Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less | Hacker News Reader

Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less

americanpurpose.com

234 pointsmanholio385 comments

If you want to de-polarize America, bring back meaningful federalism. The government in Washington is no longer federal in its character. It has become the national government our founders warned us about. The individual 50 states ought to be doing as much as possible, and the federal government as little as possible. But that's not what we've got.

We're a nation of some 330 million people, of diverse religions and ethnicities, geographies and economies. Who in his right mind believes one-size-fits-all solutions should be expanded to include every aspect of life? We need political diversity to go along with the diversity I just described.

What that means is that Americans are going to have to get used to leaving one another alone. In other words, New Yorkers are going to have to allow Alabamans to live in their "ignorance," and Mississippians are going to have to allow Californians to live in their "sin."

The upside of this political diversity is what some have characterized as "50 laboratories for democracy." Each state will have the benefit to try, and to succeed or fail; and, just as importantly, to see what neighboring states are doing and learn thereof.

But I'm arguing that no shuffling of chairs at the national level will do anything to reduce polarization. We need to stay out of one another's business. Good fences make good neighbors.

That collapsed in the Civil War for well-known reasons. Then a second wave of federal intervention was required during the Great Depression. The problem with allowing states to fail - to become failed states - is not just that it costs a lot of human lives, but that they're bordering the non-failed states.

I would argue that the first major failure was with the Articles of Confederation, which had to be replaced in part because states couldn't even agree to pay soldiers. Everything has to be unanimous.

It didn't work. You need a central government.

A problem with each state doing their own thing, is then the state can take away human rights, and wealthly people can simply move, less privileged people may be unable to. Of course the constitution is suppose to help with that by requiring all states treat everyone equally but of course they couldn't predict everything and states can simply interpret it as they see fit, so the federal government is needed, but how much is anyones guess. I don't see that de-polarizing america, rather just would be more silencing those in the minority of each state.

> A problem with each state doing their own thing, is then the state can take away human rights

(1) Why would the state residents vote for a state legislature that takes away human rights from them?

(2) And if this is seen as a real danger, can it not happen as well on the federal level then? The whole US of A voters voting for representatives that take away human rights on the federal level.

> (1) Why would the state residents vote for a state legislature that takes away human rights from them?

A lot of voters wouldn't have a problem if they're going to take rights away from those "other people" they don't like.

Many important rights were never voted in at all. Interracial marriage was legalized not by electorates but by the Supreme Court. Desegregation of education had to be imposed on several states by federal troops.

At the federal level, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th... is an example of a right that has never yet been implemented, partly because some states insisted on retaining the death penalty for children.

1) Hard to say why, but they do. It maybe comes down to "politics over policy".

2) This also happens, but it's a bit harder because you need a wider variety of people to agree, and federal-level politics get a lot more visibility in the news.

Consider that referenda are generally uncommon and that you have to vote for a whole politician, not individual policies.

> (1) Why would the state residents vote for a state legislature that takes away human rights from them?

(a) That assumes they get to vote: see voter suppression.

(b) Plenty of folks vote for things that are against their own interests:

> Working-class Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump continue to approve of him as president, even though he supported a health care bill that would disproportionately hurt them.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/upshot/why-americans-vote...

* https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/05/why-working-...

* https://thehill.com/opinion/james-carville/227350-james-carv...

Same argument can be made for federal government. Why are local governments more likely to take away human rights than a federal one?

Realistically it'll never happen, but I believe a good start might be repealing the 17th Amendment. There were probably good reasons to have senators directly elected by the people (instead of appointed by state legislatures), but it's had the effect of reducing the representation of the individual state governments, which causes a lot of resentment over "one-size-fits-all" solutions, including unfunded mandates (where the federal government requires a state to enforce some law or regulation, but provides no funds to pay for it).

Most polarization comes from identity politics, since by definition it forces us into tribes. Which means then there are "good" tribes and "bad" tribes and tribes are or aren't aligned with.

So we need to call out identity politics for what it is (and yes, the right is guilty of identity politics too) if we ever hope to beat back all of this hatred its causing.

If we really want to destroy the divisiveness we should eliminate political parties in general. There is no requirement for government to provide any support for political party primaries/caucuses or to even mention party on ballots in the elections.

Would ranked choice voting help with this very problem? As of now there can be no third party because it is too easily marginalized.

Well no, that is lipstick on a pig. The parties are the problem, rather than trying to artificially prop up 3rd parties, we need too eliminate them entirely. People should vote for politicians individually based on issues, not gang colors.

Yes.

A major problem with that is that our political divisions aren't actually at the state level. States may be "red states" or "blue states" by their overall majorities, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Rural Massachusetts is politically more in line with rural Illinois. Similarly, urban Chicago is politically more in line with urban Boston.

> A major problem with that is that our political divisions aren't actually at the state level.

You may need to go down further to the county level. Specifically looking at voter density:

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-01/how-the-d...

* https://archive.ph/fEJEa

Not perfect of course:

* https://observablehq.com/@jake-low/how-well-does-population-...

True in Canada as well:

* https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/338canada-the-urban-...

There were changes like the introduction of the 16th and 17th amendment as well as an expanded interpretation of the commerce clause that greatly contributed to a national government.

I cannot see things going back to meaningful federalism without some very difficult choices.

lol wut. You’re advocating for states rights and acknowledging that people in Mississippi would vote for Jim Crow to come back if it wasn’t for that pesky federal government.

What kind of argument is this (a well known ultra conservative talking point) and why is it at top of the thread?

HN goes a bit too far socially conservative with its libertarianism sometimes. Y’all are just conservative at that point - not libertarian.

I'd think an easier change would be to bring back secret voting in Congress, which was effectively eliminated by the use of electronic voting introduced by changes in The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970.

It would accomplish two things: lobbyists wouldn't be able to tell who actually voted for legislation and party leadership wouldn't be able to effectively enforce party allegiance through committee assignment and campaign funding. I am sure there are some unforeseen consequences (like would lobbying just be replaced with some kind of real bribery behind the scenes), but not being under the influence of lobbyists and party leadership would allow congress members to truly vote on what they think is in their constituents best interests.

>but not being under the influence of lobbyists and party leadership would allow congress members to truly vote on what they think is in their constituents best interests.

Or, it would allow them to vote in favor of the biggest donors with impunity.

It would also allow them lie to their biggest donor about their vote with impunity.

Unless the donor simply required proof of vote that was established, likely illegally. I find it hard to imagine a voting process that would be controlled by congress, to have annoyingly secure methods to ensure the private nature of the vote.

Just look at our current voting machines. They're questionably secure and they're not even remotely as regulated/audited as even our gambling machines.

For me the biggest switch is then I would care less about the individual performance and more about the team performance. Think about sports that have a stronger team component than individual. I think if the team fails, people often demand that lots of people leave the team—coach, owner, captain, etc. Sometimes to fully clean house. For more individual sports, people want that individual to leave. I think governance is more of a team sport than we realize and transparency efforts (congressional stats) make us focus more on the individual wins and less on the team wins. I care more if Congress passes an act I want than I do if my Senator votes in favor of what I want.

"For me the biggest switch is then I would care less about the individual performance and more about the team performance."

So, even stronger partisan based voting? Don't care about the individual, only if their party wins...

No, care about Congress as a team, not just the sub-teams of Republicans and Democrats. Caring about just the party is like only caring if the football team's offense or defense does well but not whether the team wins the game.

That would be ideal, but I don't see that as being what was meant by the other commenter. It's certainly not how it works today.

That football analogy is broken. The football team shares common goals. The parties in Congress very clearly have separate ideals/philosophies on specific issues. Even when they have a shared end goal (as the often do) the means to achieve it can be complete opposites.

I agree it doesn't work that way now, the strongest team identities are at the party level, overlooking that the US government was designed to balance different team identities: legislative vs executive vs judicial, federal (national) vs state, geographic territory vs population density.

The football team may not share common goals. The offense may care about scoring lots of points because each player wants to get a higher salary in their upcoming contract negotiations. The owner may only care about offense because it gets more viewers and more lucrative TV contracts.

I believe if we started rooting for Congress instead of rooting for one party (or one legislator), we might solve more collective problems.

Personally, I don't care about the Republican or Democratic parties, I care if Congress solve problems. I want the American team to win not the political party, and I'm willing to guess that there are many more citizens who think like this than it appears.

Surely there exists a voting system with k-anonymity/l-diversity which partially solves some of these competing desires, right?

I'm not sure if this is a reference to something obvious that isn't obvious to me. Are you referring to something specific?

No, nothing specific. I was genuinely hoping that someone smarter/more into the topic might reference something specific.

Ah ok, I hope someone smarter than I will too :-)

Sure. Let's role play, I'll be the big money industry guy:

"Well, BurningFrog, as you know, we really needed to get bill 1 through this month, bill 2 through next month, and bill 3 through by the end of the year. Since bill 1 passed, with the extra money we'll save and/or make we have an extra $500,000 in the budget to donate to your campaign, here's that check, BTW.

Now, if bill 2 passes after that, our lobbying budget will be an additional $500k, and if bill 3 passes we'll have an extra $1,000,000. Good luck BurningFrog."

The major downside I see is constituents not being able to hold their representatives accountable. You can't trust what they say. You have to look at their voting record.

I don’t necessarily disagree; but how exactly does that differ from the current state, regardless of where one falls on the ideological and political spectrum. The only ones to whom that does not apply are the aristocracy with the money and favor to bequeath.

There's lots of research saying most citizens have no idea how their representatives vote, even when it's open, and the people who do track it are the lobbyists, consider Myth 5 from CRI's 7 myths of transparency [0].

If the committee votes were secret, aka more of the process were secret but not the final floor votes, then we could still see how they voted in the end.

Also, if I'm not able to see how they vote individually, I'd probably be more likely to vote for people based on their team performance and not their individual performance and I think this is the biggest point for me. I don't care how Senator X votes, I care if Senator X convinces the team of Senators to pass a legislation. One Senator who says "but I voted the way you wanted me to vote" accomplishes much less for me than one Senator who is able to convince and negotiate with the other 99 to pass a bill that I wanted. So I'd look at whether things were happening that I wanted overall and if they weren't, I'd get rid of the person for not having the ability to move the team to better represent what I want.

[0]: https://congressionalresearch.org/SevenDeadlyMyths.html

The arguments in that source are pretty poor. For example, given the number of people who die from medical mistakes, people absolutely should be taking more of a role in their own care. They offer no objective evidence to support their position. They even claim that all sorts of social ills were lower during the period of secrecy and suppose they must be related.

I pay attention to what my representatives vote on the issues I care most about.

How do you know if your senator convinced people to vote for their bill if the process is secret? I could just be that they would have voted party line regardless.

I'm open to your disagreement just also quite confused on what you specifically mean.

> The arguments in that source are pretty poor.

Which arguments are poor and why?

> They offer no objective evidence to support their position.

Which positions do you think lack objective support?

> They even claim that all sorts of social ills were lower during the period of secrecy and suppose they must be related.

I agree that it may overstate the causation where it might just be correlation. At the same time, do you think that it's not worthy to investigate further? That many of at least the political ills could be strongly correlated with the increase in transparency?

> For example, given the number of people who die from medical mistakes, people absolutely should be taking more of a role in their own care.

I'm not sure if this is an example they mention or you were providing an analogy. I agree people should be taking more of a role in their medical care, I think the authors would agree as well. But do you think the patient should watch the surgeon's every move to make sure the surgeon is doing it exactly how the patient wanted it? At what point should the patient let go and trust the surgeon to do their job?

"While a number of scholars claim that a lack of citizen engagement is a fatal problem, significant data suggests otherwise"

They make claims about significant data supporting thus, but don't provide it.

"And because lobbyists for the powerful appear to be the main consumers of transparent government, the evidence (below) suggests that governments function even better without a fully informed citizenry."

This doesn't logically follow. One could make lobbying reforms to curtail the problems associated with that while still allowing transparency for the citizens.

"This is because a republic works in much the same way as one might hire a plumber, roofer, surgeon or a mechanic. Indeed, when citizens choose to hire doctors or mechanics, the evidence is pretty clear that even when it comes to possible life threatening outcomes, few of us choose to become as informed as we likely should."

People still need to be vigilant and I formed when dealing with these professions so they don't get ripped off. People should be educating themselves enough to ask intelligent medical questions. People should seek second opinions. People should educate themselves to know the terminology and basic function of a car so they aren't getting ripped off by a mechanic. To People who view the whole situation and know the details, their example is actually an argument against the point they are making.

"By publishing just the final floor votes, the active citizens can still correlate votes to candidates, but by closing the doors of committees, the lobbyists and other extreme demanders are kept in check."

How did they reach this conclusion that lobbyists would be kept in check? Wouldn't lobbyists still be able to see the floor votes? I see no reason would affect the ability of lobbyists to continue their influence.

Most of the rest of the content are quotes, fluff, and supposition about inequality being related to a lack of secrecy. There's no objective data or links to studies.

I appreciate you taking the time to write these out. I want to research it a bit more before replying and also share what you wrote with one of the authors of that site who is a friend of mine, as I think that more evidence may be there just not so directly connected to that one article.

Regardless, for now, thank you.

In looking more at it, I agree with you that that page itself doesn't provide those clear links to studies or citations to back up some of the claims. I hope they add those links in the future because they have a lot of evidence that they've collected on the Citations section of their page.

You can find citations/studies related to Transparency Benefits Lobbyists[0], Transparency Drives Partisanship[1], Transparency is Weaponized[2], Citizens Do Not Monitor Congress[3], Perverse Accountability[4], The Secret Ballot & the Gilded Age[5], The Politics of Intimidation[6], Bad Democracy[7], and a testimony before US Congress in 2019 called "Congressional Transparency: A Word of Caution"[8].

I put the links there just because right now I don't have the time to dig through them to find ones that connect directly to your concerns, but as I said, I hope the authors do illuminate those connections more and in the meantime, I hope you or others may read through some of the evidence behind the more abstracted summaries on the 7 myths page.

EDIT: One quote from that testimony which I just found and think is relevant:

> As I will discuss below, transparency burdens deliberation in two key ways: (1) it empowers organized groups to press their demands in the legislative process; (2) it tends to divert congressional discourse outward toward messaging rather than toward problem solving.

[0]: https://congressionalresearch.org/Citations.html

[1]: https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html

[2]: https://congressionalresearch.org/WeaponizedTransparencyCita...

[3]: https://congressionalresearch.org/CitizensDoNot.html

[4]: https://congressionalresearch.org/PerverseAccountability.htm...

[5]: https://congressionalresearch.org/SecretBallot.html

[6]: https://congressionalresearch.org/BruberyCitations.html

[7]: https://congressionalresearch.org/BadDemocracy.html

[8]: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/MH/MH00/20190510/109468/HHRG...

How's that working out in gerrymandered districts?

All that would accomplish is to hide things from the constituents.

Politicians themselves benefit from the lobbyists. And the politicians who wouldn’t do what the lobbyists wanted any more would just lose elections since they would receive less campaign contributions. Natural selection.

The argument is that if lobbyists can't know for certain how the person would vote, why give them money? If I want to give you $1M and yet I can't be sure you will vote the way I want you to, do I really want to take that gamble?

Why not attack the root cause and forbid political donations to parties and people running for election?

I'd argue because there are lots of ways around such prohibitions. What's considered political speech or campaigning? Is me advocating on HN for a change in Congressional rules considered a campaign? What if I were paid for it? (I'm not, just strongly believe in it). I think it becomes really nebulous to track and define what is considered campaigning or electioneering, and it would be much much easier to just have members of Congress vote using an Aristotle dual urn voting machine [0].

I think the root cause is not political donations but being able to track whether those political donations have the intended effect. I imagine very very few lobbyists would give cash if they couldn't make sure the strings were attached just as they wanted them to be.

[0]: https://congressionalresearch.org/SecretBallot.html

If this turned out to be roadblock then lobbyists would lobby for a new act that overturned this law. It would get a freedom-sounding name like Openness Of Information For a Free America God Bless You Act.

But how would they lobby for that...? you ask. It would go marginally slower because of this temporary roadblock. But the necessary information would nonethless get through by way of more informal means, in the same way that de facto bribery cannot be eliminated by boneheaded laws like “you may not explicitly say that you intend to do something if someone gives you money”. As long as there are lobbyists and politicians and they are allowed to interact... there’s a way.

Or the politicians would just overturn the act by their own initiative since they want that sweet money.

> If this turned out to be roadblock then lobbyists would lobby for a new act that overturned this law. It would get a freedom-sounding name like Openness Of Information For a Free America God Bless You Act.

Yes I agree they'd try.

> But how would they lobby for that...? you ask. It would go marginally slower because of this temporary roadblock.

You seem certain it would happen anyway.

Maybe an analogy: would you prefer that the votes of private citizens were public info? That everyone would know, with certainty, how their neighbor voted? I imagine lobbyists would love certainty over this information. Yes they try their best to guess it with all the voter info they buy and glean from data firms, yet don't have certainty over it.

So why haven't they been able to get public citizen voting records? It actually used to be this way and apparently it could get quite violent, in terms of how people would intimidate each other into voting certain ways[0].

I'm not saying that lobbyists wouldn't find a way to still influence the votes, I just think it would likely be a lot harder than you imagine it would be.

[0]: https://congressionalresearch.org/SecretBallot.html

They could just give them the money after something passes as a reward. At that point it doesn't matter if a specific individual voted for it in a secret vote or not.

Hmm I'm curious, will you say more?

Lobbyists care about results, not that specific people are voting. Secret congressional voting won't affect the money flowing if favorable policies are enacted even if there are some that don't vote in lock step with the lobbyists.

Fair, I'm just curious exactly how it would happen if they had less insight into who was voting for what. Would they have to donate to 51 of the candidates in the Senate? Or to both parties? But if the parties can't see who of their members voted for which bill or even proposed different things in committee, then how would the party leaders bully and intimidate members to follow the party line?

How do you imagine the money would flow if there were more secrecy in the Congressional process? If you were a lobbyist (or more accurately, a rich person who pays lobbyists), how would you do it?

Promise the leaders lots of support if things you want pass, and the leaders can help direct who you should be spreading your support around to. It doesn't matter at the individual level who actually votes for what you want as long as it passes. Let the leaders get the votes to pass it, and then they also concentrate their power and help direct where the rewards for passing it go.

But couldn't the representatives promise the leaders they will vote in one direction but secretly vote the other way? How will the leaders know their followers are telling them the truth on their vote?

They sure could. If things pass they may get away with not voting for something they said they would, to no impact. If things don't pass then money will not be flowing and the leaders will be mad and probably escalate pressure.

The general thought is that lobbyists pay politicians to buy votes. That means they'll do what it takes to make sure they get their money.

But escalate pressure how? Again, assuming that the votes do stay private, how will the leaders know who is lying to them and whom to pressure? Would there be 1 senator pressuring the other 50 to make it pass? But what if it still doesn't pass, does the 1 senator need to pressure all 99 others to try to guarantee it'll pass? If it still doesn't pass, does the 1 senator say we need to sack all 99 of the others?

I agree the general belief is that lobbyists pay politicians to buy votes. I think lobbyists pay much more money to intimidate politicians to vote in certain directions, as it's much cheaper to threaten 100 by paying to make an example of 1, than to pay 100 directly.

So yes, I think they would try to intimidate them, I just don't see how it would actually happen. Perhaps the lobbyists would punish all, just as the teacher punishes the whole class when no one will admit to pulling the prank, or the coach punishes the whole team when no one takes responsibility for a mistake. I just think that for lobbyists to punish the whole team of 100 senators and 435 members of Congress would require a lot more money and would be harder to coordinate than it currently is. Increase the numbers of senators or members of Congress and that could become even more difficult.

I'm not saying it's not possible, it just seems significantly more difficult to intimidate when these details are secret.

First off, they're all lying to everyone. To threaten with imperfect information doesn't mean that it's harder to threaten, they just pick winners and losers on who they think is on their side. We're talking about legalized processes border-lining bribery in some cases. If they want money they'll do whatever they have to do to ensure it gets passed. I'm not sure who these mythical politicians are that behind closed doors say they'll vote for something, then don't vote for it on secret principles, especially if it means they won't get support.

I struggle to see how giving congress more secret authority would do anything but cause more problems.

Maybe the only benefit of this would be to put the emphasis (imho) correctly back on being diligent in electing congress members, but outside of that anything done by the government in secret, is not likely to be done for the people, but rather solely to benefit those with the power to act in secret. The incentives for congress members to act outside of their own selfish interests just doesn't exist in secret.

However, the incentives for congress members to act outside of their party's selfish interests doesn't exist out in the open.

I'm wondering if more closed committees and more secrecy (not full secrecy) would incentivize different people to run for Congress. For example, how many people who are very good at thinking deeply and negotiating and deliberating want to run for Congress now where almost every single decision is scrutinized and often broadcasted on TV? I sure hesitate to run because of how much micro-managing occurs, constantly looking over the shoulder to see if someone is doing their job.

So I wonder if the current transparency initiatives inspire the ones who like to be in front of the cameras, constantly campaigning, more than those who like work together to govern.

if you don't value the affected peoples scrutiny I'm not sure you should be in the position to begin with. How can anyone act as the will of the people without the people knowing what they're doing?

To me that's like saying how can someone be a good developer without letting the customers sit in on every meeting they have and watch the developer code in real-time.

I believe a person can talk with constituents, maybe even 90% of the time, and learn as much from those conversations and then take that info into closed door discussions and negotiate on behalf of those people.

And I think Congress would do a lot better collectively if we cared more about the team performance and less about the individual performance.

In practice Congress was much more effective when things were more secret and currently it's much more effective on topics that don't get much media attention.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secr...

This, as the whole parent premise is fundamentally flawed.

What you propose can only work under specific circumstances, which, even when those circumstances existed, could not thwart the corruption of the system.

I believe quite strongly in what the parent said so I'm confused when you state that it would work in only specific circumstances but I'm open to it.

What specific circumstances do you mean?

Could the same result (plus continued transparency) come from banning political donations from any entity other than an individual citizen?

I view the electoral college system as the canary in the coal mine for voting changes in America. No honest person who is informed about how the electoral college works thinks it’s fair. There are so many possible bad outcomes of it and there are no positives over a direct vote.

If we can’t dismantle the most glaring issue in elections that is the electoral college, I’m not holding my breath for the kind of sweeping reform that would be needed for something as foreign (to the American voting base) as the ranked choice voting

I think there are positives over a direct vote. I like that presidential candidates have to consider the desires of smaller states instead of simply playing to large cities. I think that it produces better outcomes for the country than a direct alternative.

I’m not a fan of my vote not mattering at all because my state is solidly one color or another. Meanwhile rando’s in Pennsylvania matter immensely, and it’s largely just a race to see which side can rally enough people from either the city or the surrounding areas to go to the polls.

I am from Pennsylvania but I have lived many places. I assure you that the randos are everywhere.

Doesn't "rando" just mean "random person"?

It is pejorative.

Against whom? A person who could be randomly selected?

To elaborate: Suppose I said, "Your [loved one] is a rando." That clearly is a negative statement implying that their behavior is irrational (i.e. random).

Urban Dictionary has an entry starting "an unpredictable, awkward and often creepy individual..."

Urban dictionary is not an authoritative source but even that one doesn’t agree with you. Number one definition is “a random person or thing”. The one You referenced is almost net negative votes.

Your example sentence is just not a semantically correct way to use the word.

All of which is pretty pointless because you’re arguing an alternate semantic interpretation vs me, the person who used the word and is stating that’s not what was intended.

The presence of rando’s is not my problem with the situation… obviously?

That's also why complaining about voter turnout in the US is at best annoying and worst dishonest. In most states, including some of the larger ones, it wouldn't change the outcome at all if 100% voted. It's actually surprising that turnout is as high as it is.

That's just another way of saying that an individual in a smaller state is more important than an individual in a large city. The Senate and the electoral college are the modern 3/5ths compromise. Every human in the country ought to have the same ability to influence the outcome of elections, regardless of how much land they own.

Yes. And any city dweller can move to the county or vice versa. The rules of the game are well-known, hence fair.

This is fundamentally wrong because states don’t break votes into urban, suburban, and country voters.

It’s winner takes all for the state.

There are a huge amount of people who’s vote for president does not matter at all due to the voting trends of their state. These people’s only option is to move to a swing state.

This is a nonsense solution to an obviously flawed system of voting that can be fixed incredibly easily

Sorry, I flipped 'country' and 'smaller state' in my response.

Voting is statistical mechanics not a guarantee that you individually matter.

Statistically your vote never matters. It's like the odds of winning the lottery.

> another way of saying that an individual in a smaller state is more important than an individual in a large city

An individual in the country is more able to rebel than an individual in the country. Territorial integrity was the original motivation for the system. It still has arguments for it, though the massive shift in relative economic productivity makes the college, in my opinion, obsolete.

It doesn’t really do that though. All the electoral college does is make presidential campaigns hyper focus on swing states.

You don’t see many presidential candidates stopping over in Vermont.

Yeah, I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Some of the founding fathers that it was fair to give people in smaller states equal representation in the Senate and part of the electoral college, because they didn't want them to be effectively ruled by the people in cities.

I can understand why many people think its unfair, but there's at least an argument to be made that it should exist. OP was saying he has only met people who think it is unfair, but you are pointing out that it exists for a reason.

I do think there is some concern with having people in cities effectively rule over those outside of cities. I could see it resulting in poor economic outcomes for those outside of cities, since rural areas and cities tend to have very different economies. This could lead to some poor outcomes. Like rural areas becoming even less populated, even more political unrest and division, etc.

I also think that the effect of the electoral college giving some individuals more of a vote doesn't come close to the effect wealth gives. Wealth will always generate way more of a "vote" then living somewhere like Wyoming.

It massively benefits the GOP, which is why it will never change.

Ok, by this logic Ranked Choice Voting has about the same chances as the proverbial snowball in hell, because if it gets adopted, it would be bad for both currently dominant parties...

To sum it up, in a two-party system there are three kinds of issues:

- issues which both parties can agree upon (getting fewer and fewer in the US currently).

- issues which benefit one party more than the other, which get polarized, no matter how obvious they seem at first.

- issues which could potentially be bad for both parties, which are not even seriously discussed.

Mmmm, see Australia for their implementation of rank voting and two major political parties.

From what I understand, the EC benefits ‘the States’ as landmasses, and since most of those lands are rural, and rural areas tend to vote GOP, the GOP ultimately benefit.

Obviously it wasn’t set up to be like this: the GOP just evolved to fill the niche of rural politics to get the power. If anything, maybe there was a bias towards physiocrats vs urban liberals in the founders’ day that now manifests as Red v Blue.

I’m not sure if I can see many first principles justifications for giving rural areas such a mechanism of power, but I also don’t see the entire US being dominated by LA and NYC as a good thing either.

"the entire US being dominated by LA and NYC as a good thing either"

This is a ridiculous strawman. One person one vote is a good thing, and LA and NYC do not nearly have a majority of the population ... but if they did, then political outcomes should indeed by dominated by the majority vote.

In (at least) every election since 2000, Democrats in NY and California have been weighted more heavily than they would be under popular vote. Democrats only need %50 + 1 votes in each state to win every electoral college vote in that state, including the ones allocated to those states because of the republican voters who live there. If you do the math, this effect outweighs the slightly lower per capita number of electoral votes.

I've done the math; this is false.

In 2016, between NY and CA, Democrats got 13,309,912 votes out of a total of 136,669,276, or 9.74% of the popular vote. Because of winning NY and CA, they got 84/538 electoral votes, or 15.61%.

Technically, you also need to figure in the fact that by winning NY and CA it also means that some Republican votes in that popular vote denominator are also removed, so it gets a bit more complicated, but here's the full math if you want to check it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1haVZVC3iYBOMwCO2ZZia...

More importantly, political operatives on both sides know how to predict election-related action based on our current system.

Nobody knows how to predict it based on another system, so they're all conservative as in wanting to keep the status quo.

If the voting system changed, there's no telling how many people would start or stop voting based on the new rules.

You're ignoring that it's already easier to campaign in higher density areas. Each urban voter is already easier to reach (knock on doors, have BBQs, bus to polls, etc.).

In the US election system for most of the states right now, there is only 2 logical scenarios

Direct voting (popular votes)

State based (like the senate)

The current electoral college is an arbitrary blend of the two where it’s somewhat proportional (states EC count is roughly related to their population*) but also all states get 1 base vote, plus one per senator— resulting in states like Wyoming having 3 votes despite their tiny population, making each Wyoming citizens vote objectively more impactful than the states with populations above the median

Except this isn’t even true— because it doesn’t matter. Since it’s winner takes all, swing states are all that matters to presidential campaigns. If you’re in a small state that is also dominated by one party, your outsized vote still does not matter

The only effect of the electoral college is to overemphasize swing state’s votes.

> I’m not sure if I can see many first principles justifications for giving rural areas such a mechanism of power

The primary justification to give states such power is that otherwise they might leave the federation. One have to first ask why areas with radically different population density should be governed under the same government, rather than having them rule over themselves.

Two clear examples of non-proportional representation is EU and Iceland. EU has given the 3 smallest nations 6 representative each, which is just a bit less than 1% of the total votes. However if EU used proportional representation they wouldn't even get 1 representative, as the smallest one has less than 0.1% of the population in EU. Germany in contrast holds around 13% of the votes, with about 20% of the total populations.

Iceland has non-proportional representation for a rather obvious reason. Over 51% of people who live in Iceland live in the capital region. A proportional representation democracy would be identical to a dictatorship. In order to avoid this they gave each rural area just enough representatives so that the sum would have more votes than the capital alone. If all rural area went together they decide, but the capital by virtue of being the biggest region still holds the power in practically all situations.

> Iceland has non-proportional representation for a rather obvious reason. Over 51% of people who live in Iceland live in the capital region. A proportional representation democracy would be identical to a dictatorship.

But Iceland has proportional representation. I wonder whether you mean that it doesn't have at-large proportional representation (i.e. only one district). If so, I tend to agree that merging all of the districts would be a backwards step. Having said that, I still believe it would be far from a dictatorship.

It benefits rural voters.

If Democrats stopped being the party of city people, they could compete for that vote.

It does not benefit rural voters. It only benefits swing states.

You don’t see many candidates campaigning in Nebraska instead of Florida

That's a separate issue.

I'm talking about this one:

Nebraska has a 2.0M population and 5 electors = 0.4M people per elector California has a 39M population and 55 electors = 0.7M people per elector.

Let's put it on the table, not that it's going to matter - it benefits the white establishment.

The US was founded by white supremacist slaveowners taking stolen land through genocide and warfare. Its power structures were designed to maintain that status quo - keeping the white establishment in power while disenfranchising all other groups. That this race-based stratification of power is less overt now as it was in the 18th century isn't relevant, those power structures and the incentives they created still exist and still favor the white establishment. The "rural vs city-dwellers" and "population" debates tend to be proxies for race - the population in urban areas skews nonwhite, the population in rural areas is overwhelmingly white. The American right and the Republican party have, implicitly and explicitly, voiced their concern and fear of losing white power to a demographic shift towards minority status for years.

If that weren't the case, the electoral college would probably have been dumped ages ago. It's arcane and awkward and is only good for that one thing.

Please read some history. Framing America's founding in racism is dishonest at best. The history of every civilization has been of one group in power doing what it can to maintain power. Race has absolutely nothing to do with the power dynamic.

While westward expansion did kill many natives at the hands of settlers, not just white, the majority of the native population had already expired long before westward expansion. Diseases introduced by Europeans wiped out an estimated 90% of the native population before the colonies were established. By the time of Manifest Destiny the Americas were empty compared to pre-European contact populations.

You're not really contradicting anything in my comment so much as restating it more politely.

Yes, power dynamics have been central to every civilization. And at the time of the founding of the US - as a British colony - the power dynamics of Imperial Britain as well as the US were based on white supremacy, with the colonizing, subjugation and "civilization" of nonwhite societies being an expression of that. Race, relative to both slavery and manifest destiny, was integral to the philosophy and implementation of early American society.

And the US wasn't so empty that the government felt no need to wage the Indian Wars, enact the Indian Removal Act, or push natives onto reservations. Ben Franklin's famous (and often misunderstood) quote about security versus liberty was made in the context of seeking greater Federal power to fend off native attacks. The genocide of a relatively small population is still genocide, but clearly there were still enough natives to be a persistent cause for concern to the colonists.

My primary contention with your original comment is the framing of actions as white supremacists or racist. Neither white supremacy nor racism were driving forces in the founding or expansion of the US. History would have played out the same way even if all humans were purple. The native populations were weak in population and militarily. The persistent push of settlers was bound to meet resistance in the form of violence. Before the US military was involved in securing the west, some tribes had already been slaughtering settlers to protect their territory the same as they would for invading tribes. It isn't like the US government just decided to wipe out a peaceful people. It was literally war. Along with war comes the denigration of "the other" to make convincing your army to kill them easier. Skin color just happened to be an easily identifiable feature of "the other" that was used in that denigration. If we were all purple it would have been some other feature to identify the other. You can see this in the histories of wars where both sides were the same race.

The history of the US is no different than every other empire that has existed.

The first problem with the EC as a target for voting reform is that voting reform, since it goes against the personal interest of elected officials, needs very broad popular support to succeed. (This tends to be true of changing any political system.) But the EC means that some regions will likely oppose voting reform quite vigorously.

The second problem is that the EC basically only affects the Presidential election (unless you restructure the Senate, but just look at the filibuster debate to see how that goes), but most candidates get to there downstream of other elections. And in the other elections, some depressingly large proportion of legislative districts and even some entire states are lock-ins for one party. All of that is most feasibly addressed by state-level reforms that won't be part of an EC change.

So it's very hard, and it's not enough. That's not great.

I think the system would be incredibly unfair without something to balance the votes among states. The real problem is that the president/federal government has too much power, things shouldn't change drastically from one president to the next.

Imagine if every time you had a block party everyone voted on the type of food, but there was one huge family that shared a dietary preference that most of the other families disliked. You would have to go with what they said every time, just because they aren't keeping their household population under control. Some might say it would be more fair to give every family a vote, but If someone lives alone their vote would count way more than someone living with 20 others. The next step would be something like the electoral college.

That said, they should definitely get rid winner-takes-all per state, and increase the amount of votes for every state.

I think it would be nice if every state had 100 electoral votes that mapped to the percentage points of who their population voted for.

>>No honest person who is informed about how the electoral college works thinks it’s fair.

I do, because I support the concept of Federalism and I do not believe in a Centralized "America" I believe in 50 independent States, a Republic

I also think popular vote for senate was a mistake. The States need to have power over the federal government not just the people.

The US Constitution reserves powers and rights to both the people AND the States for a reason, that reason is the fact that our system of government is a Federalist Republic, not a strait representative democracy. Nor would I support a transition to a strait representative democracy as I believe the federal government is far far far too powerful today

I would support changes to the Electoral College, like the Wyoming Rule, or requiring all states to delegate their votes Proportionally by congressional district instead of Winner take all, etc but calls for elimination of the Electoral College are short sighted and ill advised

Yeah, the independant states is a feature, not a bug.

And afaik, each state can choose how to implement voting for itself. So, they could move to a proportional system for EC votes. (Altough, I personally think that making it based on US wide popular/proportional vote, rather than state wide would be a mistake)

My top 5 reforms would be

1. Wyoming Rule, expanding the size of the house

2. Electoral College 1 vote goes to who ever wins each Congressional district in the state, with the 2 state wide Votes going to who wins the entire state

3. Instant Run off or Ranked Choice Voting for all federal positions

4. Removal of party affiliation from ballot, vote for people not parties

5. Congressional districts should be set by non-political entity, like the Postal Service, or some other entity not state legislatures. This one I am less clear on, but gerrymandering would cause huge problems for #2.

You should also be opposed to the electoral college then.

The electoral college vote count is still based on population counts.

The electoral college accomplishes none of the goals of republic style voting you’d like, nor the direct popular vote that others want

"The electoral college accomplishes none of the goals of republic style voting you’d like, nor the direct popular vote that others want"

Isn't that basically the goal in the US - balance of power between the states and feds, as well as between democracy and republic? Similar to the house of representatives vs senate.

The states also have control over how they want to divide the votes (proportional, winner take all, etc). Not that it's necessarily fair. But I don't see a straight popular vote being completely fair either (depending on the definition we're using, like equal vs equitable).

I think you have confused a feature for a bug.

Correct in that the Electoral College is not a full Republic, that is no the intent, nor is it desired.

There should always be a mix of power, power for the people, and power for the States. the Electoral College attempts to balance that by granting 2 Votes for every state no matter the population, then granting another amount of votes based on population. The 2 votes representing the state (i.e the Senate which was originally the states Representatives in Congress), and Equal number of votes to representatives in Congress, (i.e the People)

In this way both "stakeholders" the States and the People are represented in the federal government

> No honest person who is informed about how the electoral college works thinks it’s fair.

Correct. The EC is unfair by design. It was was never about fair for voters, it was about growing and keeping the nation together. The EC and Senate both are to ensure that citizens of less populous states are heard, and without both, the nation would devolve (if you are not from one of the five most populous states) to whatever the five most populous states wanted, every time.

This. We'd talk about Chicago voters instead of Nebraska voters. There are pros and cons either way, but we won't have consensus to change (a supermajority is required) any time soon.

Note that more polarization is possible if the purpose and power of the states lessens. Even deep blue and deep red states have regions with different perspectives.

… you don’t talk about Nebraska voters. Nebraska is not a swing state— there was an almost 20 point difference in 2020.

All that the electoral college does is make it so the only states that matter are swing states.

We talk about Pennsylvania, not Illinois, even though they have the same electoral votes count

Swing states change over time, slowly, but they change. You can't view the EC and Senate through partisan analysis - their purpose is much deeper than that. It's more about why Nebraska is willing to give up quite a bit of sovereign power to be part of the US, and not about who wins the next election.

It’s not partisan analysis to take issue with the statement

“The person who wins the presidential election is not the person that most people voted for”

I can objectively say that I have an issue with that statement regardless of the party that wins

> “The person who wins the presidential election is not the person that most people voted for”

This indicates that you simply disagree with the EC, not that it is in some way a failure. The EC is not about fairness to voters, it is one of the two concessions that are made to less populous states to ensure that they would join and stay in the Union.

The Senate gets the less populous states heard.

The EC still results in most of them being ignored. Just because its dynamics mean California also gets ignored doesn't mean the EC doesn't actually make picking up voters in small non-swing states even less important and votes in Florida even more important.

The five most popular states add up to less than half the population and have very different political climates and priorities.

Is Florida much of a swing state anymore. It seems Atlanta makes Georgia a bigger battleground than Florida which has quickly become a cultural/political center for one side in particular.

Definitely seems to be trending Republican, but it's one the Dems will care much more about trying to pick up half a million votes in than a million votes spread across smaller states which still won't flip and wouldn't necessarily be worth as much if they did.

> The Senate gets the less populous states heard.

Yes. But this gives no say in selecting the head of the executive branch at all.

> The EC still results in most of them being ignored.

The reason that swing states even matter is the EC. Without the EC, the only thing that matters is the popular vote, and only the large cities would matter in electing the President. It's a hack that is inherently unfair to populous areas, but is the main reason joining the Union makes sense to less populated states.

The votes of large cities matter no more than an equal number of voters in rural counties in a popular vote (and you'll hear at least as much difference between the priorities of different groups of voters in the city). With the EC, votes in most states matter even less (not only are there not many voters to appeal to, picking up extra votes there isn't going to change the EC outcome). Just because California now gets ignored doesnt mean candidates don't also care even less about Alaska or Hawaii.

It's not even inherently unfair to populous areas, it's just extraordinarily skewed towards a few contestable states, mainly the large ones. A single suburb of Philadelphia and Miami matters more for a real world Presidential election campaign than most states.

A single district can be very important in deciding a state. As can a single small state in a close election.

We already have ranked choice voting in SF/Oakland, and I think it's slowly expanding in the region.

Works pretty well, but I can't say I've noticed any increased sanity in local politics :)

The electoral college is among the hardest things to change, since it's on the federal level and in the constitution.

If they removed the 435-member limit on the House and instead had the originally-recommended proportion of voters to reps we'd end up with 5k reps or something like that. A state's electoral college votes is the sum of its house representation + 2 (senators). So this would also make the electoral college somewhat more representative, as larger population states gain more EC votes.

Yes, this is the most fair solution if you’re looking to have a presidential election outcome more likely to represent how people actually voted.

But 5000 is arbitrary— and the more you add, the closer the number is to how people actually voted

So just set the number equal to the amount of votes cast by individual citizens then rebrand it to something like “the popular vote”

That would require a constitutional amendment, which is basically impossible for this change (no small state would ever agree). Increasing the size of the House of Representatives would not.

The best reform would be the Wyoming Rule, that says that the standard representative-to-population ratio would be that of the smallest state, under such a model the House would be 573 Members instead of 435

What you should say is "the electoral college system doesn't give me the outcomes I want so we should change it".

The electoral college system was designed with intent.

It's like when people complain Congress is deadlocked. Yeah, that's the point, if enough members of Congress can't agree, the it should be deadlocked.

That's a feature, not a bug.

> That's a feature, not a bug.

In the same way fever dreams are a feature, maybe…

I can objectively say that I take issue with the statement

“The winner of the presidential election is not the person who received the most votes from citizens”

Regardless of the party of the winner.

> It's like when people complain Congress is deadlocked. Yeah, that's the point, if enough members of Congress can't agree, the it should be deadlocked.

This is a meaningless statement when you consider there is only one president. The person cannot disagree with themself. The executive branch does not have to debate and compromise with itself.

I mean, the Prime Minister of Canada is not the person who receives the most votes. They are the leader of the party who gets the most seats (not the most votes as the last election shows). If the Prime Minister loses in their riding (constituency), they'll actually run them again in another one that guarantees they'll win. So in Canada (and Parliamentary system in general), the voters have even less say in who their executive leader is.

The is nothing inherently anti-democratic about not electing via popular vote.

The Founding Fathers deliberately designed a system different from "the most votes wins the Presidency". They were trying to avoid the exact scenario that would happen today with popular voting - 3 or 4 states would decide the Presidency alone. Not much point in having United States of America if most of the states had no say in their leadership.

Remember that the electoral college was designed with the same _intent_ that the 3/5ths compromise was. It was desperation to get everyone on board, not sound political science. It was designed to purposely give smaller states outsized voices because that's what it took to convince a small state to give up total autonomy to this new, untested, group of states thing.

Same intent? You mean deny full voting privileges? Can you provide a source?

I mean, the way the Bill of Rights was written was the same intent - to get everyone on board.

But I’m not prepared to throw out the first amendment because of it.

It was designed with the intent to allow slave-holding states like Virginia with huge populations but that allowed hardly any of them to vote to not get outvoted by smaller states that allowed all male inhabitants to vote.

The intent it was designed with is the worst part of the electoral college and was fundamentally unjust and corrupt.

I think we could put every American citizen in a hat who:

Has voted for the last 3 elections

No criminal record

Over the age of 25

HS diploma with a 3.0 GPA

and pick Congress at random with fixed terms and end up with better than what we have now: a bunch of lying, corrupt careerists that do nothing but serve their corporate donor masters.

Contrary to popular belief, you can be incompetent, unintelligent, and bereft of integrity and be rich, I know these people personally. Being rich is not a good litmus test for public office which is what we have now.

Drop the diploma req, and sure, that's a good idea.

At least drop the GPA requirement. I found most homework annoying and unnecessary, so I skipped it but I aced the tests. Frustrated the hell out of my parents and teachers and led to lower overall grades, but I learned everything I needed to and turned out alright in the end.

We'd probably get better results if we inverted your criteria honestly. Someone who didn't graduate high school and has a criminal record has first-hand experience with the worst our system has to offer, likely close ties to people it is failing badly right now.

Just because someone has experience with the criminal system doesn't mean they know how to fix it properly

The high school degree is necessary to ensure the person can understand the choices presented to them. Otherwise they will just be snowed by experts who claim one thing or the other.

The lack of a criminal record is necessary won’t just commit fraud or accept bribes from day one.

And also overall, people have to accept who is randomly chosen to be the president. Having a criminal with a elementary school education chosen would just lead to riots. It’s one thing if they were elected, but if it’s a choice made by a “random” system then that’s not acceptable.

Why not replace a diploma with a Net Worth or Income requirement. Someone with a 2.0 GPA, but has at least $10,000 in savings is clearly more fiscally responsible than someone who has a 4.0 GPA but is in debt. Something similar is already the law for accredited investors.

> Someone with a 2.0 GPA, but has at least $10,000 in savings is clearly more fiscally responsible than someone who has a 4.0 GPA but is in debt.

Or maybe the second person was born into a low income family and is borrowing to invest in their future, and the first person is useless at more than just academics but has a trust fund.

Accredited investor laws are because rich idiots can afford to lose money, not because their judgement is considered superior.

That makes no sense. The vast majority of people go in debt when they get a mortgage and don't come out until at least a decade later. Debt is a tool when used properly.

> The high school degree is necessary to ensure the person can understand the choices presented to them.

I disagree. I think any criteria for sortition harms it's legitimacy and creates an avenue to disenfranchise large segments of the population.

I am a big fan of sortition though, as I think elections select worse leaders with worse traits than the average citizen while the way we fund elections actively corrupts the few decent leaders we do manage to elect.

Edit: I also wouldn't support inserting sortition directly into our current selection process or ever for selecting a chief executive. Sortition only works if you have enough random picks to get a good representative sample. Otherwise the risks of selecting a massive outlier are to high.

I do agree that it can be used to disenfranchise people, however it’s unavoidable to create legitimacy.

If we didn’t have a minor education requirement (minor because high school is free and is seen as the basic education that everyone has), then an age requirement can be substituted. For example, invoking the current age requirement of 35 to become president if you do not have a high school education so at least we know that you have life experience as a substitute.

As for the criminal requirement, felons already can’t vote and participate in the electoral system so it’s questionable that many would accept felons being “randomly” chosen to lead the country. One could easily imagine and protest that a mafia kingpin who wins office by random chance did so by subverting the lottery. True or not, it’s believable enough to destroy legitimacy and throw the country into chaos.

> felons already can’t vote and participate in the electoral system

In some places, yes. This is already viewed as problematic disenfranchisement by many people.

> invoking the current age requirement of 35 to become president

In sortition, your ability to serve in office becomes your "vote". The age requirement of 35 in a sortition system disenfranchises younger voters in a massive way while in our current system it does not.

In sortition, selecting the "good ones" who are in the lottery is just a problematic as selecting the "good ones" who are allowed to vote in elections. While that doesn't mean we should have no restrictions, it does mean those restrictions should face very high levels of scrutiny and be treated as biased by default.

> it’s questionable that many would accept felons being “randomly” chosen to lead the country.

But again, sortition only works well if your sample is large enough to be reliably representative. It won't work well for selecting a president from a nation or selecting 2 senators from an entire state. This is because a sample of size 1 or 2 will always be prone to selecting outliers.

> who wins office by random chance did so by subverting the lottery

The integrity of the lottery, like the integrity of elections, is crucial to it's legitimacy. Our lack of experience with making this sort of selection process transparent, accountable, and hard to subvert is to me the biggest argument against sortition.

> be prone to selecting outliers.

I didn't phrase this well. I meant "selecting a highly disproportionate number of outliers" since having a large sample will also have outliers, but but will be much less likely to over represent those outliers in the majority in a significant way.

This is called "sortition", and Wikipedia has an interesting discussion of the history and pros/cons of such an approach.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I'd personally love to see it tried at a state or local level first.

Congress? Ok.

As long as we don't have that same high standard for POTUS. I don't know if 45 or 46 would have qualified.

You aren’t a felon if you never get prosecuted.

Boom.

There are tons of leaders who would not be eligible for office (felonies) if they were charged. Once they take office they're basically untouchable too.

Not sure the problem? I mean...I'd happily take a mulligan on those elections.

Sortition like this is an interesting idea, but you have forgotten that people who meet those criteria can be emotionally disturbed, mentally compromised, in a coma, physically unable to perform.

Also, what level of a criminal record? Only Felonies (i.e. "serious crimes") and above? Misdemeanors? Even a traffic ticket?

I'll also point out that not all HS diplomas are equal, HS in a few states like NY, Cali, Michigan, are far more rigorous/difficult than schools in say Alabama or Mississippi.

I'm reminded of efforts that most people put forth in limiting suffrage, any criteria you come up with tends to be very blind.

I've personally thought that Sortition is a great idea, but I thought using a system more like Jury duty would be better. Grab your random candidates and then have them interviewed by a few bipartisan lawyers and judges to make sure they're not obviously horrific people.

Horrific as we've recently seen is horrifically subjective. And we don't do much better at voting. I'd pick a few objective rules (perhaps the ones above) and leave it at that.

The problem with a system like this, is that the criminal justice system and educational system is now being politicized. If you want some specific people not to assert power in the system, then you create an educational system that gives them low grades or a criminal justice system that ensures they have a criminal record.

I think done right, this might work. However, one concern I have is the same concern I have with jury trials. Its easy enough to get out of jury duty, and anecdotally it seems like juries are usually filled with folks that aren't quite able to grasp how to take advantage of the system.

Would the same thing happen here?

Second issue, one I have thought a lot about. Would these same people write legislation or just propose it and vote on it? I think the challenge is also writing good legislation.

Lastly, you have to worry that corporations will just offer folks in this new congress paid positions to support business friendly legislation, when they are replaced. That would probably be cheap for them. Edit: Maybe not though, if the number of issues each group worked on before rotating out was very small.

I also have issues with the other criteria but in particular

> Over the age of 25

We have a situation (not just in the US) where old people make decisions that have strong repercussions for the younger generations and the ones affected the most can't do anything about it. If anything we should be lowering the age to vote and get into public office. Clearly the older generations have shown that they are incapable of fixing the real issues.

The world is complex as are its problems. Older folks seem to see that more. There’s a reason wars and religions prey on the young. I think that is valuable enough to have a minimum limit. I’m only in my early 30s but I sure had a lot more wrong ideas in early 20s.

I think that's overly simplistic. Look at who is starting the wars, it's almost always old men. Right at the moment it is a >70 year old, while the ones dying are the young people.

Very generally speaking:

Older people acquire life experience and wisdom, which lets them make better decisions; but their decisions are typically conservative as they are invested in "the way things are today". (It's worked fine this way for 50 years, why change now?)

Younger people have fresh ideas and less investment in "the way things are today", but lack the maturity to make wise decisions. (This is hot garbage, we need to completely throw it away and start from scratch.)

See also, we already have laws regarding age of candidacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy_laws_in_the_U...

> Very generally speaking:

> Older people acquire life experience and wisdom, which lets them make better decisions; but their decisions are typically conservative as they are invested in "the way things are today". (It's worked fine this way for 50 years, why change now?)

I'd like to see some actual statistics on this. It has certainly been the case that many of the companies that resulted in big economic changes were made by <30 year olds in the last decades. So there's at least a counterpoint that older people make better economic decisions.

> Younger people have fresh ideas and less investment in "the way things are today", but lack the maturity to make wise decisions. (This is hot garbage, we need to completely throw it away and start from scratch.)

> See also, we already have laws regarding age of candidacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy_laws_in_the_U...

I'm aware of it, and I was directly alluding to these, moreover I think it's outrageous that > 80 year olds can still hold office (some of them with quite obvious dementia). I think there is very strong scientific evidence that beyond 80 years your mental capabilities significantly declines. So if it is about good decision making, why are these people allowed to continue?

Approval voting is simultaneously simpler to understand, more effective in achieving results voters are happy with, and is inherently de-polarizing for obvious reasons. It's also very easy to understand why someone won when the winning criteria is "be the person that the largest number of voters are okay with".

Approval voting is very sensitive to strategic voting. Outside of toy elections where people are altruistically trying to find the best candidate, it reverts to similar dynamics as First-Past-the-Post.

Has this been demonstrated?

I can't be bothered to search for academic papers, but I've seen it use in real elections to designate party candidates. Voters were absolutely rabid, marking exclusively for candidates from their group. The largest group gets a clean slate and the unaligned voters, instead of acting like swings, are simply ignored.

This misses the point dramatically.

If someone is favoured by a large enough group, they're supposed to win.

The point is what happens when people aren't fanatical but are forced to vote as if they were.

The point is to have fair representation. If a 30% fanatical minority can get a 100% clean slate for its candidates by voting strategically, AV fails.

In a single winner election AV makes coordination among moderates somewhat easier, so it's an improvement, but still inferior to Ranked Choice/STV with multi-member districts.

This probably is a difference in PoV based on how many of your elections are multi-winner versus single-winner.

I was mostly thinking about single-winner elections because the big headline elections in the US are all single-winner.

AV is great for a single winner. As you have noticed, if you elect multiple winners the "naive" way then you can get unproportional outcomes. However, there are simple ways to use approval to elect winners proportionally! One easy example is this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_proportional_approv...

Approval voting gets very good results even under asymmetrical strategy.

https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key

Your scenario is unrealistic because real humans aren't that tightly clustered, so you get defectors. And people vote strategically. The winning position is the centroid.

https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW

It is not known whether proportional representation can compete with the best single winner voting methods. We don't have enough data and we can't do multi-winter Bayesian regret calculations confidently. Here's an article you really should read if you think proportion representation is the answer.

https://www.rangevoting.org/PropRep

There is a litany of research showing that proportional representation leads to more representative and stable democracies, both in terms of empirical outcomes and normative political theory. Saying we don't have enough data just because some borderline-crackpot blogger doesn't like it is pretty disingenuous.

Here's a compilation of the best expert research, arguing for and against PR. https://www.rangevoting.org/PropRep

A. The research compares proportional (PR) methods to plurality voting, the worst single-winner voting method there is. But superior methods like score voting and approval voting roughly double the accuracy (i.e. group welfare) compared to plurality voting. So no, there's no research showing the superiority of PR to these methods.

B. Even in that limited comparison, of PR to plurality voting, the data still is actually not that clear. For instance, Canada uses plurality voting rather than PR, and is rated as one of the most high functioning democracies by The Economist. Meanwhile lots of proportional democracies are far worse than plurality countries. Compare proportional Brazil (and several other Latin countries) to non-proportional UK, Canada, and USA.

> It is not known whether proportional representation can compete with the best single winner voting methods.

I don't know the metric you are using here, but it is surely purely academic, as the rest of your comment. The idea that a single candidate can better represent a smaller (and usually gerrymandered) district than a larger number of diverse candidates in a larger district flies in the face of everything we know about real democracies and party systems.

> Your scenario is unrealistic because real humans aren't that tightly clustered, so you get defectors.

Again, theoretical claims against real world experience. I've experienced polarization in AV to the point where center becomes a wasted vote, and people are incentivized to support one of the two dominant slates.

Approval voting has a single winner, which seems to not be the scenario you are talking about.

Perhaps you were using one of these variants.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiwinner_approval_voting

You should probably specify to avoid confusion.

> The idea that a single candidate can better represent a smaller (and usually gerrymandered) district than a larger number of diverse candidates in a larger district flies in the face of everything we know about real democracies and party systems.

This is simply not correct. Elections are a form of statistical sampling, and with a good single-winner voting method, all voters of every stripe affect the centroid position, "tugging" it left, right, etc. Which you can see graphically depicted here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

> Again, theoretical claims against real world experience.

You're not citing any real world data that contradicts my argument.

> I've experienced polarization in AV to the point where center becomes a wasted vote, and people are incentivized to support one of the two dominant slates.

If you mean "alternative vote" (known to experts like myself as "Instant Runoff Voting"), note that I'm not advocating that. I'm advocating cardinal methods such as score voting and approval voting. Which tend to elect broadly appealing centrists.

https://www.rangevoting.org/IrvExtreme

on the contrary, approval voting is specifically beloved by game theory experts for its immense resistance to tactical voting. for instance, NYU professor of political science and *game theory*, steven brams.

bayesian regret and voter satisfaction efficiency calculations show approval voting generally outperforming alternatives such as instant runoff voting ("ranked choice voting") with any mixture of strategic or honest voters.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key

part of the reason this happens is that the IRV/RCV tabulation mechanism flat out ignores much of the preference information on the ballot. https://www.rangevoting.org/IrvIgnoreExample.html

approval voting is also just much more resistant to gamesmanship. it satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion", meaning it can never hurt you to support your favorite candidate with approval voting. for instance, my aunt voted for biden even tho she preferred warren, to try to stop trump. if she had been ranking them in a single IRV/RCV election, she would have analogously ranked biden in 1st even tho she preferred warren. this kind of tactic means electability is still key, and it disadvantages third party and independent candidates.

with approval voting by contrast, she might strategically vote for biden (her 2nd choice) but she would still be free to also approve warren, as that could not possibly cause a worse outcome for her.

the center for election science has a good compilation of the best articles on tactical voting.

https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/

there's also an excellent book on the topic, called "gaming the vote".

https://www.amazon.com/Gaming-Vote-Elections-Arent-About/dp/...

Superficially it's simpler to understand. The actual tactics are even more complex than FPTP (and unlike ranked choice, it's not potential edge cases where rank order matters but every vote involving a decision about how low a bar of "wouldn't absolutely hate them running the country" to set for the people you approve vs the "every additional vote I approve might hurt the candidate I actually want to win)

I do agree that it tends to be depolarising in the candidates that win, but at the same time it still strongly incentivises moderates to ensure the most partisan alternative candidates get plenty of campaign airtime (both to scare moderates who identify with the other side of the aisle into putting "approve" next to their relatively moderate name, and as a "dirty tricks" campaign to promote the idea of bullet voting the other side's radicals to the other side's base)

> The actual tactics are even more complex than FPTP

Maybe marginally? How would you describe the tactics of FPTP? They may be simpler, but in some elections it is the difference of expressing your actual preferences and voting for "who you have to."

The nice thing with AV that I often see overlooked is that it always in a voters interest to vote for their favorite candidate. This is called the favorite betrayal criterion, and nearly all ordinal voting methods (inc FPTP) fail it.

Even still though - the UX, strategy, counting, and expressing results of ranked choice voting (IRV) is considerably more complex than both AV and FPTP. And its failure of the precinct summability criterion is a huge liability that we could just avoid entirely.

If you are in favor of other types of ranking, such as Borda, why not just Score? Score is counted identically, but without the restriction of "you can only vote for one candidate in each rank or we'll toss your ballot."

I agree that it would be nicer to give a more nuanced vote than just like/dislike, but I personally see AV as a stepping stone to other, more nuanced forms of Cardinal Voting. And who knows? Many online interfaces have moved from the star system in favor of thumbs up/down, and none that I'm aware of use ranking. Maybe there is an argument for a simpler UX in order to get more people to engage.

Approval voting is hard. My voting preferences pretty much match ranked-choice model, but approval requires reducing that to just two levels, so setting the bar is either arbitrary, or requires much information about decisions of other people.

This is a common intuition-based fallacy. The total information throughput of approval voting is actually GREATER than for ranked methods, when you factor in the tabulation efficiency and tactical voting effects.

https://electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-approv...

Ranked Choice does suffer from some mathematical irregularities, see http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ (2006)

Ranked Choice has had some notable unexpected outcomes, see https://bolson.org/~bolson/2009/20090303_burlington_vt_mayor...

Approval voting still suffers from the tyranny of the mainstream parties. There will be conservatives who only vote for Democrats or Republicans, making it so that people who want real change by voting Green/Libertarian would have to not approve-vote their fallback D/R to have any chance of G/L winning. The main utility would be the public referendum on how much support each party has.

Score voting collapses to approval voting under strategy.

The right answer is "Ranked choice voting", but not with runoff but rather Condorcet. Condorcet specifies that the winner is the candidate who beats every other candidate in a pairwise matching. The single drawback of Condorcet - the possibility of having no Condorcet winner - is overblown. It's the equivalent of a tie in a plurality election. If the current standard tiebreaker mechanism is not good enough (eg another election), then the tie could be broken by taking the same ranked choices and translating them into a heuristic based on approval voting, score voting, etc.

Bullet voting is an overblown “weakness” of Approval and Score. “I only voted for my honest favorite” is not a huge drawback, IMO. Nevertheless, in the actual municipal elections using Approval Voting in St. Louis and Fargo, voters on average approved of more than one candidate. And in Score there is incentive to use middle ratings because not doing so increases the probability that a popular candidate you're lukewarm on gets overtaken by a candidate you deeply dislike.

The value of STAR voting is that it reduces even further the incentive to bullet vote. By introducing a Condorcet-esque runoff of the top two finalists, every voter is strongly incentivized to use meaningful middle scores in order to have a say in the outcome of the runoff.

IRV/RCV, on the other hand, can punish voters for voting honestly. The more viable candidates there are in the field, the more likely your top ranking for your honest favorite will result in benefitting your least preferred. Given that one of the qualities most every election reform advocate wants is to see a larger field packed with viable candidates, this drawback of IRV is especially detrimental.

> “I only voted for my honest favorite” is not a huge drawback

It's a drawback because the input model prevents voters from expressing their actual preference. If individual voters' preferences cannot be meaningfully expressed, then the outcome isn't valid regardless of how reasonable the tallying looks. (see also: Plurality)

For example, let's say that I want L/G to win, but will begrudgingly accept a D win to prevent an R win at all costs. With Approval or Score voting, I am unable to simply express this preference! With Approval voting, my two options are to leave out D and create a higher chance of R winning, or include D and have a higher chance of L/G losing. And Score voting just allows me to create a weighted blend of the two - how much do I want to hurt L/G to help D beat R?

I don't see how STAR doesn't similarly fall to the two party tyranny. The top two scores will be the two popular parties, which votes then choose between. Putting "Condorcet" after another system seems pointless.

> IRV ... The more viable candidates there are in the field, the more likely your top ranking for your honest favorite will result in benefitting your least preferred

I wholeheartedly agree about IRV (which describes a tallying method). I'm talking about reframing "RCV" (which describes the input method, rather than the tallying method) to be tallied with Condorcet rather than greedy-algorithm runoffs. We can then debate which heuristics or procedures are appropriate for breaking any Condorcet ties.

The only voter preference RCV+Condorcet prevents is the ability to express an individual circular preference (A>B>C>A). But I've seen no arguments about why that would even be a reasonable preference to want to express.

Instant Pairwise Runoff and similar Condorcet methods seem like they would produce good results, though I'm averse to unsummable methods for practical reasons. But I think there's more nuance than saying a ranking method better captures voter preference than Approval because there's numbers. An ordinal method loses information about the distance between ranks. A voter could strongly prefer two candidates and then despise the rest of the pack pretty equally, and much of that distinction is lost in ranking. And the overall end result, even if it doesn't end up electing a despised candidate, is making a despised candidate look like they're the third most popular. That information helps shape who's involved in future elections.

There is a much simpler system with a proven track record, used in many democratic countries: two-rounds voting [1]. Just vote a second time for one of the two top candidates if no candidate reached 50% of more.

I'm convinced this would deeply, radically change the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system

We have run offs in Texas but get extremely low turnout partially because they are not advertised, either by the government or the candidates. I can't imagine its cheap either, for the government, candidates, or the voters.

This is why I prefer calling the version of Ranked Choice Voting I seeing being pushed as Instant Runoff because it makes how it works and the advantages clear.

That's the system we have in Brazil and we don't have a less polarized political situation currently, neither a stronger democracy, I believe.

Hey, I recently wrote a post about an idea on this: https://blog.vslira.net/2022/05/negative-voting.html?m=1

What do you think? Basically second round stays the same, but on 1st you can either vote for or against a candidate, “against” votes simply deduct from their “for” votes

My first reaction is a sum of “stick with the devil you know” and “the simpler the better”. So I would be against changing.

I like what we have in Brazil (for executive elections), and I think it is better than what they have in the US. But I don’t think changing the US system to two rounds will make things better there. That might sound contradictory, but I think sticking with a voting system has benefits for democracy, even if, in isolation, that system is subpar. Predictability is voting system is very desirable in a democracy, I think. Same with trust.

I think we have to improve democracy by other means, not a simple “fix” through a voting system. I don’t know what those other means are. It is a complex system. But I am skeptical that changing voting systems is part of the solution.

I agree, there’s no single tweak that would “fix democracy”. I’m just assuming that something like this could improve voting expressiveness in exchange for just a little bit of complexity.

It's not that different, two rounds is approximately equivalent to ranked-choice with one round of preference distributions. With the added uncertainty of different voting attendance, and people changing their preference between rounds.

That is essentially the primary and election we already have

The American South already has two-round voting.

This is actually a thing for US Congress races in a number of states, including Georgia and California, I believe. The issue that comes up is that it consistently rewards a stronger party - for instance, if the population is, let's say, 30% hardcore party A, 30% hardcore party B, and 40% who could go either way, what often happens is if party A runs 2 candidates only, and party B runs 5 with a diversity of ideas, party B could end up winning 60% of the vote overall, but at 12% per candidate, and party A could win just 40% spread across 2 candidates, but have both of their candidates easily make the runoff.

It may be better in a world where there's 5+ real parties who will never back down from each other, but even in that case, it seems like it rewards parliamentary-style coalitions where if you're polling at 5% or so, you just tell your supporters to support a stronger candidate you mostly agree with so that you don't get locked out of the final vote entirely, and you're back to essentially either a two-party system, or a two-party system with minor parties that mostly play spoiler to the main party by pulling off votes.

One of the biggest issues I tend to find with a lot of voting proposals is that they seem to assume that the parties and candidates will act only to serve their party/candidate directly, and not strategically run/withdraw in order to help/hurt other candidates, or collude with each other to game the system.

These do exist in some states, under the name runoff elections. They cost campaigns and taxpayers a lot of money, and election turnout in the US is already bad enough without having people return to the polls a second time.

https://www.thirdway.org/memo/high-costs-and-low-turnout-for...

We can barely get people to vote once. Why do you think we could get people to vote twice?

We can't count paper "yes/no" votes in a way that everyone is happy with.

Something more complicated that requires math? How're we going to convince anybody that the results are fair? Let them calculate the totals themselves?

Unfortunately, people don't trust what they can't understand easily either, which is why I think math based voting techniques aren't so popular.

Trust is a requirement of a voting system (or any other system that is entrusted with controlling who will government) if we want a stable society.

So we either need to teach people to understand it or find a way to make them trust something they don't understand.

The religion playbook is useful for the latter approach but if the goal is to make people trust what they don't understand but we've been doing pretty much the opposite real hard for the past ~10yr.

Our current system is stupidly simple and yet a quarter of the country still doesn't trust it.

It's not the mechanics of the system it's the institutions executing them that are distrusted.

You have a system that, according to the natural balances of the incentives, sets up two sides to fight with everything they've got. And everyone, mysteriously, is fighting tooth and nail. Switching to a system where everyone can cooperate and agree to elect one person may actually make everyone happy, even if people don't understand the maths that well.

The natural state of America isn't two divided halves. It is either one rather united entity or 100s of rather crazy squabbling tribes. The 2-party thing is wildly artificial and would probably dissolve without the support of the voting system.

I don't think the two-party system necessarily leads to strong polarization. The US has had mostly two parties for a very long time and yet polarization has ebbed and flowed. I highly suggest reading the following link about how transparency actually might be causing the polarization, not the voting structure: https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html

America has historically been a group of people that so disliked where they were from that they would rather face death than remain there. As a result, the descendants of these people are bred to be pugnacious. Further more, the power of any government has been historically weak. This allowed people to have a live-and-let-live policy by default.

Since FDR/WWII, the Federal government is a behemoth. It is also the new god of the many of the people. This leads to the factions within the priestly class trying to grab as much power as possible. If you want to create natural balances that fit the psyche of America, you need to shed 20 trillion in debt, and collapse the Federal government to a size last seen before WWII (scaling for population growth of course).

Are you fine with giving up the current Hegemony, then sure.

I am. We could also form alliances where the costs are spread out.

We can't convince them.

People will spend a lot of money to convince them of the opposite. I wonder where they get the ROI from that? Presumably they steal it from the voters they successfully disenfranchise.

The same team that convinced the UK that cutting trade links with the EU was a price worth paying for liberty, also convinced them that changing to a more representative voting system was too expensive. Children will die in hospital as a result of wasting money on more democracy was one actual argument advanced.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/14641/production...

If it produces results that more people are ok with, then they will be less likely to need convincing in the first place. Pretty much the only reason we have the fiasco we do is because things have become so extreme and polarized.

Oh, we can count just fine. There are no actual "fairness" concerns. Just since the system guarantees two parties and expanding the voting pool from making it easy to vote has been assessed to benefit one party over the other, there is an obvious incentive to not make it happen. You get the same crap with lowering the voting age in other countries.

> We can't count paper "yes/no" votes in a way that everyone is happy with.

That reminds me, for some reason the US doesn't have referendums. Why is that?

The US as a whole does not. Individual states do. The federal system isn't set up for referenda. I don't believe they're mentioned in the constitution anywhere.

Technically the federal system has referenda, but it has to be called by the states, as mentioned in Article V.

> The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

We've never had a constitutional convention so exactly how it would work is unknown.

I’ve wondered if there would be less polarization if the number of representatives were not fixed at 435 but instead still fixed at 1 representative per 30000 constituents.

It was less than 100 years ago that that change was made: https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...

There would likely be more parties than two at least.

330M / 30k = 11k representatives.

I actually don’t mind that idea, but we’d have to totally reinvent the way the house works if it were to operate that way. As far as voting on ideas that is fine, but the whole committee structure and how legislation is drafted would seem totally unworkable.

An in between proposal I’ve heard is to adopt the so-called Wyoming rule and keep a fixed representation of 1 rep per population of <least populated state>. IIRC that would increase the house to around 700 reps, which would change things, but not require total reinvention.

Catherine the great tried creating a constituent body for Russia with 10,000 representatives. It didn't go well and soured her on the whole prospect of democracy. Keeping assemblies within at least shouting distance of Dunbar's number seems to make them work much better in practice.

> Many who voted for Lamont in the primary may have switched to Lieberman in the general election to ensure his victory over Republican Alan Schlesinger.

That's a really weird way to frame things, and suggests to me the author didn't look into the election before writing it. The general election was very much one between Lieberman and Lamont, with Schlesinger getting less than 10% of the vote.

> Voters have no incentive to consider alternatives, because a vote for a third alternative would be “wasted:” In fact, it might help elect the major party candidate whom the voter most strongly opposes.

There are many races where one party doesn't bother to run a candidate where this isn't an issue, yet third-parties don't have much success there either. The D.C. legislature (called the city council, but functionally acts like a state legislature) has two seats that Democrats aren't legally allowed to have, and that Republicans at the moment aren't able to win because the city largely opposes them. Yet third-party candidates haven't held the seat in decades (they've been held by independent candidates).

The author brings up examples from states where ranked-choice choice voting has been implemented, but they're all examples of a candidate from one of the two major parties winning.

I doubt ranked-choice voting is going to bring about the kind of transformational change its advocates claim. The evidence so far from the places that have implemented it don't show a huge amount of difference.

why are there only two parties in the US, wheras there are many places that have 5 or 6 at least parties in countries as small as denmark or as large as germany?

As @jasode said in another comment [0]:

> In terms of cause & effect, the USA's 2-party system is the effect caused by the voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31503357

As I mentioned in my post, why aren't third parties successful in places where first past the post isn't an issue (seats where one party doesn't contest it, seats where one party isn't legally allowed to hold them, places that implemented ranked choice voting)? When first past the post is removed we're still not seeing other parties succeed.

As to why we only see two parties, I think it's for a couple of reasons. One, the parties are pretty open and just about anyone can run in them, so there's little use for a third party. Two, the two parties have become culturally entrenched - many people see themselves as Democrats or Republicans, not just people who happen to vote for Democrats or Republicans. And three, prominent national third-parties have been run so poorly they've made people more likely to anyone (including independents) over third parties. Independent candidates have actually had much more success (even in places with first past the post) than third-party candidates.

> prominent national third-parties have been run so poorly they've made people more likely to anyone (including independents) over third parties

Could you elaborate on this? It's not clear to me that they are poorly run, especially relative to the two major parties.

(I do agree with your overall point though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31503188)

A good example is the Reform Party, the most prominent party in the 90's and more successful than the Green Party or Libertarians in many ways (the Reform Party actually won a Governor's seat, and got more presidential votes than the other two ever did). They had a pretty public melting down in the late 90's and now are a non-entity.

The Greens and Libertarians have been a mess whenever I've worked with them at the local level. One problem that I've seen, both at a local and national level, is that they keep trying to run as many candidates in as many races as possible, and almost all of these end up being vanity candidates with no interest in winning. We had Green Party candidates here in major races who didn't even bother putting up a website. This just entrenches the idea in people's minds that these parties aren't serious, and are only worthwhile as protest votes.

You want to know the most successful third party at the moment in the U.S.? The Vermont Progressive Party. They only operate in Vermont, yet hold more state level offices in Vermont than Greens and Libertarians _combined_ do in the entirety of the United States. Also more independent state level elected officials. We have two independent senators at the moment. Other people from outside the two parties have had much more success than almost all of the third parties. Again, the Vermont Progressive Party is an exception, but it's only active in Vermont. The Working Families Party in New York would count as another exception, though that's a bit more complex given New York's fusion voting.

> A good example is the Reform Party, the most prominent party in the 90's

The Reform Party was an extension of Ross Perot, who bought his way into the 1992 presidential election with his own immense wealth, and actually could have won that election — at one point he was leading the polls! — if he didn't have his own personal meltdown during the campaign. Perot ran again in 1996, with lesser results. When Perot faded from the political scene, so did the Reform Party.

I would also mention that the Minnesota governor's seat won by the Reform Party was by famous professional wrestler Jesse The Mind/Body Ventura, who was already well-known before the Reform Party even existed.

Ventura was elected mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota in 1990, predating the Reform Party, and moreover, Ventura left the Reform Party a year after taking office as governor and joined the Independence Party instead.

> You want to know the most successful third party at the moment in the U.S.? The Vermont Progressive Party.

Vermont is one of the smallest states in the country by both population and physical size. Campaign fundraising is less of a problem there than in most places that require large spending on TV ads. One of the biggest disadvantages of third parties is lack of money. This is how Ross Perot succeeded where they did not: he had a ton of money.

Also the third parties have a history of pushing clowns even worse than the main parties, some of the words out of the mouth of recent Libertarian and Green candidates were clearly not well thought out and ended mostly in the being dragged on the internet.

> Also the third parties have a history of pushing clowns even worse than the main parties

My Republican Senator from Wisconsin claimed that mouthwash could kill Covid. There is no worse clown.

Proportional representation. A major advantage of STV is that there is an easy to understand and manually count proportional version of it (called single transferable vote and used in Ireland). IMO it is best to go directly to multimember STV but single member RCV is at least a non-trivial improvement. I think the Irish system would be easier to switch to in the US vs other proportional systems.

There won't be a huge change immediately, particularly when most of the country is still using a different system. It doesn't solve everything but it helps.

The linked article is somewhat bizarre. It says "Many who voted for Lamont in the primary may have switched to Lieberman in the general election to ensure his victory over Republican Alan Schlesinger."

That's pure insanity. The 2006 Connecticut Senate election results were 50% Lieberman (I), 40% Lamont (D), 10% Schlesinger (R). The Republican was a non-factor who had no chance to win. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_United_States_Senate_elec...

Joe Lieberman was the longtime, well-known incumbent and former Vice Presidential nominee. That 2006 election didn't change the country in the least; it was just more of the same old, same old.

Aren't you supporting their point?

You vote for the boring candidate because otherwise you might be wasting your vote. But maybe you really want a change, but the system discourages that by threatening you with a very unpopular option winning if you split the vote.

I don't understand. The vote was split between Democrats Lieberman and Lamont. Nobody voted for Lieberman because they were worried Schlesinger would win. Lamont himself beat Schlesinger by 30%. As the well-known longtime incumbent, Lieberman was ahead in the polls the entire general election. This was a reelection campaign, which he won. Anyone who wanted change could and did vote for Lamont.

You're not even counting the second preference of that 10% who voted Schlesinger which is enough on its own to put the race on a knife edge with a decent voting system.

Imagine a system where it was beneficial for someone to appeal to both sides? This is why its touted as a polarization reduction measure.

> You're not even counting the second preference of that 10% who voted Schlesinger which is enough on its own to put the race on a knife edge with a decent voting system.

Who do you think was their second preference? Lieberman was a "centrist" Democrat who gave a speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention endorsing McCain over Obama. Lamont criticized Lieberman for being too supportive of Republican policies.

I don't know. No one knows. That's why it's a good idea to ask them to express their preference in full.

There’s an interesting effect to consider: in the current situation, centrist politicians can use their role as tie-breaker to get the best result for the state they represent. Assuming RCV benefits centrist candidates, a state can improve it’s leverage by switching to RCV. So you don’t need to convince people that it would be fair to switch to RCV, just that it is in their best interest.

I think it would be better if every election was for multiple offices, and the top 2-5 candidates got those offices. For example, Presidential elections first place would become president, second place would become vice president, and third place would become speaker.

Another nice thing we could do is stop listing party on the ballot. Just list names in alphabetical order.

Though I think the biggest thing we could do to be "more democratic" is get rid of the 435 limit for the house, and go back one seat per 30,000 people. If we had 10,000 congressmen, they would all more closely represent the area they're from. Maybe up the senate to 10 per state while we're at it.

And while I'm throwing out wacky ideas, why not have regional governments that encompass multiple states?. If America was a company, we would be overdue for middle management.

That’s not a wacky idea it’s how presidential elections were originally specified in the Constitution. Look at how badly Jefferson undermined Adams as his VP to see why that was quickly discovered to be a bad idea.

It is expressly illegal in Florida.

Wow, TIL.

https://reason.com/2022/04/28/florida-tennessee-ban-ranked-c...

Florida is actually pretty big on banning stuff they don’t like. Was shocked to hear I can’t but 95% everclear (not that I wanted to before learning of that).

I’m still floored at how many things get banned in Florida that are a.o.k. In much deeper conserve states. I lived in SC for several years and it felt less conservative than Florida in many ways.

I don't think this is caused by the voting system. Polarization is a function of where the cultural discourse is at. By culture I don't just mean the arts.

I think it's natural for any culture to go through a time of division, polarization, and conflicting narratives as a culture and the people collectively wrestle with their identity, and try to work out where they stand.

I think it's natural polarization would occur at a time when previous notions of authority and truth are being revised.

I think it's only bad if that "growth process", that any culture must go through periodically, is corrupted / co-opted to artificially maintain a persistent state of division.

Does anyone find it odd that the solutions proposed are to fiddle with the method of voting for a delegate rather than de-delegating in favor of directly voting for or against things? Maybe the problem is the left word in "representative democracy?"

I've long loathed Texas' endless parade of constitutional amendments put before the entire state. The matters involved seemed unimportant to me (stuff like allowing railroad widows to collect the pensions of their second spouse). When I think of it in terms of de-delegating decisions, I think "why don't I and everyone else get a direct vote for or against a budget item?"

For an overview of alternate voting systems, I found this video from Primer highly informative:

https://youtu.be/yhO6jfHPFQU

Or use a system which enables proportional representation. Then the totally incompatible viewpoints will both have an outlet to congregate around and an arena to discuss.

Thus also making sure that one of the larger parties can't get co-opted by for example the Trumpism movement inside it. In a proportional system that would have been it's own party.

Case in point, how most nationalistic parties in Europe have stopped at 10-25% of the votes depending on country, thus having influence but not dictating it.

MA tried to change to ranked choice voting but people didn't vote for it. I'm guessing most at the ballot were confused about what it was and just default voted no.

Also need to get rid of the filibuster and the Electoral College, which are both anti-democratic.

Then possibly abolish the Senate too for the same reason.

I think the right way to roll this out is to create a new party as an abstraction layer between the new proposed system and the existing system.

Within the party, you can use whatever voting mechanism you like to set the agenda of the party and elect party leaders. If the mechanism is good enough, you ought to be able to attract enough members to win a standard legacy election.

Rank choice voting allows flooding the ballot with candidates to downrank another. Approval based voting is far simpler and superior.

You can have a 2 party system and still have elections won by someone vaguely centrist in their policies. Both parties have moved toward their respective extremes over the last 20-30 years.

Before we even think of tweaking the voting system, it might be best to go back to a simple implementation people trust: paper.

As a programmer, I understand that only us really control the software behind voting system. Most folks don't have the slightest idea how it actually works, and if there's a bug (or worse, a vulnerability) the consequences might ripple nationwide. With paper, you get some failed counts here and there, but nothing major, and such errors tend to average out. And of course, people can understand how it work, and how to make it more accurate and reliable.

Once we go back to paper, a ranking system becomes quite a bit harder to implement. Much easier however is to give a yes/no answer for each candidate. Easy to count, and the end result for each candidate is how many of the voters support them. Throw in a void clause if no candidate manages to get some threshold of support (say 50%), and you even get to take "all politicians are bastard" votes into account (something that ranked choice does not have).

Alternatively, we could could give each candidate a degree of support, ranging from "unacceptable" to "ideal", and elect the candidate with the best median support. Slightly more complex, but quite a bit closer to ranked choice voting, and you keep the "all politicians are bastards" votes.

How does ranked choice become hard on paper? At the end of the day the tally all is input into a computer anyway. Im sure different sums of yes and no answers could be reduced to a single number if you are arguing that tallying votes would be harder in the system

RCV lacks the quality of “precinct summability” which means that all ballots have to be centrally tabulated. This is a serious security issue because there is a single point of failure for an attacker to undermine auditing measures. Here in Oregon, for example, state law requires that tabulation for a county's precincts must be done by the county clerk using nothing more than the information on the ballots cast in their county. This ensures that no one centralized authority can be compromised to throw a state-wide election. It also means there's no legal way to tally RCV elections in, for example, cities that span multiple counties or in state legislative districts that span multiple counties.

So first let me say I generally agree with you that voting machines are a bad idea, and that we absolutely need to maintain physical audit trails.

That said, I don't think it's in any way related. The people expressing the least confidence in the US' system of voting are railing against mail in and late cast votes, things that are done on paper. Electronic votes would give you a count instantly, and could be easily summed and tallied; it's any delay caused by counting paper ballots, or confirm from paper audit trails, that has led to a particular political party undermining the integrity of the elections. That's -with- "pick only your top choice". Ranked choice isn't going to change that equation.

Voting security is now a political disaster area. Sensible people have been pointing out problems for years, since the Bush vs Gore "hanging chad" business and before. One example is Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/tag/voting/

However, in the most recent election, there was a spate of bogus claims of election interference by Republicans presenting no evidence and trying to get the election overturned by various executive actions at various levels. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/11/undermining-d...

People can understand paper voting, but will they? Or will they just listen to their favorite partisan news source telling them that the election has been stolen and to march on the legislature with their guns?

>Once we go back to paper, a ranking system becomes quite a bit harder to implement

I assume your "yes/no" for each candidate is designed to make it easier for a machine to count? If you get rid of machines and have humans who can be observed to show they're doing it correctly (which I think is the best way, since then the whole process can be easily understood by every voter) then it's not harder, it just takes longer as you have to run another round of counting as you eliminate candidates who didn't get sufficient votes.

Vote counts don't need to come back same night or next day, the media can drum up drama in some other way than an all-night results watch. Obviously you have some pretty large districts with vastly more votes to count, but in those larger districts you also have a larger pool of volunteers to count.

Ranking candidates in preference order also works the way that people think: "I want X, and if I can't have X I'd be OK with Y, or failing that with Z".

None of these solutions will stop the bad-faith actors in the political system claiming that everything is rigged, but you'll never make those folks happy unless their candidate wins with the level of landslide they want

I think we would be better off taking the notion of 'state's rights', expanding it to 'city's rights', doing away with governors, and modifying Congress to compensate.

Target federal power at concerns that cross cities and maintenance of current rights. Guarantee free travel across city lines and free engagement in legal activities in whatever city a person is standing in, and people will be free to choose their own destiny so to speak.

The issue is not simply choice of candidates, it is that certain groups within the population have fundamental political differences that can't be compromised away. The political extremist see it as their objective to save everyone from themselves.

See conservatives wanting to stop people from traveling to get abortions. See liberals insisting that abortion be available even where large parts of the population have religious beliefs that are against them.

Doing this at the scale of cities makes it easier for individuals to escape from areas that they find objectionable while still not having to travel so far that it's difficult to maintain their current jobs and relationships.

Don't want to deal with primitive conservative ideology? Move to the city. Don't want to deal with liberal snowflakes? Move out of the city. I'm sure independent areas will crop up as well.

This sounds like a nightmare. Following this reasoning, all children would be subject the whims of their backwards city or rural enclave. Parents will have more of an ability to brainwash their kids, I suppose, but that's not what we usually mean by "liberty." We've already seen what happens at the state level (abortion, creationism).

Allowing even smaller populations to further insulate themselves will only accelerate the cultural, intellectual, and moral decline of the Republican voter base. I'd rather see the government work to bring these people dignified lives, i.e., solving the problem instead of giving up.

Right, but then you also subject yourself to the whims of the federal government once “people I don’t like” get in charge.

Democracy functions better on smaller, more homogeneous scales.

>Following this reasoning, all children would be subject the whims of their backwards city or rural enclave. Parents will have more of an ability to brainwash their kids, I suppose, but that's not what we usually mean by "liberty."

At least their whims affect only the children in the backwards city or rural enclave, which by definition is small.

How much liberty there is in a system where all schools are subject to whims of a national government, which you can't hope to affect with your single one vote? No chance even if you, your spouse and friends all decide to weigh in. Sounds positively totalitarian.

One can't even talk about tyranny of majority: In most Western democracies -- no matter if the electoral system is proportional or not -- the percentage of people who vote is so small that any government seldom was voted in by majority of the population, only by a plurality, anyway.

> This sounds like a nightmare. Following this reasoning, all children would be subject the whims of their backwards city or rural enclave. Parents will have more of an ability to brainwash their kids

This doesn’t sound particularly different from rn.

I appreciate your sentiment, but I think you fall into the very trap that leads to the current state of the world.

I'm not one to promote doom and gloom, but we have to face reality and acknowledge the circumstances we find ourselves in. They are a bit doomy and a bit gloomy. I acknowledge that any action can have unintended consequences, but inaction and repetitive action will only lead to the same outcomes.

The outcome I hope for is this: people will be forced to face the consequence of their political decisions. They will no longer be able to hide behind the complexity of the world.

Right now a conservative can look at his state or the U.S. at large and blame any flaw on liberal ideology. "Things wouldn't be so bad if we could just control the liberals." "Things wouldn't be, so bad if my vote actually counted for something." The same is true for Liberals.

You could argue that these people should educate themselves and be active participants in democracy, but "should" doesn't count for much; and their perception is not entirely unreasonable. To reiterate, your suggestions is to save them from themselves. They don't know any better--we have to bring them "dignified lives." Is it so hard to understand why people would take increasingly inflexible positions when on the opposite end of their desire, stands someone like you with such a holier-than-thou mindset?

As an alternative to your suggestion, I wonder this: If you vote for a conservative, and 90% of the people around you vote for a conservative, and your mayor is conservative, and that mayor implements conservative policies, and you find that your life still isn't improving. Who do you have to blame now?

You can't save people that don't want to be saved, and sometimes you can't save people that do want to be saved. Sometimes there is no value in trying because the results of a given sequence of actions create a foregone conclusion.

I listen to conservative politicians talking about outlawing leaving a state to get an abortion. People freaked out over this joke of a coup (from an organizational standpoint) that happened not long ago, but you're not freaked out by this Orwellian garbage?

With this at the forefront, I'd rather have small nodes of madness and sanity and give everyone a more realistic chance of reaching their idea of a sane space, than have state wide nodes of insanity for the vast majority of the country.

"See liberals insisting that abortion be available even where large parts of the population have religious beliefs that are against them."

As well everyone, not just liberals, should insist.

I'm not against abortion, so I could have used anything there, but I stuck with abortion to keep the topic consistent. The key take away is that the morality of the subject is evaluated by humans. One groups wants to control another group, to an extent that is unreasonable.

Sure, I think the fairest solution at the scale of adults is to let the individual choose whether to get an abortion or not, but from a conservative perspective, you're dealing with two equivalent people, and perception is reality unfortunately.

Voting is such a lie.

You are given the illusion of choice that is created by two political cartels who only care about power not principles. Voting gives you zero political influence.

When you vote you are implying consent to be ruled by anyone that is on that ballot including the bad people. Remember, democracy gave us President Donald Trump. Gotta love it, right?! Right? ... guys?

Is it possible to change the system so alternative parties would have real weight? Is it possible (or even beneficial) to move extremes out of the 2 major parties to separate extreme parties to have "rational conservatives" and "reasonable liberals" separate from "gun nuts" and tax maniacs?

The "gun nuts" and "tax maniacs" are in the same party ... see the recent GOP tax cut that transferred trillions of tax burden from the uber rich to the middle class.

Not without changing our voting. The equilibrium point of our choose-one, winner-take-all plurality voting system naturally cultivates two-party dominance.

I know, that's why I ask: is such a voting system possible?

Cardinal voting methods eliminate the spoiler effect, which is one of the biggest obstacles that 3rd party candidates face right now. It would let people support any number of alternative candidates without detracting from their support of "safe" candidates.

I mean SF right now has a DA that won simply by default through ranked choice voting. And he’s about to be recalled.

It may help but clearly bad people get into office anyways.

It would help if they weren't being sandbagged by the SFPD.

I think the biggest step towards the current political polarization was the FCC's revocation of the fairness doctrine in 1987. This lead to conservative talk radio's rise, which lead to the mainstreaming of right wing propaganda.

I'm not sure how we could "undo" this, given the decentralized social media we have today..

The two biggest problems in US politics are the two-party system and unproprotional representation.

I mean, even in European countries it's hard to say you support a specific party (e.g. the Greens in Germany), because you'll never agree with 100% of their politics. Just having two parties and needing to commit to one? That's fucking insane.

The two party system is a direct result of the voting methods that are being used.

In that the electoral college exists? Sure.

In that if we did proportional voting different candidates would be elected? Probably.

Then again somehow we managed to elect Eric Adams in NYC despite him being the worst option.

> we managed to elect Eric Adams in NYC despite him being the worst option

“Worst” as in favoured by every borough except the Manhattan political elite, with “Garcia’s support [being] strongly correlated with median household income…she topped 40 percent in each of the city’s five wealthiest Assembly districts” [1]. (Disclaimer: I probably align with the Manhattan political elite.)

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-eric-adams-won-the-...

Well, the two-party system is a result of having single-winner districts. Countries with multi-winner districts tend to be the ones were many parties are viable.

But does multiparty actually result in better outcomes? It's not like any parliamentary country has such a rich array of options. I think most max out at 4 with right-leaning and left-leaning parties forming fragile coalitions that cost a huge amount of energy to negotiate.

I think RCV is a net win and we actually did it for the mayoral primary here in NYC and I think it functioned well but the winner was still the most mild and obvious candidate. I think it will produce a very marginal benefit for voters.

In Romania, the last election had a plurality. This resulted in politicians believing they need to listen to voters.

That is, until the top 2 parties could form a majority coalition in spite of their ideologies being opposite on paper, so they can continue the degeneracy.

I hope the next election leaves them with even less power.

America's most urgent problem isn't politicians failing to heed voters. It's what the voters are saying.

It is interesting you say that, because the symptoms do not cause the disease.

The problem always has been that the politicians have not heeded, let alone even represented the voters for a very long time now, hence why the voters who are the legitimate heirs are saying things you may not like.

It essentially comes down to rather basic things, abuse, dishonesty, laziness, hedonism, etc. that has caused a perversion and Distortion of the whole system that means to maintain peace affairs among people through mutually agreed upon terms. Unfortunately those terms have been consistently, grotesquely, and deliberately violated for many decades now.

It hasn’t even been Democracy, majority rule, for at least 60 years now; and democracy has also been perverted fundamentally by simply using psychological warfare techniques to gaslight the majority into self-sabotage.

There are elements of a vicious cycle in all this, but that doesn't absolve voters. Politicians lie about a lot of things, but in the US at least the two main parties are pretty consistent in their overall approaches and ideology. You may see opinion polls that Americans want this or that policy that never happens, but when they vote, they vote for candidates whose policies are very clear. It's like if you want government to take strong action on climate, then vote for a guy who very explicitly wants to do nothing about climate, then you don't actually want the government to take strong action on climate. And that's besides the many millions of voters who have access to all the information they could need to make an informed decision and still explicitly don't want to take action against climate change. And who is to blame for the millions of Americans who think the election system is rigged? Are they all just hapless goons under the thrall of a madman?

I'm not sure I buy this. There's many surveys that show that there are many issues that voters across both parties agree on. It's simply that catering to some more extreme elements of the party, so-called single issue voters can be more important because the parties don't loose votes over the issue from more moderate voters.

Proportional representation leads to parliament representing the opinions of the voters pretty well.

Of course, if the voters are bad, parliament also will be.

>The two biggest problems in US politics are the two-party system

In terms of cause & effect, the USA's 2-party system is the effect caused by the voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

The game theory of voters not wanting to "waste their vote" on a marginal candidate -- and -- candidates naturally forming alliances and consolidating into fewer parties to have the best chance of attracting votes means.... the inevitable 2-party situation emerging organically.

Australia has a robust ranked voting system but still has very dominant 2 major parties.

I think you're still correct but other factors can be powerful too. For example, people struggle to understand how ranked preferences work, so they are still irrationally afraid of 'wasting their vote' if they preference for a minor party that has no chance of winning. I suspect mandatory voting also encourages people that dont really care about politics (or understand ranked voting) to vote based on propaganda, reinforcing the major two parties.

> Australia has a robust ranked voting system but still has very dominant 2 major parties.

Australia's top 3 parties achieved ~65% of the vote. That leaves about 1/3rd to minor parties and independents. Surely that's a great deal better than having just 2 parties with any real power.

The actual seats that are won are a better indication of the results and who has power. Results seem to be that the major 2 parties won 90% of the seats: https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal-election-2022-res...

It's slightly more complicated, it's more like there's 3-5-ish major parties. If you take the Liberal party, the Liberal National Party of Queensland and the National Party. Those form the Coalition conservative block. Then there's Labor who form the Center Left, and the Greens who are the progressive Left.

Importantly whilst 90% of the seats may be in 4 distinct parties, that form two opposing sides, The Coalition suffered the loss of seats to independents recently. Labor voters in these electorates were able to vote 1 for the ALP and then send there preference to an independent in order to tactically vote against the liberals ruling party. This effect can be seen by the reduced labor vote in these electorates.

"Tactical voting" means you vote for a less preferred candidate over your preferred candidate to achieve a desired outcome. This is not the same a giving a second preference to an independent.

In your example, the voter has voted for their preferred (Labor) candidate over the independent. If the Labor candidate gets knocked out then their second preference says "if I can't have Labor then I would prefer an Independent over Liberal". That's the beauty of preferential voting, you generally don't have to vote tactically. You just vote for what you really want.

True, it is interesting from a game theoretic point of view. There is info about the algorithm's properties here in case anyone is interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical...

> The actual seats that are won are a better indication of the results and who has power. Results seem to be that the major 2 parties won 90% of the seats:

While true, that 10% allocation of parliamentary seats to independents/small parties allows for a great deal of negotiation on policy. The smaller parties, particularly if the hold a sufficient level of balance-of-power, can see some/many of their own policies reflected in the eventual policies which pass through parliament.

[Edit: clarification]

In the US we have the opposite problem - low turnout. Especially in primaries, we see that a small minority (15% maybe) pick the candidates. This is because it's the most motivated (potentially extreme) voters that show up to vote in primaries. Also, different states hold primaries on different days, so many of the presidential candidates drop after just a couple states vote.

> Especially in primaries

The primaries are your problem - those are crazy. Why does the government run voting for the representatives of private political parties?

Because they're not actually political parties like other countries have; they have no memberships, they have employees. You can't join e.g. the Democratic party and start paying dues, instead you declare your Democratic party allegiance to the government, and it allows you to participate in the selection of the Democratic party candidate.

The two major parties created this situation through state and local legislation. It's absolutely bizarre that two private organizations who are responsible to no one but themselves have inextricably and exclusively bound themselves to the operation of US government. They avoided any constitutional questions by legislating locally instead of federally.

I don't see how that's meant to be superior to a single-party communist system. Is adding a "primary" step so much more democratic than just putting all of the primary candidates into a single election?

> you declare your … party allegiance to the government

Do Americans realise how insane this sounds?

Why? The main reason this is done is to facilitate closed primary voting so the members of other parties can't interfere with the primary voting. Once you get to the main election, party doesn't matter. Perhaps the word allegiance is too strong. People do switch parties (including candidates), some "neutral" candidates like judges can cross register as both parties, and voters in the main election can vote for anyone.

> Why?

Seems contrary to secret voting? If someone in the government wanted to round up many supporters of party X they have a database.

> this is done is to facilitate closed primary voting

Why is the government facilitating how political parties pick who represents them? Isn’t that a private matter?

How do you think this works in other countries? Parties have their own, private, lists, not shared with other parties or the government, so that you can support a party in private.

"Seems contrary to secret voting? If someone in the government wanted to round up many supporters of party X they have a database."

Just because you register one way doesn't mean you always vote on party lines. There might not be as much concern with being rounded up with an armed population.

"Why is the government facilitating how political parties pick who represents them? Isn’t that a private matter?"

I'd imagine because you needed voting locations prior to the technology today. It was convenient to use the same infrastructure as for the regular vote.

"How do you think this works in other countries? Parties have their own, private, lists, not shared with other parties or the government, so that you can support a party in private."

How do the choose the party representatives? Or does that fall to the aristocrats of the party?

> How do the choose the party representatives?

Entirely up to them - postal voting in practice. The government keeps out of it.

Interesting that they trust voting by mail even in places that don't trust it in general for the actual election.

Most places do trust it for the actual election - the US is also an outlier in not always allowing it.

If they are private organisations, wouldn't it be fun if they could be hauled before the Federal Trade Commission? :-)

Now this guy's thinking.

Proportional voting for congress per state would solve this.

If the 27 seats from New York would be distributed via proportional voting, then a party with just a few percent of votes can get some political power.

As of Saturday: HAD two very dominant major parties.

Australia just had Federal elections, and the count is still in progress, but there is a chance we will end up with a "hung parliament" with neither (ex) major party having a majority. 16 seats of 151 appear to have gone to minor parties or independents. Forming government should be an easy negotiation, to the extent that the new Prime Minister has already been declared, as the new government will need support from only 1 or 2 independents. In this instance a hung parliament would be an excellent outcome in that the government would be stable due to the small number of independents needed to form government, and debate would have to occur in the parliament and not behind closed doors in a party room.

The general view is that this change in voting patterns will be long term, as the majors' votes have been declining for years and it has just reached the tipping point. 10 independents elected is a record.

In my opinion the Australian electoral system gets several things right:

* Compulsory voting. You have to turn up to the booth and receive a ballot paper, but it's then up to you what you do with it. Most people use it to vote but some use it to draw a pretty picture or tell the counters what they really think of the government. The real power of compulsory voting is that it virtually eliminates disenfranchisement as those who are not marked as receiving their ballot are handed a small ($20) fine. This creates a paper trail and a disenfranchised voter can refuse to pay the fine, turn up to court and as part of their argument against the fine tell the judge how they were disenfranchised.

* An independent commission (aec.gov.au) that sets voting boundaries and runs the election on a national basis.

* Preferential/RCV voting makes it more likely (than FPTP) that the result reflects the will of the majority and is harder to game. Whilst RCV might not be perfect, it's better than FPTP.

Things it gets wrong:

1) Lack of disclosure of political funding sources

2) This has lead to corruption, whereby the major parties put the interests of themselves and donors above the country, with rampant pork barrelling and looking after "mates".

#2 is a big reason why the major parties are losing votes, and the new government comes with the promise of an anti-corruption commission "with teeth", and a bunch of independents who plan on holding the government to this promise. Amazingly in this instance the system seems to have self-corrected.

With any luck, #2 being fixed will reduce the opportunities to put the interests of parties and donors above the country and lead to #1 also being fixed in the not too distant future.

Australia still has two very dominant major parties in terms of the main prize: who become ministers of state.

I'd say there's a 1% chance of having a prime minister from outside the ALP and the Coalition in the next 50 years.

Right now I'd say the dominance is a thin veneer, as the winner takes all nature of each individual seat tends to hide the reducing margins by which each seat is held. The result based on seats is non-linear so when change becomes apparent it will appear to have come quickly.

As an aside, this discussion about the Australian system is relevant to the original question of how to depolarise the US. Australia looked to be following the US into polarisation stasis, but this week the preferential voting system has allowed a number independents to fill the void left by the major parties as they have gone off course. Time will tell, but the signs are that either the parties will have to adopt less polarised positions or drift off either end of the spectrum into oblivion.

> Right now I'd say the dominance is a thin veneer, as the winner takes all nature of each individual seat tends to hide the reducing margins by which each seat is held.

Is this an argument that first-past-the-post reduces the dominance of major parties? It's a weird argument that the dominance of the winners is reduced because their margins were small. The smaller the margins, the larger the portion of the governed who ultimately have no say about the direction of government e.g. the US, where margins (and differences) between the winning and losing parties are tiny.

No. The winner takes all nature of each seat does tend to lock out candidates who might get in with proportional representation with multiple candidates per seat, so it encourages dominance in that regard. One could say that this is a weakness in the Australian system. Maybe there should be one big electorate with 151 candidates elected on a proportional basis?

The main benefit of the preferential system is that it allows people to safely take the risk of voting for a third candidate. I see it as question of incentives more than raw maths. (Everything I'm saying is from the perspective of the lived experience of being under a RCV system, not the raw maths.)

By way of information the upper house does use proportional representation with typically 6 candidates chosen from each state, each state being a single electorate. Smaller parties do regularly win a number of spots in the upper house.

If the tradition is to have many parties in the parliament and government, it's not going to be hung because MPs are used to talk and compromise. I say this with the Swiss perspective: even the government is always formed by the 4 most important parties and has to work together - if any minister handles against its own team it gets kicked out and replaced by another from the same party. This also reflects positively on the electorate itself which will have expectations of compromise and talks. And also allows for new parties to rise and have a real voice.

Edit: downsides: stuff gets moving slower (until they reach compromise...) and the electorate is less motivated (let them find a way among themselves...)

> Compulsory voting. You have to turn up to the booth and receive a ballot paper, but it's then up to you what you do with it.

This is untrue. It is not only a crime in Australia not to properly fill out your ballot paper, but part of properly filling out your ballot means fully ranking your choices. Encouraging others to not fill out their ballot paper or rank all choices is a crime.

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

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa12/005/1996/en/

I don't completely understand why everyone who thinks the Australian system is good gets this wrong. Ranked-choice voting in Australia compels Australians to choose a preference between the two major parties, creating support for them on paper that doesn't actually exist.

edit: it might even be criminal for you, if you were/are an Australian, to have posted here that it is legal not to completely and properly complete your ballot paper.

Incorrect!

It's not a crime to vote informally. It is a crime to try and induce others to vote informally. The reasoning is that such advocacy is a form of disenfranchisement, as it opens the door to deception, causing others to lose the effectiveness of their vote. Langer was free to put whatever he wanted on his own ballot paper, but not free to tell others to vote informally.

The real controversy with the Langer case was that his recommended way of voting (using repeated numbers) was actually a valid way of voting at the time. The law was later changed to make such votes informal.

There is no physical way for anyone to know what you put on your ballot paper in an Australian election. You fill it out, fold it and put it in the box with thousands of others. The restrictions are that you must take the ballot paper and it must not leave the room.

Edit:

A quick search gives a result from the parliamentary library. To quote: "Of course, voters may deliberately choose to cast an informal vote."

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

No, it is caused by the presidential system. A parliamentary system even with first past the post would give you more than two parties.

I'm not sure I agree. The UK doesn't have a presidential system, but have first past the post and essentially have a 2 party system, with a small sprinkle of a third party.

And France, which is a presidential system, is not a two party system, with a large number of parties represented in their legislature.

They have a different election system than the US.

Arguably the UK is a good example of how FPTP can result in even worse dynamics than two broadly competitive parties as in the US (though I agree that it's FPTP doing the work; many fully functioning multiparty democracies have elected presidents). England has a de facto 2.5 party system, where the third party picks up a large fraction of votes but only a handful of seats and the governing party is rarely backed by much more than a third of the vote but usually picks up most of the seats. Worse still, the relative policy overlap of the two centre-left parties has meant the centre-right party usually wins elections even though generally a majority of the public votes for parties promising centre-left politics (yes there's obviously a lot more nuance and exceptions to that than can be fitted into a single sentence).

Scotland has more recently shown shows that a single main representative of a losing minority in an independence referendum can win nearly everything against the multiple major parties on the other side. (Wales shows if your nationalist support is more lukewarm and unevenly distributed you get more unpredictable multiparty politics)

Northern Ireland is contested only by local parties with a longstanding religious/national identity division leading to two major parties for each side plus, and ultra tactical voting based on trying to figure out which of your factions' parties to unite behind this time to avoid the embarrassment of the local minority faction getting their candidate elected (and the non-sectarian fifth party being squeezed out).

None of the areas are particularly delighted with the results they are getting.

The 2 parties have also legislated to ensure only they can make it to the stage.

For a 3rd party to participate they must be polling over 15%. Dems and GOP allowed on stage often only poll at 4%.

https://www.debates.org/about-cpd/overview/

15% polling with the political machine of our News apparatus and the 2 parties is almost impossible unless it's a celebrity running.

While this is definitely an issue, it doesn’t change the fact that third party candidates still end up as spoilers in most cases due to candidates not being required to gain > 50% of the vote (which ranked choice and approval voting both do).

Also, it would be great if we could make voting easy enough for people to do it every election. Focusing on just the presidency means that we have fewer candidates representing the will of the People in the off years.

Would be nice if we could make election day into a Federal holiday. We could move Veteran's day a week earlier, and maybe shift election day to a Monday which would also give a more sensible three-day weekend. It is absolutely stunning to me that we don't have unanimous agreement on this simple change.

I would actually expect worst outcomes if you turned it into a three day weekend. Why stay in town and vote when you could use the three day weekend for something more fun?

With typical work weeks in mind, midweek makes more sense to avoid conflicting with weekends.

(and here's why we don't have unanimous agreement—it's always the little details that hang people up)

In most places you can vote before the election for varying degree of times (like 1-2 weeks). We don’t need a holiday for voting.

What we need is the ability for people to get their ballot easily, return it when they want.

Where I live, I get my ballot for every election in the mail, I fill out at home. I then walk it down to a secure ballot drop box a few blocks away. Everyone should have this experience.

I take it you haven't been paying attention to US politics around early voting and vote-by-mail this last couple of years. :(

PS: the disadvantage of fixing vote-by-mail is that voting is run by 50 states, with wildly different standards in each (and some run by politicians that are opposed to the entire concept.) Whereas a Federal election-day holiday is at least just one vote by Congress.

I have absolutely been paying attention. And I find it sad and frustrating that a party is using its loose grip on power to ensure anti-democratic policies are in place based on misleading information and fear.

I agree on the holiday. It’s fine if they want to do it, I’m not against it. I just think it’s not the thing we need to be demanding.

On the other hand you have European systems like the one in Italy where you have a lot of parties, all of which STILL not represent their voters and when they govern (together, mostly) they get nothing done because they don't agree on a single thing.

> they get nothing done

That's not a bug, it's a feature. :)

> That's not a bug, it's a feature

There are times when just leaving the status quo in place might well be the most desirable outcome for the majority of people, indeed deciding not to act is an option almost everywhere ... except in the voting booth.

I repeatedly joke with my friends about how "the Belgian option" (a record 589 days without an elected government[0]) should be listed on every ballot paper.

Musk was alluding to this with his recent tweet about Biden[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_gove... [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524883482836623373

Your wording seems to imply that the US system has a working parliament, which has clearly not been the case for the last couple of election cycles?

Here in the USA, many people I know (myself included) voted for Biden in hopes that less would "get done", because at least it would slow the damage that Trump and the GOP were doing to our world.

I would much rather have a more progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders as a viable option, but he (and others) dropped out to support the most likely non-right-wing candidate (Biden); because that is the only option you have in a two party system.

> the two-party system

The problem is thresholds. It's not inherently a 2-p system.

The main thing to understand here is that the 2-p system works great for capitalists (= super rich). They can simply make contributions to and lobby both parties. Easy!

> biggest problems in US politics

What commoners see as a problem is a great feature for the capitalists.

Another problem is with democracy: if you have a lot of uneducated voters that have their whole identity married with certain parties, or --even more common it seems-- hating "the other party", you will merely reduce the problems even with more parties to choose from.

I'm not from the US, but after WMD-Bush, suveilance-drone-strike-Obama, pussy-grabber-Trump and demented-Biden I'd probably not be voting at all.

I understand the concerns people have with a two-party system, but in practice I'm not sure that's what we have. Within each party there are a wide variety of subgroups. These subgroups have varying levels of influence generally and in different geographical regions. Take the republican party for example, inside it you can find both libertarians, paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives, liberals, and others. What do you think?

You definitely have a two party system. Countries with many parties also have factions like you describe within all their parties, so there's far more diversity than you see.

> The two biggest problems in US politics are the two-party system and unproprotional representation.

In my opinion, runoff voting, transfer voting, ranked-choice voting, are just small fixes that allow the occasional independent candidate to win over the candidates from the two major parties. But, as long as you only choose one candidate from an electoral district, I think the details of the voting system can only matter somewhat.

For proportional representation and a multi-party system, you need to elect more than one candidate from an electoral district. At least 5 I think. 5 to 10. Only this way you allow for more that 2 viable political parties, that constantly get some candidates elected, that have viable party organizations and continuity. That are a constant part of the political debates.

A two-party system where some outsiders, independent candidates occasionally get elected, is still a two-party system.

"For proportional representation and a multi-party system, you need to elect more than one candidate from an electoral district. At least 5 I think. 5 to 10."

You can apply the proportional factor to a state or the whole country.