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[1]: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/ , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329
[1] https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...
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.)
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.
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.
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.