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=316694

I feel compelled to note that while historically Libertarians have been more likely to vote for Republicans as second preference, I don't think that's true any more with the veer the Republican party has taken in the past 4 years of the administration.

The GOP's center of gravity has been shifting away somewhat from the views of its historical base.

Over the past couple of decades, Libertarians aren't becoming Republicans, but Republicans are becoming Libertarians.

That's an interesting perspective. I think it's still a bit of both. Yes, GOP has been shifting away from small-government, balanced budgets, and free trade, leaving the Libertarian platform to pick up those staunch proponents. However, the socially liberal aspects of the Libertarian party, like drug decriminalization, criminal justice reform, and gay marriage have been cornerstones of Libertarianism and Republicans would still be crossing over on those issues that haven't been a part of the historical Republican base. Another interesting difference is that the current Libertarian nominee's environmental platform is based on Nuclear, solar, and other renewables[0], in contrast to Republicans' usual Oil and Gas position.

[0]https://jo20.com/issues/environment/

In the console video game world, there was a period of time when you either had an Xbox or a PlayStation, but everyone also had a Nintendo Wii as their second system. Some very casual gamers only had a Wii.

It's not hard to imagine a local election where both the DNC and the GOP put forth lackluster, hyper-polarizing candidates, and a reasonable third party candidate who's everyone's #2 pick wins.

It's not so much that these other systems would enable third party candidates to win, it's that they would reward less polarizing candidates with more broad appeal.

Note that important part of forming two-party systems are single-member districts. It seems unlikely that just removing FPTP and keeping single-member districts changes this in a significant way.

A good example of a proportional (and thus multi-party) system that uses single-member districts is MMP[1]. You could argue, though, that this system doesn't fully keep single-member districts because some of the representatives are chosen from a national or regional list and such lists are effectively giant districts.

There is still much to be said in support of non-FPTP single-member systems, though, since they allow factions within a party to break off and present their own policies. Even if such a splinter party never replaced the party it split from, it could still prevent the bigger party from becoming too complacent and reliant on being the lesser of two evils.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

Both ruling parties oppose anything that opens the system to additional parties. Ballot access is a prime example. It's very hard for additional parties to get candidates on the ballot in most states.

> Both ruling parties oppose anything that opens the system to additional parties.

Virtually all RC election schemes in the US, and also nonpartisan primaries (which are a close cousin) are championed by democrats. That's just not true.

Edit to expand: it's a partisan issue because structurally the democratic party is already a loose collection of interests. They've always structured their internal workings around this kind of dealmaking and coalition-building. Shifting to an environment where those groups (Blue Dogs, DSA, The Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus, etc...) become first class parties doesn't really change the way democrats have always governed.

I've worked with a 3rd party in New York. At least in that state what you said is false and I've heard but not verified stories in other states.

To get a candidate on a statewide ballot you have to get signatures from a percentage of registered voters. I don't remember the numbers off hand but it's in the tens of thousands. This alone is both cost and time prohibitive. There are also a bunch of other hoops you have to jump through.

Both your and the other counterexample are talking about something other than nonpartisan ballotting, though. I mean, yes, if you have a third party candidate in isolation then whoever that third party is going to "steal" more votes from is going to oppose it.

So democrats would oppose a Green or other progressive candidate in (most races in) New York, sure. That's just self-interest. But for the same reason they'd clearly welcome a libertarian entrant. That's not responsive to the discussion.

The claim upthread was that "both" parties oppose ranked choice voting. And that's simply not true.

This was for the LP. The rules apply the same to all other parties.

A single party's goal may be to avoid direct competition but they work together with each other to prevent all other parties. This is one of the things that's easy for them to have bipartisan agreements on.

As a German, this whole registered voter thing still puzzles me. It's almost as if un-registeres people are second class citizens. No ballot access, and even that access can be cut off with voter role purges. It took me a while to really wrap my head around the fact that bot every resident is automatically registered. Without party affiliation off course. Just implementing that would go a long way to fix things. Add more polling places, get rid of gerrymandering and make voting day a public holiday and the US would almost be there. Except for that electoral college thing.

Germany is based on the experience of the Nazi's raise to power, one thing Germany got right after WW2 was the German constitution. Stuff like the 5% hurdle to get seats in parliament for example. The US on the other hand still seem to struggle with a system put in place after the civil war to suppress the black vote and satisfy the former confederate states. But I might be wrong.

I think the crux of the issue is that the elections are held by each state, and each state can't enumerate its own eligible voters due to the lack of a 100% comprehensive ID system. Think of European Parliament elections, but in this case there is no concept of "home country". However, I certainly do agree it's not ideal.

Doesn't Germany also follow a voter registration system ? With proof of identity ?

You are legally obliged to have a ID card or passport. You also have a officially registered primary residency. Being a German citizen makes you eligible for all German and European elections.

No need to present your ID to vote, your invitation is enough. Your ID will do if you forgot that invitation.

So in a sense, we have. A mandatory, government run. You cannot be purged, we don't sign ballots (our elections have to be 100% anonymous), we don't need our ID to vote. And any party affiliation is not part of that system. makes stuff a lot easier, and individual parties cannot toy around with it.

For clarity: no one signs a ballot in the US. States with remote voting options generally have a ballot envelope which must be signed and sealed. That is: you have to authenticate that the ballot was cast by the right person, but the vote itself can only be tallied anonymously.

This is sort of a dumb idea, really. But it's not as broken as you imagine.

Thanks for the clarification, that puts things right.

The Democratic party fought extremely hard to keep the Green party off the ballot in many states this year. They sued and literally harassed petition signers into recanting their signatures. Both parties in the United States disenfranchise voters.

https://www.gp.org/dem_voter_suppression

Trying to keep third parties off the ballot while still operating under a first past the post system is very different from opposing a switch to something other than first past the post.

Under systems like ranked-choice, IRV, etc., having the Green party or Libertarian party on the ballot would be much less likely to harm the near-term prospects for candidates from the two major parties: most of the voters that minor parties would gain are people who currently pick a major-party candidate that has a real chance of winning. Those voters would mostly continue to select a major-party candidate as a second choice.

Can you blame them after what happened in Florida in 2000?

It was very mean of the greens to vote for their preferred candidate.

On the other hand, it can be argued that 400 green votes to Al Gore would've unmade the Bush presidency and all the misery that followed.

On the other hand, one way or another the entire Democratic operation with all of its spending couldn’t secure those additional votes (closer to 600) in Florida and they didn’t bother challenging voter suppression efforts, basically rolling their eyes at those sounding the alarm. It’s also possible that the early call of Florida swung the election too close by encouraging last minute voters to stay home in the panhandle, and it really was a stronger Bush victory. Also, if they could have prevented so much vote spoiling through the confusing ballots and malfunctioning “machines” or marking devices, which was in the Democrats court as the vote supervisors in the counties they control; Gore would have won. But, sure, it’s a good look for the Democratic party to suppress democracy.

This is the great difficulty of writing a constitution. If there's a game in which it might happen that the system produces an undesirable result, you have to have anticipated it beforehand. Otherwise, eventually the game gets locked up and whoever is in control uses the constitution to cement control.

IMO legislatures should have proportional representation. Sure there are drawbacks but they're not as bad as locking out minority opinions.

I think the Senate should be entirely determined by proportional representation. Leaving everything else the same, it would make a massive difference in how much people feel the government represents them. The drawback is that we would have at least three Q Anon Senators, but I'm pretty sure we're going to get that anyway.

For the US, it's kinda interesting. It seems that when the original constitution was written, people kinda thought of the states as different countries. Robert E Lee seemed to think he had to fight for Virginia, for instance.

Nowadays, that thinking seems wrong. Not sure what yall think over there, but I've always thought of Michael Jackson an American artist, rather than a person from Indiana. I just don't see that Americans see the states as a federation of countries, but I guess people there might.

Something like the UN might have similar votes per country, on the rationale that countries are equal regardless of relative size.

Mass media and industrialization have definitely caused some convergence, but in the context of an America where it took more than a day for some intra-state trips this made sense. There's still definitely a lot of regional pride and some differences, most notably in Texas, which is rather unique in its mythology because it existed as a country for a short period and fought an independence war.

The US when it formed was probably more aligned with what the EU is today. That original setup was very impractical so they reformed into the current US with the Constitution in 1789.

For all practical purposes they were, or damn close to it. Modern conceptions of the nation-state are post-Napoleon, so when the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution were put together, Union meant Union, however post-Civil War, that came to matter much much less.

There was an episode during the ratification debates where Rhode Island was almost left out of the United States. 12 other States had already ratified the new US Constitution but Rhode Island held out for more concessions until eventually it was decided that Rhode Island could ratify or leave the Union. Considering they were surrounded by much larger States who had prior grievances with Rhode Island, Rhode Island made the right call. Otherwise they’d likely be part of New York or Massachusetts right now.

But only in America (still due to FPTP, btw) is the ratfucking so bad that the biggest supporters of libertarians is the democrats and the biggest supporters of the greens are republicans. RC voting (or proportional representation) doesn't have this issue, since theres not a good reason to fund whichever party is more extreme than your opponent.

Ballot access is 99.9% meaningless without an alternative voting method (like Ranked Choice).

Single vote first-past-the-post guarantees a 2-party system.

In Canada, we say "electoral reform is always popular with the opposition party/parties".

The GOP is the minority party in the United States. The only reason they are not in opposition is due to structural defects. This quote does not make sense when applied to the US.

Sure, but federal electoral reform was one of Trudeau's platform items before he got elected.

Once he got in... it seems suddenly less interesting. I would dearly love to see this get done here. In BC, there was an attempt to get it in, but province-wide, the results of voting weren't there.

Trudeau's flip flop is an example of what I'm talking about, so i don't understand your use of the word "but" in the first sentence. Once in power, a party is interested in maintaining that power. Since the current system got them into power, they are unlikely to be interested in reforming it (other than with a system that would solidify it more).

I don't live in BC anymore, so hadn't realized that there had been another vote in 2018. That is disappointing.

I would argue it would make Democrats win much less as well. We would probably end up with level headed moderates who are best aligned with the majority of the country's voters. Not a extremist that somehow scared and scammed 51% of voters.

None of the established powers-that-be will help change the system that keeps them in power.

There is one thing that is worse than FPTP: The Top-Two Primary. A bunch of candidates run, if no one gets 50% then the top two vote-getters face off in a second round with no other options allowed. On the surface it sounds a bit like IRV, but it causes really bizarre outcomes.

Basically, let's say party A is unpopular, and has 2 candidates. Party B is extremely popular and has 7. Party A's candidates each get 15% of the vote, Party B's candidates each get 10%. Even though most voters voted for Party B, they're now stuck in a runoff with two candidates from the opposite party.

Some people argue that this forces parties to be disciplined and force out candidates they deem "unsensible" or "extreme". But in practice this often doesn't work, and even if it did I feel like the mark of a good voting system is that voters feel safe expressing their preferences without having to be strategic.

Do you have a specific example where this scenario played out?

This happened in the 2016 Washington State Treasurer election

https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Treasurer_election,_2016

Duane Davidson (R) won against Michael Waite (R) after 3 democrats split the vote in the primary:

    Republican Duane Davidson 25.09% 322,374
     Republican Michael Waite 23.33% 299,766
     Democratic Marko Liias 20.36% 261,633
     Democratic John Paul Comerford 17.97% 230,904
     Democratic Alec Fisken 13.24% 170,117

Well that raises the question why there were 3 Dems to begin with.

I'm not sure any of the alternative systems would have actually given a different result. Yes, the democrats have a majority of the vote, but transfer of support between members of a party is never perfect.

I'm also not sure if this is enough of a problem to try to solve preemptively, if there's one example from four years ago from a state-level election.

If outcomes in general are better, I'll take the risk that they're occasionally worse.

I think this is easily addressed by using approval voting in the open primary. (And this has the benefit of being extremely simple while likely getting all the benefits of IRV/Condorcet.) Any sort of RCV ends up so convoluted I think a lot of people will try to be strategic but completely misunderstand some edge cases.

Voting systems that serve to "moderate" voter preferences are anti-democratic. Sometimes an extreme policy is necessary to meet a challenge (e.g. climate change). A voting system should simply do its best to express true voter preferences. That's it.

that sounds like a problem with considering parties when voting, and trying to reduce the complexity of choice to a binary, rather than the merits of the candidates themselves.

> There is one thing that is worse than FPTP: The Top-Two Primary. A bunch of candidates run, if no one gets 50% then the top two vote-getters face off in a second round with no other options allowed.

Well, that is just plain two round system, it is pretty common and definitely better than FPTP. The bizzare outcome you describe may also happen with FPTP, you just need one candidate from party A and several candidates from party B. The solution is same as in FPTP system - each party endorses just one candidate.

>Well, that is just plain two round system, it is pretty common and definitely better than FPTP.

I would differentiate it from a two-round system in that voting takes place on a single ballot paper.

In two-round elections there is the ability to use the information about who is in the top 1 to cast the second vote.

In Supplemental Voting an elector has no information as to who's going to be in the top 2 when they cast the second preference.

I don't see how this is worse than FPTP. In FPTP, the candidate with the most votes just wins, even if that is only 15%. A second round for the two most popular candidates is still better than that.

The issue in your example is of course that both parties send all their candidates to the election, instead of just their most popular one, and that dilutes the vote, but the same would happen if they did that in FPTP.

It's only in systems like approval voting or instant run-off that parties can afford to send all their candidates.

> In FPTP, the candidate with the most votes just wins, even if that is only 15%. A second round for the two most popular candidates is still better than that.

In practice, most US elections are preceded by explicitly partisan primaries, and that's the status quo you should be comparing against.

But that's something that they can continue doing. There are many countries where they have a second round between the two candidates with the most votes, and in those countries, parties generally send only one candidate. And that's what they'll keep doing under this system, because they want their candidate to end up in the top-2.

So unless you actively ban any kind of candidate selection by the parties, that is what would also happen in the US.

I believe the particular design of the top-two primary allows anyone to enter the primary and list any party as their "preferred party." So the party might endorse a particular candidate, they can't prevent other candidate from getting on the ballot under their party name.

That's what we have here in France, which led to a right vs far-right second round in 2002, from which the traditional left never really recovered.

True. But it also prevented LePen. And before it produced Holland, regardless hoe bad a president he was, he was definitely from the left of the political spectrum.

Why would you have inner party run-offs in a public election anyway? Just have sort out their candidate far any given election internally beforehand. Then a Top-Two system is actually pretty nice, for direct mandates that is.

I second Approval Voting for similar reasons. In addition to the simplicity, IMO it sidesteps Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [0] by redefining the success condition: rather than trying to accurately capture political preferences, Approval inherently maximizes Consent of the Governed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

> Instant Runoff Voting has legit flaws

Talking to people about what they expect "ranked choice" means, I get the idea they mean Condorcet rather than IRV...

I'd love condorcet, and I'd prefer it to IRV, but I've only ever seen IRV when it comes to real proposals on ballots and implementations in governments.

I don't have access to TFA, but it's using IRV, right?

"Ranked choice" doesn't necessarily imply a particular counting method and could describe IRV or Condorcet. I'm disappointed that all of these proposals use IRV though.

Would love to see Nicky Case incorporate the STAR system into a /ballot-2 version.

I learned about it recently from this article on the long and painful history of how STAR came to be > https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle... (A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote).

Update: I just asked Nicky Case here > https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/1322230931571159040

from the wired article:

"...the election technology business was a heavily consolidated industry—a cartel, essentially, of just three vendors, all owned by private equity firms—that was starved for profit and all but incapable of innovation. Subsequent research suggested that the companies earned their most stable revenue through a maze of fees: maintenance, upkeep, software licenses. Their core business model seemed to involve locking clients into relationships of “ongoing annual payments.” Small wonder, then, that the firms hadn't leapt to DeBeauvoir's idea of building a machine with open source code that aimed to liberate local governments with cheap, self-sustaining technology."

that's just one of the thousand cuts of corruption undermining our democratic republic. consolidation (including in government, via a 2-party system) has unquestionably proven to be a social bad.

in any case, the wired story was interesting and informative. the STAR system (potentially) solves the problem of verifiability with secrecy, but not the issue of better representing the people's will in voting.

for the record, i'm partial to score voting (like nicky case) with a 7-point scale.

My major concern about IRV is that there's a lot of false promises made with it. It is shown (and we have real world examples) that it doesn't do a great job at removing spoilers, which I think is most peoples' number one draw to the system. It also doesn't scale very well and becomes less transparent as it does so. That's why I personally reject the push for ordinal systems and push for cardinal. This may seem absurd, but we've had IRV in the US in the past and we reverted back to plurality. So there's historical precedence for this position as well.

That page doesn't seem to mention the method used for president/governor/mayor elections here in Brazil: there will be an election for mayor (and the municipal legislative) on November 15. If none of the mayor candidates has at least 50% of the vote, there will be a second round on November 29 with only the two candidates which got the most votes in the first round.

This system has the advantage of being very simple to explain (I just did it above in one sentence) and implement, and works well enough in practice.

Brazilian living in Ireland here. The system used in Brazil doesn't help with weeding out extremists (as it's painfully obvious right now). Ranked voting, OTOH, heavily punishes rejection, which results in reducing the size of the Overton Window in politics.

The two dominant parties here are both center-right and are barely distinguishable to the point the Green Party formed a government with them. This is undesirable if you want quick changes, but exceedingly good if the aim is long-term multi-generational stability.

It does help, but not much. It basically enforces that the most rejected candidate does not win. But it does nothing to the second most rejected one.

Of course, ranked and approval voting are much better choices.

We have a similar system for electing the Mayor of Richmond, Virginia. It's biggest drawback is that the 2nd election is needlessly expensive, and since it's out-of-cycle and there are no other elections occurring at the same time turnout is much lower. I would prefer instant runoff.

I don't know about the costs, but here in Brazil the turnout for the second round isn't much lower: for instance, for the 2018 federal elections, the turnout was 79.67% in the first round, and 78.70% in the second round (source: official results website). But that's probably because voting is mandatory (except for voters younger than 18 years or older than 70 years).

This can be really bad if the vote is split enough that the top two candidates are not the actual voters' preferred top two.

Just reading from the website... I would like use the condorcet method and if it "crashes" just use first past the post.

Look into cardinal systems. If you want good voting systems you have to consider more factors than VSE. You'll find that cardinal systems can get to similar VSEs of condorcet with far less complexities and many other benefits.

Why would you expect approval voting to yield different results than FPTP?

I would frequently vote for more than just one candidate. And people who don't vote because e.g. Biden isn't progressive enough would have someone to vote for who could actually garner a significant number of votes. So maybe turnout improves too. Those other candidates/parties could then get momentum and funding and show up at the debates.

If you did it for just one election, I'd bet something like the president would get the same outcome, but local stuff with half a dozen decent candidates on the ballot would be different. Over time, different candidates winning lower races, plus 3rd party candidates for the big races being able to actually gather momentum would have profound impacts on the top races.

It would even change who shows up on the ballot. Remember in the dem primaries, all the commentary about candidate X drawing votes away from candidate Y, so they had to withdraw from the race to give their policies a better chance of winning? The whole "lanes" thing? Sanders and Warren wouldn't be splitting the progressive vote. And so on. Hell, the dems could nominate biden/harris and another pair in an effort to increase turnout, which would be suicide in FPTP. Or maybe not. I'd expect lots of changes and many would likely be surprising.

You can think about it this way -- approval voting allows you to vote strategically for a candidate (in case you are worried about the lesser of two evils winning), and then allows you to also vote for anyone you actually prefer, guaranteeing this can't hurt the strategically chosen candidate.

This would allow third parties to see real support, and then go on to win subsequent elections.

Simple answer: The math says so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

Longer answer: cardinal systems (the generalized form that approval is part of) is able to capture more information about voter preference. It is easiest to see this with something like range voting. You may be familiar with a question like "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree." That is range. Approval would be "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: Disagree, agree". Conversely FPTP would present you many statements and you have to pick the one you agree with the most, even though you may agree with many in the list. You can probably see here that you are actually able to capture a fair amount of preference information through this, thus allowing to elect representatives that more accurately represent the population as a whole.

This exit poll result is one data point among hundreds.

http://scorevoting.net/Maine2014Exit

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