https://www.forwardparty.com/platform
Surprisingly, the issue that Yang is known for, UBI, is not on the list.
UBI is, however, present here:
https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward
I wonder if that was accidental.
UBI is hardly without controversy.
> abortion, evolution, religion, gun rights, etc
If Yang took positions on those things it would mostly give people reasons not not support him rather than to support him, thus reducing his (and Forward Party's) overall support.
Yang probably thinks the things he's pushing -- UBI, RCV, etc -- are more important in improving the lives of ordinary Americans than those highly controversial culture-war issues.
It is the second WORST voting system after first past the post, which is what we have now.
Read about the Condorcet Method
Being simple to understand is crucial for voting systems and I would argue is the most important factor since an election without public buy-in is worse than worthless.
With condorcet I think you can also visualize it nicely by playing a Head to Head thing and show ok A vs B, B wins. Ok B vs C, B wins, etc.
If the 2020 US election tabulation process is any indication, yes.
Just to be clear, the difference would be something like having to say B won because he was the most common second choice and beat every other candidates in a one on one. Versus saying B won because it had the most first choices, yet did not have a majority of first choices.
I think it's easy enough to understand that while someone had more first choices, they didn't have a majority first choices and since someone else had more second choices they took the win.
While I would really love to see what outcomes could be produced by a Condorcet method I can’t imagine actually implementing one without relying on computerized counting and software. This makes it impossible for volunteers to audit due to the need to audit the hardware and software of the computers doing the counting. If only security experts are capable of auditing such a system then our whole democracy is at their mercy. That’s essentially a technocracy.
"Imagine this candidate ran in a two person race against each of the other candidates in turn. If he'd win ALL those races individually, he should win when running against all of them at the same time too."
Now, explaining various methods which guarantee this property is not as easy - nor is it easy to understand why you might prefer one such method to another.
But this isn't actually a big deal. In the many, many countries that use proportional representation, it's the outcome ("parties share of seats in parliament should be roughly the same as parties share of votes in the election") which is agreed upon. The actual mathematics to achieve it are somewhat counterintuitive and not many people are aware of them, but that doesn't matter. We can all see it works, and so we would in an election with, say, Ranked Pairs.
Sums up most of the points about it. I want to highlight the "leads to two party dominance in countries that use it" (australia for example) point. This is exactly what we want to avoid.
I prefer approval or score voting for single member elections as it does away with all these bad voting incentives.
But regardless, I think single member elections are stupid and proportional systems are far better and more democratic. The idea that the thing most representative of you is the piece of land you live on is very outdated. Zweitmandat is the most advanced implementation of proportional representation imo.
> The Zweitmandat (English: second mandate) is a feature in the variation of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) used to elect the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Unlike most variations of MMP, such as the German federal electoral system, Baden-Württemberg's system does not use party lists. Instead, proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
The main distinction is that Ranked Choice can elect someone which is not the best compromise of everyone's choices, while Schulze and Ranked pairs will always elect the best compromise of everyone's choices. If there is a candidate who is preferred over the other candidates, when compared in turn with each of the others, they guarantee that candidate will win, while Ranked Choice does not.
The downside to Schulze or Ranked Pairs is that saying that someone is your second choice could hurt the chances of your first choice to be elected, because by putting forward a compromising candidate, and since Schulze or Ranked Pairs optimize for that, you lean the tally towards your potential compromises (which are your second, third, etc. choices) in the case where the election are a "close call".
If I understand correctly.
I personally would prefer a system that optimizes for the compromise, as I think it's more important to get the candidate that the least people dislike, than it is to get the candidate that the most people adore.
So if I understand correctly, it means something like:
If you have A, B and C.
100% think B is second best.
40% think A is best.
19% think B is best.
41% think C is best.
That's because C is most people's first choice, so they win. But if you asked people to pick between C or B, B would technically win, because 19% would pick B (as it is their best), and 40% that think A is best but B is second best would also pick B, thus B vs C would get 59% votes for B and only 41% votes for C, that means that in a vote for B against C, B would win, but with Ranked Choice B loses, and C is elected.
If you decay the hypothetical 3 party set of options by eliminating the least popular candidate then you're back to first past the post which is the current status quo in the US.
Schulze and similar methods use the ranked lists to evaluate pairs of candidates and eliminate the candidates that are universally the worst first / retain candidates that rank well in isolation. This is more likely to result in a compromise that works best for the most people.
The problem is that it appears at first glance to defy the idea of "one person, one vote", so it might be harder to convince people of.
More systems here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system
Alternatively we can scale back the power of the federal government massively and have it be funded by the states rather than via direct taxes, similar to how EU works. But right now it is the worst of both worlds, taxes and control like a local government but poor representation like a federated one.
IRV (sometimes called “ranked choice”, but its among the worst of the ranked choice single-member methods) can be improved by getting rid of the loser elimination step, and counting down on all ballots (instead of those with an eliminated loser) until some candidate had a total that crosses the winning threshold (this is a version of Bucklin, but historical Bucklin implementations have often done dumb things like limiting the number of preference ranks to a much smaller number than candidates (often 2-3) rather than using fully-ranked (forced preference or unforced preference) ballots.
But, other than things like unique executive offices, single-member elections should be avoided. Legislative elections with small multimember districts (say 5 members) with a system like STV (or a Bucklinish cousin, again without loser elimination) gets decent proportionality, the candidate accountability of single-member districts (but more, because parties are likely to run more candidates than they'll win seats, so there os general election accountability even within preferred parties) and avoids high-stakes districting (eliminating gerrymandering opportunities.)
Even executive offices with a designated successor (e.g., governor and lt. governor) can be made multiwinner (sequential rather than proportional) using a ranked ballots method with a normal single-winner majority threshold: once the first winner is selected, eliminate that candidate and recount the ballots (for some methods, this can simply be continue the count till the next winner crosses the threshold with the same effect) to select the winner of the successor office. This improves candidate accountability when one party is clearly preferred, because a disfavored incumbent can be demoted without abandoning the preferred party.
The big advantage of ranked choice is that it is simple to understand and implement.
In elections, it is essential that the average person understand exactly how the system works. An election result that people don't understand/trust is worse than useless.
- I vote
- Something happens in a black box
- A result emerges that I do not comprehendI'd be surprised if an average person finds ranked choice voting to be simpler to understand than approval or FPTP.
The main issue with approval voting though is that it's much harder for individuals to use when voting.
It's tricky to figure out when to bullet vote vs not bullet vote.
Simplicity to use != simplicity to count
I think ranked choice is in that sweet spot where it is reasonably simple to use and simple to count.
The only advantages ranked choice have over approval are entirely theoretical. Another advantage approval has is that it trends towards moderation.
Approval isn't perfect though (personally I prefer STAR, but it requires ballots to change).
Approval voting may not seem "fun", But thousands of voters have used it in Fargo and St Louis without any issue. All the evidence says it gets better results, is more resistant to strategic voting, and has a better chance of replacing the status quo.
"Ranked choice" is a range of methods and usually people mean instant-runoff. Recognizing that no system is perfect, I nonetheless have significant worries about instant runoff.
Imagine we have a society that's predominately split into two religions, where members of each religion would love a theocracy of their flavor, would settle for secular tolerance, and is vigorously (sometimes violently!) opposed to theocracy of another flavor.
If we have three candidates, one representing each of these positions, and everyone votes their true preferences then we see maybe 40% theocracy A, 40% theocracy B, 20% secular tolerance. The very first thing instant-runoff does is throw out the compromise, and we chose violence and strife.
If we generally believe that "a good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied" then IRV will never choose a good compromise. I worry that that's a bad way of choosing what we do as a society.
With approval voting, you can declare a victor without running a state machine.
Relevant Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
If the situation is close the best outcome may be a somewhat random outcome. Having 1,000 extra votes determine the outcome is just as arbitrary as anything else.
What is true, is that simplicity is a propaganda advantage for actually getting it passed, since "It's too complex so we can't trust it" is a good attack line even if it isn't true.
I'm not sure that advantage is worth it, given that 1. it's a terribly long shot anyway, and 2. It's the same argument which will be used to defend the status quo.
I expect most could if they spent 5 minutes on Wikipedia researching it. They don't, because they don't want to; most probably regard it as an unimportant implementation detail.
No, its not. That would be a big advantage of the method equivalent to it but without loser elimination and instead counting each rank down on all ballots simultaneously, which is both easier to understand and much easier to implement.
Approval voting has advantages when you get into the weeds, but ranked choice has one big advantage right out the gate: people like it more. If you present the two systems to regular voters with simple one paragraph descriptions, people will choose ranked choice nearly every time, because they want to be able to rank candidates if they're voting for more than one person. Nobody wants to have to say that the guy there willing to hold their nose for is just as worthy of their vote as the guy they really want in office.
Two big problems:
1. Half of the politicians that make it into parliament are from the party list (which is chosen by the party) and are not voted for individually. I believe much of the power of democracy is the ability to vote people out, and the party list mostly prevents that.
2. There is a lot of talk of strategic voting. I guess all systems can be gamed, but MMP seems to encourage it.
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy... “Every candidate who wins an electorate gets a seat in Parliament. They are called electorate MPs. The remaining seats are filled from party lists. Every party has a party list, which is a list of candidates ranked in the order the party wants those candidates to be elected to Parliament. Candidates elected from a party list are called list MPs.”
I dunno, I think random ballot is worse.
Its arguably the worst system that uses ranked choice ballots and ever considers more than the first position, though, which is why in should be called its proper name, “instant runoff voting”, and not “ranked choice”.
I sincerely hope Newsom gets successfully primaried and has no chance of a Presidential run, https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-ve...
The positions may not be, but voting for anything but R or D is very controversial, because by voting third party in the US, you are helping the choice you like least win.
There is exactly zero chance that a third party will gain any meaningful amount of power, so all you are doing is throwing your vote away.
Maybe you're one of the five people in the country who don't actually care which of those two will win, but for some crazy reason still go to the polls - but if you're not one of those five, the best you can hope out of a third party is to produce better candidates in your preferred party's primary races.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/27/new-yorke...
Recently, there was a Canadian election. While we use FPTP here, many chose to vote NDP. They are effectively a third party, and were unlikely to hold even a minority government.
But neither incumbent party put forward anything, or anyone, more compelling. So those voting NDP were given two choices: they could vote for something barely better than the other guy, or they could treat their ballot as a mixture of optimism and a spoiled ballot, to voice their disappointment at the current state of affairs in the hope it might lead to something better, someday.
[1] Their politics couldn't be more similar. Look at how provincial NDP parties govern, and tell me how it differs from the Federal Liberals. (It doesn't.)
The US has had a two party system since about its second election under the Constitution, but only one of the current parties has a direct lineage to the original two. The second party of the two-party system has been replaced twice. It could happen again.
OTOH, it won't happen with a platform that isn't very controversial (that's two easy for one or the other major party to coopt—or both in pieces); it would only happen with a platform with a strong position on a controversial issue where a sizable fraction of the population has views more strongly opposed to one major parties position than the other existing major party is willing to take.
Even adding 15-20 years of working life would mean that 100 y.o. politicians or judges would become a normal occurrence. For Democrats: would you like to Amy Coney Barrett to serve until 2072? For Republicans: would you like Sonia Sotomayor to serve until 2054?
In politics, a long tenure is a huge advantage. We should probably act now, before the interests of the current stakeholders are too entrenched.
I agree with term limits though, but mainly to ensure that the politicians better represent those working in the economy. So many issues come from politicians effectively being idle landlords - completely divorced from the issues caused by the housing crisis and the damage that comes from the subsequent lack of economic mobility.
But we might be able to turn 70 y.o. into 67 y.o. relatively soon. In fact, there already was an experiment in humans which turned their epigenetic clock back 2,5 years by rejuvenating their thymuses.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02638-w
(Of course, the complicated relationship between epigenetic clock and real internal state of the organism is not fully clear yet. I know. This might be a very imperfect measure.)
This kind of baby steps is going to compound. I am sort of afraid of the possibility that we will ignore the baby steps until their aggregated weight is unconquerable, much like the climate crisis, where any single added chimney meant "almost nothing", but all of them together over decades meant a lot.
I would say Yang introduced an issue single-handedly into the conversation and it was implemented quite quickly without any discussion because of the unique pandemic situation. Will be interesting to see the long term research that emerges from this.
I'm sure I'm going to appreciate this April 15th 2022 when my liability is much larger than usual because my credit was already paid out.