Seattle residents launch Approval Voting initiative for representative elections [pdf]
seattleapproves.org
seattleapproves.org
I also suggest other users look for Clay[0] in these threads. He's the co-inventor of STAR and writes a lot about voting. Also a HN user.
I'm curious why you think this? I think exactly the opposite. RCV/IRV has major problems, especially for strong spoilers. They are also more difficult to tabulate and with the recent events of the last election the importance of ease to tabulate went up in my priority list (making me even question my preference of score over approval). In fact, IRV also favors extremists, which is something I really don't want.
Another problem with RCV is that it’s difficult to understand, at least when you get into the runoffs. That makes it harder for people to understand and trust the election system, which is also very important.
This is one big issue for me with IRV vs Cardinal systems. Both handle _weak_ spoilers but IRV doesn't handle ''strong,, spoilers. Understanding that these are two different types of spoilers is really important. It is "Bernie vs Hillary" and "Cruz vs Trump." Even with IRV we'd still see the parties trying to prevent strong primary candidates from running independently because they could spoil the election. With cardinal methods (approval, score, star) this is far less of a concern and thus I think more democratic of an election. I honestly think we should be much more concerned with strong spoilers than weak spoilers (weak spoilers don't affect elections much anyways).
STAR: 5, Score 4, approval 4, IRV 1, FPTP 1
It would be ranked in this order too, but there's more expressivity here than an ordinal system can provide.
FWIW, this already happens. That will also happen under any system. I'm not sure why you think IRV encourages moderates. It actually encourages extremist candidates which is why I'm particularly against it.
IRV/Approval/Borda/Condorcet voting systems all improve those factors. That they have some edge conditions that could be theoretically exploited belies that fact that plurality voting (ie, FPTP / one person one vote) is a complete train wreck for spoilers and favoring extreme voting.
No voting system is perfect (Arrow's impossibility theorem) but some are harder to exploit than others. Staying with a broken system because the proposed replacement isn't perfect is a poor justification.
I think the problem here is that people get caught up in VSE. I get it, that's what I was caught up in when I first started learning about this stuff. Then I had to really dig through strategic voting and spoilage. The nuance of the systems actually do make a very big difference in the outcomes.
Because for many municipalities, it's not whether they move to Approval vs. RCV or IRV or Star, etc - it's moving away from the dumpster fire of plurality voting.
The non-monotonicity shown there for instant runoff voting seems to be more undesirable than any downsides of approval voting.
IMO the point of elected representation is to be representative, not to elect specific people, so the possibility of a lesser known candidate winning over a major party's favorite candidate isn't a problem.
Arrow's impossibility theorem only says that no _ranked_ voting system is perfect, so it doesn't apply to cardinal methods such as Approval or Score.
> That they have some edge conditions that could be theoretically exploited belies that fact that plurality voting (ie, FPTP / one person one vote) is a complete train wreck for spoilers and favoring extreme voting.
I agree, but I think the nature of the exploitation should still be considered. For IRV, we would be introducing a dependence on unauditable voting machines to tabulate votes, which would make it harder to verify the integrity of future elections.
I tend to not get into this fight because 1) it extends to cardinal systems with Gibbard's and 2) Arrow's is more about social choice than voting.
In a local mayoral election that used IRV, I've seen some candidates tell their supporters to vote for them in every slot. Either those candidates didn't understand IRV themselves, or they didn't want to try to explain IRV to their supporters.
Though with a candidate modification: add 'none of them / no confidence' as a virtual candidate that can never be removed by the runoff processes. If 'NoT' is the winner then the entire election is thrown out and all of the candidates are banned from the re-run.
Computer simulations pretty universally paper over the main problem with approval compared to any ranked-ballot (whether forced or unforced preference) methods by pretending that “approval” has a consistent, cross-voter meaning. (This is an even bigger problem with score-based methods than approval.)
Personally, for simplicity and good enough single winner methods, I prefer Bucklin which is both better than and simpler to explain than IRV, but more critically I prefer minimizing single-winner elections. 5-member legislative districts using a candidate-centric proportional method like STV or the method that has the same relationship to it as Bucklin as to IRV, which AFAIK isn't a named method, would be far superior to any possible system with single-member districts, and basically neutralize districting as a lever for partisan advantage.
Paramount executive elections with a parallel successor (e.g., US Presidential tickets, if they were directly elected, or state Gov/LtGov pairs) can even be made into phased single-winner systems to get some of the advantages of multiwinner systems (not proportionality, but you do get some ability to separate partisan and personal preference in the general election, and to thereby weaken incumbency advantage: basically, use any ranked ballots [0] single winner election for the top spot, eliminate the winner, and rerun the election on the same ballots with the same method for the constitutional successor.)
[0] while I am not partial to them, approval or score systems could be used to; simple FPTP fails because it mean those who voted for the top winner have no voice in the designated successor.
I give an example from this year's Seattle primaries where RCV/IRV would have eliminated the candidate that most accurately reflects the electorate but Approval Voting would not have. That's not a trivial or rare situation, either, it's just such a simple race that it's easy to spot.
Always good to see you Clay. Hope you are doing well.
But I'm disillusioned. Many non-plurality methods (including approval) can effectively solve the spoiler problem (i.e. satisfy IIA)... but I no longer think that spoilers are the absolute most important problem to solve.
The most important problem is single-seat districts creating anti-majoritarian, disproportional legislatures. Because of how people geographically sort themselves among the likeminded, even independent districting commissions will not be able to effectively prevent anti-majoritarian legislatures.
For this reason, I believe that we would greatly benefit from explicitly proportional representation. This can be accomplished through cardinal or ordinal means - I no longer care about that dimension. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't enjoy some incremental benefit from approval or really any non-FPTP system. We would. Seattle should go ahead and do its thing. But the fight for better forms of democracy can't stop with any system that retains single-seat districts.
Speaking as a fellow kin who also won't shut up about this, right now we need to just acknowledge that ANYTHING is better than first-past-the-post. At this point I honestly don't care which alternative it is, none of them are worse than the current system. In every jurisdiction where any form of alternative voting system is on the ballot, I will throw my support behind whatever effort has the most momentum, regardless of whether it's approval, star, RCV, whatever. First-past-the-post is killing us with its inevitable descent into bipolarization, and we can figure out a perfect solution once we've stopped the bleeding (keeping in mind that voting system reform is merely a necessary first step, and not sufficient on its own).
I disagree with this stance. Mostly because how these methods are presented. RCV has gained such popularity because its claims of preventing spoiled elections. But people think that's Bernie spoiling Hillary and not Stein spoiling no one. RCV only prevents weak spoilers where cardinal systems prevent strong spoilers.
The reason I'm so concerned with this is because this is also why RCV got repealed in the past. IN AMERICA. This is my big fear. We all get excited about it, implement a system that doesn't solve the problems we are seeking to solve, and then go back and look for other solutions. We have a solution now, and a wide breadth of them. They just aren't the popular ones.
Meanwhile, lots of far more consensus-oriented political systems have utterly collapsed. Weimar Germany used PR- so did Argentina when Peron took over. Rwanda was using PR leading up to its famous genocide in the 90s! The number of parliamentary countries using PR that have collapsed probably exceeds the total number of FPTP countries globally.
Voting or electoral systems just don't matter that much- culture does. If you're a basically stable society, you can use any voting method and be fine- if Japan or the Scandinavian nations adopted FPTP tomorrow, nothing fundamental would change. If you're unstable, you'll be unstable no matter what type of voting system you use. Governments are not computers where a different operating system leads to different results, I'm sorry
So which is it? Is FPTP the lynchpin of stable democracies, or otherwise irrelevant? Are you making an explicit statement about politics or an implicit statement about culture, here?
I did not say that, I'm sorry that you got that impression. I am saying that political systems overall are simply much less important than many people, including anti-FPTP campaigners, believe. These examples were simply meant to illustrate the non-correlation between government structure & stability- I could just as easily point to how stable most European PR countries are, or how unstable FPTP users like Jamaica, Pakistan and Yemen can be. It's my belief that the US, Canada and Britain would be equally stable under PR. I am very much making an implicit statement about culture.
Fun fact, with a little more research I learned that both South Korea & Taiwan use FPTP for at least some parliamentary offices. Again, if the voting system makes such a huge difference....
Short version: there used to be much less "party discipline" in US politics. There were lots of sub-factions within the two big parties that would vote differently, depending on the issue. So, it was common for bills to pass with (say) 50% of Democrats voting for them, and 60% of Republicans.
In the 90's (according to Drutman), the parties started being much more "coherent" -- like, all Democrats would favor a bill, and all Republicans would oppose it. This makes it much harder to pass legislation.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Two-Party-Doom-Loop-Multipar...
There's a lot of other factors in there besides the method of voting. People often compare the US to other countries over voting but ignore that the systems are substantially different. For example, the UK parliament (and many parliaments) has proportional representation. This is something we don't see in the US congress. And it is important to distinguish that presidential elections are vastly different than congressional/parliamentary elections. Then again, maybe this is part of the problem, that US is hyper focused on the presidential elections but nowhere near similarly engaged in the congressional ones.
https://thefulcrum.us/amp/actually-approval-voting-beats-rcv...
As a general rule, it is true that plurality voting absolutely sucks. The vast majority of highly rated democracies use something different. The UK and US are ranked 16th and 25th respectively.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Taiwan and South Korea both use a significant amount of proportional representation.
But Drutman's biggest fallacy is thinking that you have to have proportional representation. Simple approval voting would plausibly have as big or greater impact.
If anyone would like to invest time or money to make this happen, please contact us or donate here: https://SeattleApproves.org/
[1]: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/ , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329
one method of implementing this (from thinking about it for all of 2 minutes), is developing a list of the top 10-20 issues that voters care about in a given election and providing tradeoff choices for each, then matching them to the candidate closest to their revealed preference. of course, the biggest issue with method is that it moves the problem up one level, from voting to choice design.
the neat thing about conjoint is that it multiplexes the choice-making (when designed well), so that the choice burden scales reasonably while also better representing collective choice. nothing is going to be perfect, but conjoint could potentially be better than all current systems, probably by an order of magnitude or more.
it's relatively complicated, so yes, 'experts' (i disdain this term, frankly) could in theory manipulate the system, but transparency of voting data (just like now) and survey design (the more likely bias vector) would make that difficult. transparency would allow competing independent journalists, academics/researchers, political analysts, etc. to weigh in and balance out biases (not perfectly of course), as well as verify results.
For politicians, for me, it's more about (perceived) character vs. their stated policies.
currently, there is no option to choose a candidate supporting marijuana legalization, $15 minimum wage, pro-life, and pro-gun policies (as an example), since we practically only have two relatively fixed packages of pre-ordained, all-or-nothing policy positions to choose from. revealed preferences would pressure parties into fielding candidates that better match the non-partisan preferences of constituents. or better yet, it would lead to the waning of the two-party system altogether, toward a more direct representative democracy.
Additionally, all of this ignores the possibility that a representative could change their stance on an issue after receiving more information on an issue. Presidents and Supreme Court justices have changes their stances once their terms have begun or events have taken place during their time in office. I would hate a system that relies on tightly binding the representatives to narrow definitions of hot-button issue stances.
That's all academic, though. A great real example is the 2021 Seattle City Attorney primary, which had only 3 candidates. The votes were split: 36%, 32%, 30%. These 2 candidates emerged from the primary: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/us/seattle-city-attorney-.... The candidate that most accurately represented the opinion of the electorate, Holmes, was eliminated. That would have still happened in a ranked ballot. The voters who voted for Thomas-Kennedy or Davison in our current system would have still put Thomas-Kennedy or Davison #1 in a ranked ballot.
I tried to distill this in https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1461389190206156802. And a 3-way race like that is actually the simplest possible case. Effects like that are much more likely with more candidates and they happen everywhere in the elimination cycle, they’re just less obvious to casual observers. That's what you see in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329 (note that IRV == RCV in that video).
(Obligatory disclaimer: I don't care who wins. I do care how accurately the winners reflect the inputs, namely, voter opinion.)
Separately, Washington law requires cities hold a primary that produces 2 candidates for the general election, so cities can't legally eliminate primaries. That said, whether primaries are a net positive or negative is a really complicated discussion. Beyond election mechanics, the disadvantage of primaries is that only a subset of voters in the general will turn out in the primary. The advantage is that voters don't spend much time on ballots and it focuses that time. Seattle had 15 candidates for Mayor (many races are 10+). If someone spends 10 minutes on their ballot and the ballot has 10 races, that's 1 minute per race - 6 seconds per candidate. No easy answer here. However, for practical purposes we don't need to answer that hard question; this one change delivers an incredibly representative election.
[1] https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...
One issue seems to be domination by majority?
For example, let's say 55% of electorate is hard left, 45% moderate to conservative.
Under approval those 55% can vote for all 3 lets say hard left candidates, no moderate's make it in?
RCV, once someone has gotten their candidate in, their vote is exhausted. Seems to come out much better. Still might end up with 2 hard left, one moderate, but that seems fairer to me.
I think the appeal of the simple ballot is what drove adoption (ie, vote for as many as you like, top X win).
In California the trick is they treat all open seats as one office.
The ballot is approval style voting, you can vote for X of Y candidates.
Approval voting is a single winner system.
If they're just adding up each candidate's votes, that's not how approval is supposed to be tabulated in a multi-winner context (which is more complicated); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_non-transferable_vote
> RCV, once someone has gotten their candidate in, their vote is exhausted.
Hi, Australian here. What happens with multi-winner single transferable vote is that there's a _quota_ and then ballots for candidates who have reached quota get _reweighted_ (not quite the same thing).
This quota-and-reweighting system can (and must!) be applied to multi-winner Approval too - jpfed linked the wiki article.
Where I see trouble these days is with Federal elections. Being able to vote for anyone but X or Z would be a wonderful way to send a signal as a voter. I suspect that both the east and west sides of the state would feel similarly (East: "Anyone but X!", West: "Anyone but Y!". Result: M gets elected, who is thankfully neither X nor Y.).
Same thing that makes it difficult by attempting to do it country wide. That it is larger and more difficult. It would be nice if we could just wave a hand and change everything at once, but that also wouldn't be very democratic. What is also nice is that we can experiment, refine, and test at smaller levels before we advance to larger elections.
Someone else answered this well, but: money. A Seattle initiative is roughly 10%-20% as expensive as a statewide one, and it's still an incredible challenge to raise enough to do this. Ask me where I spend my time.
Qualifying for the ballot in Seattle requires about 26,200 valid signatures (10% of votes cast in the last Mayoral election). They must be collected during a 180-day period that, due to deadlines to make the November ballot, must is basically January-June. Since January-March is wet and cold, people aren't outside as much and many initiatives just do April-June.
Collecting 26,000 signatures in 90-180 days is all but impossible with volunteers, which means the core challenge for an initiative is fundraising to pay signature-gathering costs. You can divide 26,000 by any number of valid signatures collected per hour - 3, 6, 12, whatever - and it's still a lot of time and thus really expensive.
So, that's for the Seattle ballot. Getting on the WA state ballot requires 324,516 (!). Yes, 12x more. And that cost scales roughly linearly; the few efficiencies of scale are offset by new inefficiencies like travel. There's some efficiencies with overhead, but that's a small % of the cost.
So, that's why. It takes 5-10x more money.
Of course, voters would need to support it statewide too. In Seattle, this will pass; our job is to get it on the ballot. A statewide campaign may also need to do at least an education/awareness campaign (roughly the last paragraph of your comment) and potentially even try to change public opinion. These can cost even more than collecting signatures.
(If you're reading this and thinking "Wow, Troy knows this stuff - and it's interesting and there's a plan to do this!" - it is and there is! I'd love your help as a volunteer and/or your donations.)
Kshama Sawant fought for the $15 minimum wage, the Amazon tax, numerous renters' rights protections, a ban on police use of chemical weapons against protestors, and is now continuing the fight for rent control. She's currently facing a right-wing recall campaign because big business was unable to defeat her in the 2019 election, despite Amazon dumping $1.5 million into various races for citywide office.
A few here have remarked that approval voting tends to select more "moderate" candidates over "extremes." This isn't a neutral preference, it's obviously ideological, and targeted at one specific legislator in Seattle. Voters should reject this measure as a transparent attack on the most effective and sincere fighter for working people in the country.
Full disclosure, Kshama and I are both members of Socialist Alternative. I may be limited in my ability to respond today, as I'm rushing right after work to a volunteer shift to make sure she stays in office. I'll try my best to check in occasionally!
That doesn't change the fact that big business in Seattle would love to see Kshama out of office, and if she survives her recall and this initiative gains traction, I'm confident they'd throw their resources behind it to get another bite at the apple. With the exception of Sawant, they have a city government that works for them, and I think they'd prefer the middle path to rocking the boat in either direction.
I can answer this conclusively: it's not a response to any single election or event. We've been working on this for almost 2 years. Here's a tweet from June 2020: https://twitter.com/SeattleApproves/status/12776993817564528...
As we all say, correlation is not causality, but more practically, it's impossible to announce an initiative that addresses a real problem without it seeming related to something recent :-) Until the prior election is done, no one cares, and yet signature-gathering deadlines basically require starting as soon as that election ends.
(AMA about running an initiative, particularly one that doesn't have an enemy - that is, we're not trying to "Move the goalposts" towards or against any viewpoint. That's incredibly valuable (IMO!) and quite rare, but also means the typical you're-with-us-or-against-us fundraising and voter pitches don't apply. "You're with us if you support representative democracy" requires a different campaign plan targeted at people and organizations who support systems and incentives, not only candidates and positions, and who put their own preferences second to the will of the voters.)
Those are not adjectives that I think the majority of people would ascribe to Sawant.
As a moderate, are these extremist ideals now?
Regarding:
> This isn't a neutral preference, it's obviously ideological, and targeted at one specific legislator in Seattle. Voters should reject this measure as a transparent attack on the most effective and sincere fighter for working people in the country.
This isn't ideological in any way, and it's not targeted at anyone. When I said it was non-partisan and candidate-neutral, it's really that simple. It's non-partisan and candidate-neutral.
Consistent with HN guidelines, I'd ask first for an assumption of good faith. Beyond that, I can give some practical comments:
1. Our group of volunteers includes a huge range of political beliefs. There is no "one" opinion that the group could try to target even if we wanted to. The shared belief is that leaders reflect public opinion as accurately as possible.
2. This doesn't help or harm anyone. Rather, think of the current system like a grocery store where, each time you walk in, the prices on every item have doubled or halved. No one wins today: one entity (sellers/candidates) has no idea what their real support is and the other entity (buyers/voters) has to cobble together ingredients for dinner.
That wouldn't be good for the dairy people and bad for the fish people, it's bad for all sellers/candidates and all buyers/voters. Our flawed system doesn't help anyone.
Imagine a system where every voter could express their whole opinion, without feeling like they were throwing away their vote. Every election becomes a simple measure of how many voters approve of each candidate.
3. Just practically, no one's job - politician or otherwise - is worth a year or two of my life. It violates the "The sun doesn't revolve around any of us" theorem :-) Heck, even if I got to personally pick every Seattle legislator, I wouldn't put in this much effort. I don't care anywhere near enough. The thing I care about, and the only thing that's worth this much effort, is a system that delivers whatever voters want.
PS: I would welcome your help making this happen! That's how much I mean it when I say this is candidate-neutral and we welcome everyone. As volunteers, our political preferences vary widely. Our commitment is to elect winners which best reflect voters' opinions (democracy), whether or not they match any of ours.
Wealthy elites don't care what policy choices are optimal in terms of some abstract desiderata[1], they push for the policies that will be best for them materially. Working people need to understand that and behave the same way.
To take a different example: Republicans in the U.S. push for voter ID laws because they favor Republican election outcomes. This is pretty well understood. A voter ID law appears on its face ideologically neutral. It still is meant to bring about a certain outcome, and should be fought on the basis of that outcome. It doesn't even matter if somebody pushing the legislation has a different intention, even a noble one!
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[1] Incidentally, I'm not really sure how well AV even meets those desiderata. For example, does a non-Condorcet system really reflect voters' preferences most accurately? Later-no-harm is another criteria that comes to mind. I'm skeptical of the claim that AV is really "more reflective" in some objective sense than FPTP.
The IEEE, Mathematical Association of America, and the Dartmouth Alumni Association have all tried & discarded AV- as they consistently found that the vast majority of voters bullet vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Other_organiza...
Moreover, it's inferior to a simple runoff with a large number of candidates. As Dartmouth found, when you have 6-8+ candidates, even with AV the plurality winner will be a pretty small chunk of total votes cast (like less than 40 or even 30%). Pretty ironic result for a method that claims that to help find the consensus solution!
Unpopular opinion, FPTP with a runoff is superior to AV or RCV just for sheer workability & finding the consensus candidate. Even more unpopular opinion, voting systems just don't matter that much- healthy democracies have been plenty stable with FPTP (the UK has like the most extreme version possible), unhealthy democracies will be unstable no matter which voting system is used
that's not ironic. that's closer to the complex reality of heterogeneous interests and perspectives. what's unnatural is the idea that 50+% of a group would naturally, in an unbiased setting, pick only 2 viable candidates out of millions, and then vote consistently for one of them.
>what's unnatural is the idea that 50+% of a group
This is literally how a runoff works- a pragmatic system that's been used for decades by 50+ countries globally. It also enhances democratic legitimacy, as the majority of people feel invested in having voted for the eventual winner.
(To be fair, I will say that using AV to select the top two candidates who then go to a runoff is pretty interesting)
plurality of perspective and expertise is what makes a society stronger, not a singular hegemony. the legitimacy of government emerges from the totality of its actions (and non-actions), not from cult of personality.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005032/https://sites.goo...
The American system acknowledges the fact that there are long-term stable coalitions. Even if you went to a single election with a runoff, you're going to end up with similar dynamics. Most of the candidates will say, "If I'm your first choice, your second choice should be that other guy who is in my coalition and believes most of the same things that I do."
There may well be other candidates on the ballot, but they'll usually find themselves unable to win without a coalition to present a slate of candidates. They're in exactly the same position as "third party" candidates already are.
The systems aren't identical and don't produce identical outcomes, but they're a lot closer than I think people make it out to be. A simple procedural change isn't going to fix what's wrong with the American body politic.
There is no perfect tiny party out there with all the right answers that everybody would agree with if only the two main parties would just get out of the way. That is what each of hundreds of tiny parties tell themselves. And that's why there's really no such thing as a "third party". Really, there are hundreds of "hundredth parties" who disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the two main parties, because they haven't put forth the effort of hammering out and nurturing the uneasy coalitions that go into making a dominant party.
But for the various state and district offices, that doesn't matter. There, you really are voting at the same time as all of the other people with an interest in it.
I'd say the bigger issue is that for a number of places, only one party really has a chance, and the general election is a foregone conclusion. Voters really only get one bite at the apple, during the primaries. (The voters for the other party never really get a bite at the apple, but they are so far outnumbered that no tweak to the voting system will fix that. They have to hope that the elected representative will keep their interests in mind.)
http://scorevoting.net/BulletBugaboo
Approval voting is beloved by game theory experts specifically for its immense resistance to strategy. It was adopted by a 64% landslide majority in Fargo and a 68% landslide majority in St Louis.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key
Here's a mathematical proof that, even in the worst case scenario where 100% of voters are maximally strategic, approval voting elects the Condorcet winner (candidate who beats every rival head-to-head).
https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW
Moreover, in 422 of the 440 ranked choice voting elections since 2004, the winner was the candidate with the most first-place votes. So even if it was true that everyone would just bullet vote with approval voting, approval voting would still elect the same winner as RCV 96% of the time. At radically lower cost and complexity.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/bullet-voting-is-fine-52e6f2...
I don't disagree that Approval has issues. I think we can improve upon these with score or STAR. But I think it is very naive to start a post with such a criticism and then ignore that it applies even more strongly to the alternative method being presented (either Exhaustive Voting or Two-Round).
You had me up until here, but there's no way this claim is true. FPTP with a runoff is exactly how San Francisco elections are held, and it has made the elections there essentially a one-party system. Voters get to choose between two establishment wings of the Democratic Party at each runoff. It's even worse than plain old FPTP.
I don't think that the voting system has made SF 'essentially a one-party system', as tons & tons of cities across the US just use normal FPTP and are still very Democratic. Just as tons of rural states just use normal FPTP and are still very Republican. This is what I mean by, voting systems are overrated and just don't have the large effects that enthusiasts want them to have. It's a seductive argument for left-brained engineering types who are systems thinkers, but it's just not empirically true
This was sold as a way of breaking the two-party duopoly, which it did, but not in the expected way. Instead of getting third parties or independents into that second spot, in heavily blue areas like SF they instead typically get the democratic vote split among two candidates, who go on to compete against each other in the general election. So now instead of third parties being locked by the mechanics of FPTP voting, they get third parties and republicans locked out! Went from a duopoly to a monopoly.
(E.g. the last senate election in California was between Dianne Feinstein and Kevin de León, both establishment dems. Nancy Pelosi also faced a democrat in 2020.)
> consistently 80+% of voters 'bullet vote', or simply select one candidate
St. Louis's election with Approval Voting in March 2021 seems to dispel that. In a Mayoral race with 4 candidates, voters approved an average of 1.56 candidates (https://stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/board-election...).
Voters understood and used the system, and they didn't bullet vote. 1.56 is a ton of additional expression.
As I wrote in https://twitter.com/SeattleApproves/status/14589200428425748..., with 15 Mayoral candidates in 2021, Seattle's average may be much higher. It's quite possibly the average will be above 2.
Or do you mean inefficient in the sense of "more effort for voters"? You could always just rank your favorite candidate as 1 and leave the rest blank, which should give you the same amount of voting power you had in a single-vote system.
Are you sure your situation isn't due to too few candidates?
If you're a fringe single-issue candidate, you can more easily push your issue by running on that issue (while adopting most other parts of the most similar mainstream candidate).
In our current system you would be a spoiler. With a better voting system like Approval, you would not. I prefer RCV to Approval (so the single-issue candidate can signal issue strength) but either are a big improvement to the status quo.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...
It's an amazing in-depth interview about Approval and other types of voting systems.
This is something everyone can get behind. Literally Democrat or Republican, you would be happier with more parties and more options.
There really shouldn't be anyone on the other side of this issue except the politicians who use the two party system to keep power among the few.
So they've changed it from vote for one to vote for zero. Thanks but it's been a long time since a politician I approved of made it onto my ballot. Better wording would be "Vote for as many of the lesser evils as you want." Otherwise I have to lie in order to vote.
Suppose right now you have a Democrat, a Republican and a moderate. In first past the post, the moderate splits the vote with whichever major party candidate is most like them, causing the one less like them to win. Also, everybody knows this and then only votes for one of the major parties. So then the moderate doesn't bother to run and the only thing on the ballot is the one evil or the other.
With approval voting, if the moderate runs, most of the Republicans approve of the Republican and the moderate (because better the moderate than the Democrat) and most of the Democrats approve of the Democrat and the moderate (because better the moderate than the Republican). So then the moderate runs, and wins. And you get a candidate you might actually want to vote for.