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Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don't want to research beyond 3 candidates, don't!

I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there's usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don't have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever.

The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-was-people-play-w...

But this "preference whispering" is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single '1' for a given party and it was their preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn't go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It's not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don't even have to keep numbering.

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In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research.

There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal. That 3rd party candidate almost never has a chance at winning. Neither does the alternative from your own party.

Stacked ranking simply allows you to say "I hate both candidates from the major parties, and I'd rather have this other person in office, but since I have to pick one of the two of them, I guess I'll pick X."

It would mostly be for primaries, where the field is wider, but don't discount how ranked choice voting could lead to more than 2 viable parties.

Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.

Cost of elections is not an issue, but replacing FPTP with ranked choice makes candidate less dependent on the party.

Remember Trump 2016 elections, when Trump disagreed with the way debates were conducted. Trump had to bend because there could be only one Republican candidate.

Not saying Trump was right, but making candidate less dependent on the party (i. e. redistribute the power from the party committee to the candidates) would be good thing.

If this achieves widespread in the US I could see regional libertarian and green candidates picking up spots in certain areas in US.

Do you have something US-specific to indicate that this would be the case? Neither empirics nor theory support your claim. https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html

The very first line of your source references Australia as an example of why ranked voting would not give third parties any influence.

This seems like an odd choice, given that Australia currently has five different parties in Parliament, and has in recent history had a third party be the deciding "vote" on who forms government. It seems like an even odder choice for you to reference it as a counterpoint in this specific case given that one of those parties is literally called "the Greens".

Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won.

Maybe within the first 100 years; history isn’t my strongest subject.

> Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won.

Not recently for President, but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.

I would mention that everyone's favorite example in this category (Bernie Sanders) does secure the democratic primary nomination for senate each election - he just refuses to leverage it in the general election. But failing to do that would lead to a much harder general election since the Dems would likely put up a competing candidate and split the vote three ways.

> Not recently for President,

Not ever. The Federalists collapsed before we got a Whig, and the Whigs before we got a Republican, and those and the Democratic (ex-Democratic-Republican) parties are the only four that have won the Presidency.

> but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.

Sure, but its easy to overcount them; state two-party systems (where they haven't been effectively one-party systems) haven't historically always aligned with the national two-party system (e.g., Missouri’s [ed: or, in the real world, Minnesota’s] Farmer-Labor Party was the second (and later first) party in the state for years, alongside the Republicans, before it merged with a local third party—and thereby joined the national Democrats—as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate - VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular. He managed to ride an extremely popular mayoral career into a state that is extremely dominated by Burlington population-wise. Burlington metro is roughly as large a proportion of the VT voting block as NYC metro is for NY.

> I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate -

While he identifies as a socialist by ideology and has some association with the Vermont Progressive Party, AFAIK he has always run for federal legislative office as an independent, not third-party, candidate.

> VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular.

IIRC, his original House campaign was spectacular, but Democrats in VT coalesced around him in his 8 terms in VT’s sole House seat.

Oh excuse me yes - I'd forgotten he initially stepped into congress as a house rep.

It was MN not MO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...

> It was MN not MO:

It was, and I am embarrassed that i managed to do that.

A third party candidate gave America one of the worst presidents ever - Woodrow Wilson was essentially elected on a fluke because Teddy split the vote with Taft - the two together had a strong majority of the overall vote while Wilson only took home 41%.

FPTP systems strongly encourage bipartisan politics but it's silly to say third parties have never won and it's also incorrect. Early American politics were much more diverse before things coalesced around the slavery question leading up to the civil war - after the war there was a brief re-emergence of multi-party politics but it quickly collapsed back down to two as campaigning became less policy driven and new media opened up the door for a lot more fear-based advertising.

I would agree that it's highly unlikely that a third party candidate would ever win in the current political atmosphere - though if the GOP continues to move toward Trump and the Dems shift way to the left we might see a third party fiscal conservative have a real shot at it.

You're 100% wrong because the third party has won many times and both democrats and republicans started out as third parties.

The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".

> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution.

In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch).

But that gets at one possibility of why these minor parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale.

It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US.

And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years.

If there is interest in altering the equation, I would suggest https://conventionofstates.com/

Plurality voting systems lacking runoff elections lead to two-party states. Maurice Duverger pointed this out in 1964.

The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly idea if you ask me.

The 16th and 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, all in 1913, along with the capping of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1910, have driven the growth of the Administrative State. And the debt.

So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years.

Calls for substantial reform.

Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems.

Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day.

But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.

I agree that our political system is a train wreck, but I don't see why the political positions of the people you're suggesting amend the Constitution wouldn't be relevant.

Ah, so.

I submit that perhaps the communication challenge may be rooted in the modern insistence in making ansolutely everything political.

A Federalist construct would seek to assign appropriate tasking to each level of government, and have DC manage international and inter-State concerns.

Arguably, a single, monolithic state try to manage every personal and local concern leads to gridlock, Q.E.D.

> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts.

That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people. That said I think it’s a serious missed opportunity to press RCV without multimember districts.

I think that RCV is at best a hack, a compromise for people who don't want to get too far from FPP.

IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution

Ranked ballots in single member districts are really a hack on electoral reform movements. It creates the appearance of improving the system while only solving one of many problems.

The hack worked in Canada and GB, where it was used to divide, confuse and ultimately scuttle the electoral reform process.

> But if you are electing parties (like the US House)

I'm not sure why you are phrasing it this way. Voters don't pick a party for their House representative, they pick a candidate. Each House district election is independent of all the others.

Voters pick a candidate knowing that the candidate will have to play within a two party legislature.

Third party legislators are shunned. Their bills get no traction, and they get no committee assignments. If they are seriously divergent, the House could easily have them removed.

Further evidence for this exists in the demise of ticket splitting: if you vote R at the top of the ticket, you're very likely to vote R the rest of the way down the ticket, regardless of who the downballot R's are. It wasn't always this way, but has been for some time.

Some States even have a single box you can check to vote entirely for that party’s candidates, “straight ticket voting”.

Texas removed it a few years back and it’s removal was challenged (and lost) by Democrats: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/30/texas-2020-election-...

Yes but if each house district is FPP 3rd parties generally don't get a look in, people who vote for them get no representation at all, and can produce governments where the party with the most seats got fewer votes than the others.

MMP provides local representation, and proportional representation (at the expense of having larger local seats, or more representatives).

I'm Australian so I might be biased, but I don't like MMP. It seems to be optimising for democratic outcome (well at least a parliament that looks like the distribution of first party votes) while ignoring all other factors. Many countries that use it seem to have weak governments that can't get much done. There is parties that won't work together because one is secessionists (Catalans), right wing (national rally in France, AfD in Germany), different ethnic group (Arabs in Israel, Flemish vs French speakers in Belgium). Some parties seem to get more popular if they refuse to compromise. This can end up in endless elections (e.g. Israel), inability to form government for years (e.g. Belgium) or parties that aren't acceptable for mainstream parties to form coalitions with becoming the only opposition (e.g. National Rally). Even well run countries like the Netherlands and Sweden can seem to take forever to form a government. RCV mostly allows one party to form a majority government and get things done. There is clear accountability. While at the same time there is still the incentive to appeal to a broad base. And over time new parties can break into the system if they are appealing enough.

Just to be clear - most of the countries you give as your examples aren't MMP systems, they are other proportional representation systems, and the problems you have with it are common to proportional representation systems broadly rather than MMP.

You seem to be assuming that doing something is usually better than doing nothing. I believe the opposite is true in politics. It's difficult to make things better with political decisions, but it's much easier to break things or make them worse. If you can't convince a clear majority that something is a good idea, doing nothing is probably a better choice.

Presidents, prime ministers, and governors are always enemies of liberal democracy (the republic for those more familiar with American terminology). Nobody should be given that kind of power, but unless we can figure out how to run a country without such leaders, we have to tolerate them as a necessary evil.

It works well here in NZ - I think that part of it is that we've built a political culture around MMP that understands that to be successful at MMP parties need to build coalitions and compromise (very transparent public compromises) - the current government is the first we've had in 3-4 decades where one party could form a government by themselves, and they still formed a coalition of sorts

It's interesting you gave France as an example, because they have a nice workflow/system to avoid this.

There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he can work with if they're OK with him. Macron won with 20 something % in the first round ( second round was against the aforementioned National Rally, so his victory was guaranteed), but his party got 50%+ in the legislative elections because people decided to give him a chance to enact his program, even if he wasn't their first choice. That isn't always the case, and if the far right wins the presidential elections next year i'm certain they won't have a parliamentary majority.

To avoid a popular wave sweeping everything, the legislature id bicameral, the aforementioned legislative elections only for the lower chamber, the National Assembly. The higher chamber, the Senate, which is more limited in powers but can still exert influence over the lower chamber's law making, is indirectly elected by mayors, local/departmental/regional councilors with staggered 6 year terms ( every 3 years half the seats are up for election).

IMHO it's overall a good system that allows for everyone to be represented, enables governments to be stable ( but doesn't force it). The main thing i'd improve is ranked choice voting for single seat elections ( presidential, local).

And besides all that specific to France, i disagree about "classic" MMP. It forces cooperation and compromise, much better than a party forcing through with whatever they want because there's nobody that can opose them.

That’s not correct, Chirac won the parliament in 2002, the first time the presidential election was for 5 years. The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity and that’s how he got to work with a left prime minister, 10 years after having been himself the prime minister of a left president.

Hm, i remembered my history wrongly, i've now removed that stuff, thanks!

> The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity

Yeah, but 7 years is a lot and it's a remnant of when France wad supposed to be a monarchy, so i completely understand why they changed it.

I see RCV and STV used interchangeably. And the way I’ve seen RCV described in the US it is just STV with a better name for easier marketing. But I may be missing some subtlety. I also prefer MMP for parliamentary systems but changing the US to use MMP is several orders of magnitude harder than implementing RCV, which can be done state by state. It can even be implanted using multimember districts without changing anything. So it gives the US the best path to a better electoral system I think.

While multimember districts would be a huge improvement, I wonder if we also should start having the conversation if geography based representation is the right approach for the internet age.

I for one, have more in common with a minority identity widely dispersed across the country but connected through the internet than I do my next door neighbors. My niche identity never gets proportionately represented in government because I'm overwhelmed by local majorities.

No. Government and politics are primarily local because most problems are local.

For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them.

Likewise, nobody in NYC is affected by the repeat wildfires we’ve had recently on the west coast. Letting them directly say, “Nah, it’s no big deal” is also unfair.

I definitely empathize, though. Lots of my beliefs aren’t represented where I live, either.

Ironically, a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY.

> a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY

Albany bailed us out, so it retains oversight. But the vast majority of the MTA’s decisions are made by people with boots on the ground.

The Congress does not decide the New York local tax rate or how west coast cities handle their forest. You can have a local government and Congressional elections that are not tied to your specific location. As far as I know now the only position that both someone in California and someone in New York would vote for is POTUS.

Congress does, however decide how western states manage much of their land - a majority in some states.

There is always a trade-off between the representation of regions, demographic groups, and opinions. Single-member districts are the right solution when regional representation is the most important concern and the representation of various opinions is the least important one. Sufficiently large multimember districts are the opposite.

When it comes to regional representation, the right district size depends on population and mobility. If you live in a rural area, a single-member district probably covers you local area reasonably well. In major cities, the boundaries of electoral districts are often arbitrary and meaningless. If you live in one district, work in another, and use shops and other services in a third, which of the three is most important to you? And what happens if you move to another place within the city?

> That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people.

RCV has a bigger impact when used in conjunction with primaries. The is a not unusual situation where more extreme candidates win primaries when the more moderate candidate would have won the election by a larger margin. The more extreme candidate then ends up elected because the district has been jerrymandered to belong to their party.

Yeah. The solution there is to get rid of primaries altogether. And they’re unnecessary with RCV.

Although I think they’re unnecessary already under the current system and the US would be a lot better off without them. You could get rid of them and just leave it up to the parties themselves to decide which candidate they will back for each district via whichever means they prefer internally amongst party members.

What I like about RCV is that it benefits moderate candidates. You can also argue that moderate candates have more influence at a national level, and if your representatives have more influence they have more bargaining power on behalf of your state.

All in all RCV can be a moderating factor AND it does not require top down changes to the election system.

> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system.

There's much more to it than that. The two-party system is codified into many laws. A lot of effort goes into maintaining it; the voting system isn't up to that job.

That's just a circular argument though. It's codified because the voting system has historically only allowed for two parties to flourish.

What you say is true if general elections in the US, but often not the primary elections where a party determines who its candidate will be. At that stage it's pretty common to have a wider field of candidates.

Also, ranking could change the US dynamic of only have 2 choices. Being able to vote 3rd party and then then choose someone from one of the two main parties might drive a lot more people to vote 3rd party because they wouldn't feel it's hurting the chance of having a candidate that represents at least some of their views. This may not change national elections much, but for Senate, and especially House members it could make a difference. Enough to force more coalitions and compromise between parties instead of winner take all. Sure, that outcome isn't guaranteed, but it seems more likely to produce that sort of result than what we have now.

With that argument China is also a democracy, since you can vote who will get to run the party. I'd argue that a proper democracy requires new parties to be easily formed and quickly gain momentum and power if they have support from a fraction of the population. I don't think that ranked choices allows for that, as even if the third party "Greens" in this case got 25% of the votes they'd get thrown away in favour of peoples secondary choice.

Minor nit: I believe only party members vote on party leadership, and it's actually difficult to get into the party. Also, I'm under the impression that the voting is multi-tiered, where you vote on your level and region on which member gets elevated to the next level.

It's actually an interesting system, and as usual, it seems adding indirection solves some problems while introducing others.

I mean... are you suggesting that some system where someone could get elected with only 25% of the vote would somehow be more democratic? If a party or candidate can only get 25% of the vote in an election for a single position, like mayor, they aren't going to get elected, that's just democracy, right?

RCV makes it more likely a third party could get 50% of the vote though, since people can vote for it without worrying about "throwing their vote away", or throwing the election to a right-wing party when they want to vote for the lesser left-wing party.

I think once people see that their 'other party' preferences are at least being represented in the early rounds, they will gain confidence in their ability to express their actual desires in the ranking. The understanding that third parties actually have a real chance if they get enough voters' first choices will wake up the Ds and Rs that they can't just coast and hand wave anymore or they'll get tossed out.

I don't know how you got from my comment to China. I speculated that ranked choice might have more of an impact on which candidates are selected in primary elections. If you think voting for who will be the party's candidate is undemocratic then we're already there, that's already how it works, and I don't see anything in my comment that would lead to a single-party system like China. Maybe you could elaborate on why you think ranked choice in primary elections would take us to a single party system.

What I don't understand is why you think 3rd parties should rapidly gain power if they only have support from a fraction of the population. Why should their power be disproportionately larger than the # of people supporting them? I don't think it's very democratic to have a candidate with only 25% of the vote win the election.

Americans may not know that most countries don't have public primaries the way that the US does - here in NZ it varies from party to party - at one extreme the Greens hold a very public transparent democratic process, at the other the National party use closed 'smoke filled' rooms

I'd guess that most people don't know the detailed rules of elections in other countries.

Yes if this voting style extended to primaries or other elections with multiple candidates from one party, it also has benefits. You can vote for the less popular candidate that better suits you, while falling back to the popular one you're willing to settle for. Preferences are generally reported, so people will see 'unpopular' options actually getting votes and things shift over time.

Does this vary in different parts of the US? Where I live many municipal elections are nonpartisan (no D or R next to someone's name). In some cases (e.g. jungle primary) there may be multiple viable candidates from the same party

Incorrect. I voted in today's NYC mayoral primary. There are 13 candidates on the Democratic primary ballot. Perhaps 3 are considered "front-runners" but everyone's aware it's entirely possible at least a couple of the others could wind up winning. The race is entirely up in the air.

Because NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic, this election almost certainly determines who will be mayor.

And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc.

Welcome to actual democracy where you suddenly do get to express meaningful choices that aren't just between a single candidate preselected by two parties! And know that if your first-choice candidate doesn't win, your vote isn't effectively thrown out. :)

> And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc.

Can you say how many such choices "etcetera" was eliding here? And if possible if there were roles where you had no idea about any of the candidates beyond stuff like incumbency ? I can see New York City is too big to make just having a Mayor on the ballot enough to properly establish democratically elected local government, but in general it seems Americans elect way too many roles.

Here’s a sample ballot from today’s primary in Brooklyn. Voting was for 7 offices, 5 of which were RCV.

https://nyc-static.electionhub.com/sampleballots/384760/12/2...

Yeah :/ that does seem excessive. Delegates to the Judicial Convention in particular don't look to me to have a role that justifies expecting citizens to choose eleven of them each cycle.

I believe those, in particular, are part of the party infrastructure, and just on there because it's a Democratic Party Primary ballot.

We elect some form of party-apparatus delegates here in California too, though the Democratic Party here holds those elections separately and privately.

The only one I've ever been actively aware was happening was because I was dating someone working for a prominent state politician, and got dragged along to vote for people I'd never heard of in some park.

> Welcome to actual democracy

Fake democracy where you get to choose viable candidates exclusively from one party, and only one party.

Aka a party dictatorship, the same as they have in most authoritarian states, and ideologically enforced in a similarly regressive manner. If you're not of the party, you will be an outcast and blockaded from any chance at winning. The opposite of democracy, and very clearly so.

If you don't represent the views of the voters you won't win.

Another way to say it is "if you're not of the society, you will be outcast and blockaded from any chance of winning."

What are you even talking about...?

Literally anyone can run in the Democratic primary, you just have to be registered as a Democrat, which is just filling out a form where there are no wrong answers.

Have you even been following the NYC primary at all? "Ideologically enforced" is hilarious. The difference between, say, the current #1 and #2 candidates Adams and Wiley is basically the difference between Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the the rest are everything in between and then some.

If you think anything is being ideologically enforced in this race, if you think anyone is being "outcast and blockaded" -- I mean, this dude Paperboy Love Prince [1] is actually on the ballot, not even joking -- then quite frankly you're delusional. This isn't Communist China, this is the Democratic Party which is, well, famously a bit of a mess.

I don't know where you live or what news you read, but if you're trying to claim America isn't democratic and open then, ha... you sure picked the wrong race to use as an example! :)

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

Anyone can join that party and run in the primary.

Are you hinting at the Overton Window? It's notoriously small in the US.

> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

We really need to get rid of the canonization of the party. If there are only going to be two candidates, let it be two individuals. The party shouldn't even be listed on the ballot. If you haven't done enough research to know which individual belongs to the party you support, then you haven't done enough research to vote. More individuals make this even better because it becomes a forcing function that forces people to actually learn about the individuals they are voting for and each individual's policies.

If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.

>...If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.

Yeah, we know how that goes when we try to keep the "wrong" people from voting in the US.

> In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research. > > There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

In NY, what's being discussed in the OP, the ranked choice system is being used only for the primaries. Whoever wins the Democratic party will certainly win the mayoral general election -- but ranked choice voting isn't being used there anyway.

So what you're describing isn't actually the context of ranked choice voting in this election.

In Chicago, another city where the Democrats always win, they actually have, since 1999, non-partisan primaries. Just one primary, for all parties, top two candidates go on to the general election -- so the general election can be between two generals. It would be interesting to see instead a single ranked-choice election, no primary at all.

> Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal.

Interesting to apply the term "signaling" to a behavior which other people cannot observe.

It is observable in the aggregate statistics. x% of people voted for so-and-so candidate.

New York is a fusion voting state with all sorts of parties. Most, like the “Rent is Too Damn High” party fade, but there is a bunch of third parties of varying degrees of relevance.

Imagine there are two major party candidates, D and R, and also a third candidate X who is well-kmown and well-loved, but few believe X can win.

Now voters go to the election and mostly put R or D on top place, but consistently put X on the second place. X has a really fair chance to win.

This is how the two-party system can be cracked. This is how an already well-known person can be elected without having to join either major party.

I think most people would put X in first place, then D or R in second just in case. If X can't get enough votes, then they fall back on D or R

More over, a way this can actually play is that there's a third candidate Z who has policies many people strongly agree with, but, since they aren't a member of the big parties and don't attract mainstream news focus, few believe they'll win. Under RCV and several other systems, many R and D voters will put Z first, because it can't hurt. They expect Z will be eliminated, since they "know" R or D must win, and their R or D second choice is what they expect to matter but at least they made their preference clear.

And then Z wins with 55% of the vote. Even though this is a surprise to Z's voters, it's a pleasant surprise. They wanted Z they just didn't expect it to be possible.

Under FPTP this can be made to happen, but you have to persuade people Z can actually win, because they're worried they are "throwing away" their vote until it really happens. Consider Brighton Pavilion in the UK. In 2005, Brighton was held by a Labour Co-Op incumbent, and the Green candidate came a close third. The Greens had to really sell the message that when Lucas stood in 2010 they genuinely had a chance to elect her, if only people who supported Green policies looked past the Red/Blue split and gave Caroline their vote.

They made it happen, but it was close, turnout was up considerably, and much of that new turnout voted for Lucas. If you voted for Lucas despite vague Tory leanings, and she hadn't won, you've have been devastated because right behind her was the new Labour candidate whereas even a modest fraction of Lucas' votes going to the Tory would have won them the election.

Once she'd shown it was possible Caroline Lucas never looked back, and she now routinely secures a clear majority in elections not the mere plurality required to win.

But this has been hard for her party to replicate elsewhere, and while Lucas is an especially personable candidate that can't explain the entire phenomenon. There are likely other constituencies in the UK where Greens could secure a majority if the voters believed the Green candidate has a chance and didn't vote their second or third choice to prevent their least preferred from winning.

I'm actually not bullish for RCV, but this sort of problem is exactly why it makes sense.

If ranked voting happened everywhere at same time, the independents, who outnumber both Democratic and Republican party numbers combined, might become a force onto themselves and change everyone's assumptions on 3rd party candidates. This won't likely happen without national voting reform, but it is an interesting thought experiment.

At the very least you might given enough independents are elected, hand them the balance of power where the governing party has to deal with them to get bills passed rather than the increasingly difficult task of skimming votes from the rival party.

What you really need is a Don "keep the bastards honest" Chipp type to splinter off one of the major parties and form a viable third party with a group of like-minded moderates. Given the state of the GOP it could be time for the likes of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney backed by operative groups such as the Lincoln Project to give it a crack.

> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

I’m an immigrant so some of this may be wrong, but the party system in the US seems to operate very differently to that in most other countries.

Primaries make races far more focussed on the individual representative so there is less incentive for serious third parties to emerge as their potential candidates can instead challenge an incumbent in a primary within the same party affiliation.

With voters registering with an affiliation rather than joining a party as a member and being subject to that party’s rules, so far as I can tell there is no way for a party to prevent someone from running under their banner so long as they win the primary.

The whole point of this kind of voting is that you would have to relay on primaries. You can just put up 2 or 5 candidates per party without hurting the parties chances of winning.

This is the whole point of such voting systems.

The goal of voting for a 3rd party is go get to 5% of the popular vote to fully fund the party across the next election cycle.

Libertarian party has come the closest, earning 3.1% in 2016 while total 3rd party votes were over 5.5%. If the Green Party voters had voted LP we’d have validated a 3rd party that year.

So much political messaging focuses on fear of the other major party that people feel they have to vote opposition rather than voting for who they really want. US elections have been fear driven for years.

Local elections usually have more interesting options for candidates.

For example the recent mayoral election in Portland, where the incumbent was pretty much a Democrat and was challenged by a couple of more progressive candidates. The incumbent ended up winning with less than 50% of the vote

This video [0] argues that most Australians fail to understand how the system works and that the mainstream political parties actively mislead voters into thinking that their voice is "wasted" if they vote for a 3rd party

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleyX4oMCgM

Most don't understand the upper house (Senate) system as it applies weighting on the redistribution of votes and there is a choice between above the line (party preference) and below the line (tick every box): but the lower house system is fairly straight forward.

That’s not exactly an academic source.

Anyone moderately awake during the election cycle is keenly aware we have a preferential voting system (and the basic mechanics) as preference deals between parties are keenly covered by the media.

There is another great little thing in Australian voting that plays on this - political parties get paid per #1 vote (I think it is about $4 or something).

This means you pick the party you want to win, they get paid, and then preference from there.

> but the Australian experience is instructive.

No? It is instructive of how parliaments work. IRV doesn't explain the multi-party house and senate given that every other country with a parliament also has a similar distribution. If you're only looking at Australia vs America you're doing the wrong analysis (it is far too limited). Australia vs France just outright disproves your supposition (they use a 2 round system). Or we can look at Germany who has a similar distribution and who also uses MMP (like Australia). In fact, both France and Germany have more parties represented than Australia.

I do not understand why Australia is the instructive example and why this is frequently propositioned.

I disagree about the consistent distribution in parliaments. I do think that parliamentary governance is, overall, just a better way to elect heads of state - but up here in Canada we have a parliament and, while the NDP certainly does hold some sway, we're drifting toward a two party system. Surprisingly, it seems most likely that the CPC might collapse and get absorbed into the LPC which then provides conservative opposition to the NDP - but time will tell whether the CPC can recover now that Harper is gone.

(I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate).

> but up here in Canada we have a parliament and we're drifting toward a two party system

Actually this is kinda my point:

Canada: Liberal + Conservative = 81.1% (90.5% with Bloc, 97.6% w/ NDP, )

Australia: Liberal + Labor = 84.8% (95.4% with National)

Germany: CDU + SPD = 56% (68% w/ AfD, 79.7% w/FDP, 89.4% w/ Left)

France: REM + LR = 71.8% (79.9% w/ MoDem, 85.4% w/ UAI, 90.8% w/SOC)

I can continue if needed...

These 4 countries have 4 different voting systems but what they have in common is a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all). Canada and Australia seem to be the closest to America than the others. (Note that I used house numbers for all because they have larger sample sizes so there's a lower bias in distributions)

So it is pretty clear that IRV is ''not,, the defining feature here that causes multi-party systems, nor weaker coalitions. Though we'd have to get more into game theory about coalitions to talk more accurately and I want to stress that while I believe voting methods is a strong tool to prevent these things it isn't the only necessary tool (it's just the biggest step forward we can make given the current US system).

> (I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate).

I think this is fair. As I've argued elsewhere America's two party system is closer to a two coalition system. Which actually Australia is a better example of two coalition domination, IMO, than Canada (though I would say a close runner up).

>These 4 countries have 4 different voting systems but what they have in common is a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all).

That is wrong. Australian lower house seats are single member aka winner takes all.

edit: and Canada is FPTP

> Canada is FPTP

Yes? I said those 4 examples use different election styles, not that Canada doesn't use FPTP...

> Australian lower house seats are single member aka winner takes all.

>> The lower house, the House of Representatives, currently consists of 151 members, each elected using full-preference instant-runoff voting from single-member constituencies known as electoral divisions (and commonly referred to as "electorates" or "seats").[0]

(And the upper house uses STV with proportional representation)

Winner-take-all refers to

>> a legislative body is elected by dividing the jurisdiction into geographic constituencies, each electing exactly one representative. Although this may result in diverse representation due to different political groups making up majorities of different districts, within each district, only one political party or group will be able to elect a candidate[1]

Yes, I am using more of an Ameri-centric usage of the word (since we commonly use it referring to the electoral college and not local elections), but pointing this out isn't exactly a great rebuttal. The "winner-take-all" definition is vague and a given considering the impracticality of implementing a non-winner-take-all system without a significantly larger number of representatives. Consider that in Australia they do not have greater than a 10% variation of electorates. If we give more seats and apply proportionate seating this is functionally equivalent to just dividing the electorate further and using winner-take-all. Thus if we follow this usage, there is no election that would _not_ be winner-take-all (or making our term meaningless). This is not the system we see in America where the phrase winner-take-all is applied to electorates that are nowhere near uniform. But I apologize for the confusion and hope this comment clarifies my more (American) natural usage of the term.

And if this is why you're throwing my comment out the window I think you missed the entire point and I do not appreciate the lack of good faith here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Australia

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Winner-take-all

>Yes? I said those 4 examples use different election styles, not that Canada doesn't use FPTP...

FPTP is a winner takes all electoral system. You said Canada had "a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all)".

>Winner-take-all refers to

>>> a legislative body is elected by dividing the jurisdiction into geographic constituencies, each electing exactly one representative. Although this may result in diverse representation due to different political groups making up majorities of different districts, within each district, only one political party or group will be able to elect a candidate[1]

This is exactly what Australia and Canada's lower houses have. And looking it up now, France too.

>considering the impracticality of implementing a non-winner-take-all system without a significantly larger number of representatives

The Australian senate has 76 senators. The Australian house of Reps has 151 members. The Australian senate elected with a non-winner-take-all system. The Australian house of reps is elected via a winner-take-all system.

>If we give more seats and apply proportionate seating this is functionally equivalent to just dividing the electorate further and using winner-take-all.

It is not. To illustrate: imagine a country of 1 million where instead of left-wing and right-wing parties they have left-hand and right-hand parties. So there everyone votes for the right-hand party except for the 10% of people who are left-handed. As handedness is fairly evenly distributed, in a single member electorate system it would be basically impossible for the lefties to take a single seat. So you'd expect the parliament to be 100% right-hand party no matter if it comprised a single member or 10,000. However with a proportional system (e.g. SLV) with electorates of 10 or more you could expect the parliament to roughly reflect the 90/10 split.

We see this in the real world, where places with single member seats (e.g. Canada, France, Australia lower house) have worse parliamentary diversity than those with multi member seats (e.g. Germany, Australia upper house).

>And if this is why you're throwing my comment out the window I think you missed the entire point and I do not appreciate the lack of good faith here.

As you haven't made it very clear at all, what is your point?

> As you haven't made it very clear at all, what is your point?

I think the issue we're having here is that you're focusing on a very narrow part of my argument which I'm saying isn't actually that important. The majority of my argument hasn't actually been addressed. I've historically learned not to argue with those that greatly narrow your argument (as opposed to focusing on one part).

> France: REM + LR = 71.8% (79.9% w/ MoDem, 85.4% w/ UAI, 90.8% w/SOC)

As i explained in great detail elsewhere here, you can't use that out of context. French legislative elections are after presidential ones to send the just elected president a new parliament he(or maybe soon she) can work with. If Macron loses next year, REM will have close to nothing. So, it's more like "president's party gets around a majority". Note that this isn't always the case, and Chirac's second term was with a socialist majority parliament he had to work with.

The difference is that RCV results in the "least worst" candidate winning. They receive the most #1 votes, but unless they achieve an outright majority, if they only have a plurality then they only win by being the most preferred alternative vote by the voters.

So the situation is that the leading parties have to spread their ideological base to incorporate more of the electorate.

In addition, Australia has compulsory registration at 18 and compulsory voting (well, actually compulsory attendance at a voting location, the ballots are all secret).

So the candidates have to appeal most to a plurality of their electorate, and they have to appeal least worse alternative to a majority.

> The difference is that RCV results in the "least worst" candidate winning.

This isn't quite true. IRV actually increases spoilage[0]

[0] https://medium.com/election-science/star-voting-is-simpler-t...

>who also uses MMP (like Australia)

Australian federal lower house elections are single member IRV, upper house are multiple member STV. MMP isn't used anywhere in Australia.

I apologize, I was wrong. I'm not sure why I confused that. I appreciate the correction.

Correction, MMP is sort of used in Tasmania's lower house with the Hare-Clark thing.

And they've got an even more convoluted mechanism for their upper house :)

Australia has a bi-cameral system structured very much like the US, with the lower house being geographic regions of roughly equal population, while the upper house is State based, with equal representation of each State.

In terms of voting, our lower house is ranked choice, our upper house is party-list based ("vote 1 above the line") with the option of individual selections instead ("number the candidates of your choice from 1").

Australia ends up with a two-sided lower house, but the conservative side is actually a coalition of business and rural parties. So it is actually multi-party, in fact, there's a spat going on right now between the urban "Liberal" (right wing conservative fiscally "liberal") and "National" (rural agrarian socialists, privatizing gains, socializing losses, internally split between being pro-resource-extraction industries and agricultural industries).

So we have that same multi-party representation, just our coalitions are more rigid.

I remember there was also some parties that would name themselves suspiciously similar to existing parties and parlay that in to political power via the horse trading you mentioned.

There's still a huge problem with the Australian system - seat-based voting. I live in one of the safest seats in Australia, and thus my vote has literally zero effect on any election result - votes only have impact in swing seats.

This is also very unfair on third parties - under proportional representation, winning 10% of the vote nationwide means 10% of seats. Under Australia's system, unless those votes are very concentrated in specific seats, it means zero seats.

"Roo poo" Ricky Muir was better than many of the regulars, IMHO. IIRC he seemed to actually think about the bills in front of him.

He wasn't awful.

OTOH while he seemed principled, he often just seemed to vote along with the Coalition then publicly regret it afterwards - helping them get what they wanted on refugees and then being surprised at how inhumane it all was and the extent that the government reneged or slow-played a lot of the concessions he obtained.

If I remember rightly, that was one of his first votes and he wisened up after that. There was an interview early in his term where he admitted he was unfamiliar with the term "balance of power", but he seemed to learn quickly.

Is Australia a mandatory voting jurisdiction?

Yes but enforcement is lax and fines are low.

Still ~90-95% voter turnout (vs ~60% in the USA)

And lower than 90% turnout is better, right?

Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.

A democratic society, where all votes are equal, benefits when everyone votes, even without a testing how well-informed they are. It encourages personal ownership of collective problems.

For every apathetic member who is voting based on ignorance, there is a zealous member voting based on dogma. The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.

> The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.

This isn't true. If voters are voting randomly (or effectively randomly) then that's just noise in the system. Worse, if voting is based on candidate exposure (i.e. voting on who had more TV ads rather than policy) then the votes are explicitly not representative of voter preference (unless the candidate that advertises the most also happens to be the true preference of voters, but we should not assume this to be true). Your statement is only true given a large amount of assumptions which typically do not hold true in practice. It holds true if voters are both informed, vote purely honestly (no strategy or no manipulation which includes through ads), and candidates are fairly representative of public opinions. I don't think anyone would argue that these three assumptions hold true in most elections. Real world doesn't have idealistic conditions.

So no, more voters does not result in better representation.

I think you're making an assumption about the assumptions of the person you're replying to.

Many voter beliefs are implicit and how we express our political preferences can sometimes be reducible to a simple matter of group allegiance.

People don't need to be highly informed to effectively participate if the voter's top priority is to support a certain group interest (i.e., a union member supporting labour) rather than individual legislators or laws.

Very odd argument indeed, particularly because it equally applies to non-mandatory voting. The deisre to vote could be based on randomness and candidate exposure. Thus whatever underlying assumptions one makes, more people voting gives better representation for any meaningful definition of representation.

> because it equally applies to non-mandatory voting

Yes, this is because voting is often non-intuitive. There's a reason we haven't found an amazing system in thousands of years. The problem is that people are trying to apply "common sense" rules and not testing them to check if their assumptions hold true. It follows the typical rule of "if people think the solution to a long standing problem can be solved with common sense it probably cant." Which should be obvious since the problem is long standing... But here's the thing, we've done a lot of testing and aren't going in blind. Unfortunately when solutions are "common sense" we end up not looking at data because why would we? We already know the answer ;)

> the more accurate is the representation of the whole

Accurate representation is not a goal. The goal is freedom, wealth, stability, happiness, etc.

Also, people who vote for a random names just because they are forced to, are not exactly represented by those who they are technically voted for.

The argument is if you're compelled to vote you're compelled to take interest. You have to register to vote anyhow, those who wish to remain apolitical are free to do so.

In an optional voting society, parties are incentivized to radicalize and enrage their supporters so they bother to go vote.

In Australia everyone knows the two parties and has a rough idea what they support. I doubt there is very much "random name voting" going on which is shown by the consistent voting patterns over the years.

There is a problem with what is called the "donkey vote" where the person at the top of the ballot is more likely to get a "1" vote than the person at the bottom.

However, in practice, people accept voting guides from parties that direct their preferences and they vote the way their choice of party decides.

That's why there is horse trading between parties before the election on "preference deals" where they agree to different ordering on the guides.

Smaller parties use this to engage larger parties by demanding some of their policy requests in return.

Yes, was just saying if you really object it's not a big deal legally. Although most people don't as you say. Having elections on Saturdays definitely helps.

Also loads of locations and little queuing. Also increasingly you get sausage sizzles that seems to becoming a tradition to go get your sausage sandwich.

I find it amazing hearing about people in USA queuing for hours year after year. It doesn't have to be that way.

The whole Ricky Muir / preference-whispering / group-ticket-voting issue was related to the Senate which is a combination of both PR (proportional representation) and STV, a whole additional bucket of worms over the plain STV of single member electorates.

>We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal.

Do the greens get elected, then?

Federally yes, primarily in the senate however there is one currently sitting house of reps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens#Current_Fede...

There are also 16 state based elected members both in the upper house and lower house

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

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