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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

She was mentally unfit to serve for the last couple years. It was a travesty many countries seem to have no mental bar required to serve or even reasonable age limits (Feinstein was 90!) Any decision "she" was made in the last couple years was made by her aids and not her. This is not how democracy is supposed to work.

Details:

> Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers and the California Democratic member of Congress told The Chronicle in recent interviews that her memory is rapidly deteriorating. They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/dianne-feinstei...

With our aging population, we need to figure out how to be inclusive of those who can contribute, while identifying those who can not. Hard age limits are likely becoming less desirable as the population ages - retirement at 55 will seem like a joke. But that doesn't mean we should just accept people who are not with it in various positions of power.

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Between her and McConnell and the other gerontocrats in Washington, I’m really baffled. Why do these people grip the reins of power until their knuckles turn white? What is so important about political horse trading that they have to literally haul you out of office on a stretcher?

Even though I lean left more than right, we should probably also include Biden in that list. That guy is highly managed by his staff.

This is true of pretty much every high profile figure in Washington. They all have staff that manage a lot of the day to day operations.

Could be a bit more true of Biden, I don't know, but I doubt it's significantly more than other high profile figures or other presidents.

Trump had handlers. They just wish Trump would do what they said like the other politicians

Why does everyone keep reelecting them? Vote for someone else. We also need a better voting system than first past the post.

It would require voting for the other party. The big issue is the parties being willing to back aging candidates. But of course, party leaders are just as old -- so they see no problem.

There's more than two parties. Nobody is forcing you to vote for one of them. Parties are also an anti-pattern. Again we need a better system than first past the post that naturally biases towards a two party system.

Party primaries devolve into 'the devil you know vs the devil you dont' and the Devil You Know usually has a boatload of cash to spend on the campaign that the Devil You Dont doesn't have. You are right of course, the solution lies in eliminating the party system and implementing a ranked voting system of some kind.

Due to practicality and congressional gridlock, this has to happen state by state, and in many states the 'easiest' method is some sort of ballot initiative. I encourage anyone who reads this to look up the process in their state (https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_ballot_measures_by_state) and at least try to get a signature out to one so they show up on the ballot.

Not in California. Feinstein beat Kevin de Leon, a Democrat, in the 2018 general.

California runs an open primary and a top two general.

All other things being equal it is in their best interest to re-elect the incumbent. Seniority and connections figure into what posts you get and what influence you have. McConnell's and Feinstein's constituents have an outsized influence on the proceedings. Why would Kentuckians cede control of the Senate in favor of a politician, no matter how skilled, who had zero seniority?

I'm not especially in favor of short term limits, since there is a benefit to politicians with experience. But I'd definitely consider options that better balance their reasonable desire to elect experienced and influential candidates with the very heavy hand that experience puts on everybody else.

Once you realize people vote for parties not persons it all makes sense.

Heck, California has gone so far as to have all their senate elections be between two members of the same party.

And voting for the party is sensible. Most important votes happen along party lines. Including the most important, for Speaker and Majority Leader, who set the agenda.

Most other votes will be largely sublimated to the party priorities. The individuals will determine the specific contents of what they're voting on, but in general the person from the other party is going to vote against the things you're most interested in. You may watch your party vote on things that aren't your favorite, but it's unlikely they'll be repugnant to you. That's how they got to be your allies.

If you want to get more involved than that, you show up for the primaries. That's a multi-way contest to find the person who best represents you and your allies. That's where the party priorities get set. People who vote only in the general election are missing out on the real work of politics.

Because then their staff / funders will lose power. The officials themselves are nothing but placeholders.

Why do they cling to power? I imagine the personality type that seeks political power in the first place tends to want to keep it. It's good to be the king.

At the end of the day, the people continue to elect them. If voters were unhappy with Feinstein's performance (or that of her key aides), the solution was as simple as voting her out.

Name recognition is powerful.

Seniority leads to leadership of key committees in the US Congress.

But, I do agree that this is a problem. RBG was another example - had she retired a few years prior to her death, the state of SCOTUS would be very different today. Was she addicted to the power? Did she truly think nobody younger could do a better job? Same for Feinstein, McConnell, Biden, and many others on both sides of the aisle.

> If voters were unhappy with Feinstein's performance (or that of her key aides), the solution was as simple as voting her out.

Often these incompetent people are in "safe seat" regions. Either heavily democrat or republican. Voters won't switch parties just because representative is incompetent. There should be another options.

Feinstein was a Senator and CA uses a "jungle primary" for state-wide elections - there's no "safe seat" in that model.

In her last election, both final candidates were Democrats. Neither party could unseat her. Voters have been clear that they preferred Feinstein to anybody else.

So the question is why? Was it her power in the Senate? Was she particularly good at bringing pork to CA? Or was it just money and the political machine? Probably a lot of that last item - the parties themselves have incentives to keep winning politicians around - they're good for fund-raising.

Rank in Senate committee is literally about seniority. Replacing Feinstein meant the state and Democratic Party losing power in the Senate.

The rules for rank in committees is per party and it’s only Democrats that have indefinite positions of seniority. Republicans have caps on number of terms as chair, etc.

The only people losing power with her early retirement would have been her handlers. She hasn’t made a decision on her own in a long time. And when she did pretend to do so, the handlers would “help her remember the right choice”.

Let's not pretend that Feinstein wouldn't still win re-election even now.

> Why do they cling to power?

Life or death. The mindset is that when they retire they have nothing to live for and will die soon after. The personality type required to get to a powerful position like Senator can also (frequently * ) not be able to conceive of a meaningful life after office. Quitting office is like giving up on life for these people.

*Jimmy Carter is a good counter example. He found a meaningful purpose after holding a powerful office.

Carter is also still alive, and only eight years older than Feinstein (and 18 than Biden).

Perhaps the "reason to live" is more important than people realize.

They are the boomers representative and a demographic auto majority..

First, some places, like in McConnell's case, are just statistically going to go to a particular party, due to demographics (or gerrymandering), and primary elections famously don't draw people to the polls (if there's a challenger at all).

California and senate elections are slightly better in that regard, however, look at how much money Feinstein was able to raise over her opponents. This is nothing special about Feinstein, it's an advantage incumbents generally enjoy:

https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/dianne-feins...

I think getting this money out of politics is a start to ensuring elections are based on the candidate themselves & their policies and less around how much special interests already have invested in them. I don't have any ideas about how to get more people to show up specifically for primary elections, but the ideas people have around getting more people to vote in general elections could help, like expanding absentee voting, making it a holiday, etc.

I can offer one piece of puzzle: the demographics of registered votes has increased significantly. Take a look at "Age and generation" at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/26/what-the-... .

> The U.S. electorate is aging: 52% of registered voters are ages 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996. This shift has occurred in both partisan coalitions. More than half of Republican and GOP-leaning voters (56%) are ages 50 and older, up from 39% in 1996. And among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, half are 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996.

> Another way to consider the aging of the electorate is to look at median age. The median age among all registered voters increased from 44 in 1996 to 50 in 2019. It rose from 43 to 52 among Republican registered voters and from 45 to 49 among Democratic registered voters.

I think that on average, people consider age significant, so they expect their candidate to be around as old as them. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it helps me feel less baffled at least.

Tyranny of old

And yet, only 61% of voting age citizens bother to vote. Guess which demographic makes up most of that non-voting 39%.

I think the reason is influence. Older people have accumulated more connections and therefore have more power and influence.

Their underlings support them because they lose access to a great influencer in case of removal.

It's more difficult for young people to rise up when there's very little influence to be had. However, in times of great upheaval young people tend to rise up much faster as the incompetent people at the top get removed.

Because, like most people, they want to feel they have purpose in their life. Giving up the job is almost like accepting death, especially if they are old.

Bobby Bowden said, "I don't want to retire. After retirement, there's really only one big event left."

I miss Bobby. Bear Bryant died 4 weeks after he retired.

I don't understand it either but my theory is this.

This is their life. It is literally the only thing they have ever one in one form or another.

For many of us this would be like never touching a computer again after turning 65.

I'm no fan of the man, but while McConnell may have moments of confusion, but he's still all there. The same was not true of Feinstein.

Yes, and she's not the only one who is (edit: was) serving without being functional[1]. We need to start talking about upper age limits for public office. I believe it'd require a constitutional amendment, but I expect there's lots of support for it from all sides. I'd suggest 65 as a maximum age for being elected, which means one could serve to about age 71, for a six-year Senate term.

[1] This article is from six years ago. https://www3.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2017/10/11/congres...

Are age limits viable in our aging population? I think they may not work because it would exclude so many people and many voters will be aged as well? I think a low bar competency test would be more viable.

Tests for public participation have a real, real bad history, and for good reason. Age is a simple and objective measure.

I agree. It is just that people's facilities fall off at different rates, but as others pointed out, it is hard to make an objective test that also can not be gamed.

There's nothing to prevent an older politician from advising their colleagues, serving on committee staffs or even lobbying. They're not prevented from participantion, they'd be prevented from being elected.

It's just that that's not actually really important. The test of a good system is one that admits that its members will retire and adjusts accordingly.

In the military, you're always training a replacement, and come 65 (or 68), you're retiring, regardless of your capacity.

Politicians make up a tiny percentage of the population and babies haven't stopped being born at any point, so there will always be a population under 65 from which to elect people. If voters over 65 feel left out because they can't vote for someone their age bracket, I don't know what to tell them except "welcome to the party".

Weird SciFi idea: The human race is dying after such an amendment passes. The US Constitution finally crumbles because there is no one under 65 left in the country, making it ungovernable due to amendment ratification requirements.

Age limits work for keeping those noisy kids out, should also help with senile old farts.

I’m fairly certain that percentage will still be less than the number of minors, which no one has a problem with excluding in the same way.

The Church, which is certainly something of a gerontocracy, excludes the elderly Cardinals from Papal elections too. It's not intrinsically unjust anymore than excluding the very young is.

To be fair, that limit is 80 and likely has more to do with not forcing elderly Cardinals to travel (many would and even still do out of a feeling of duty; it's basically literally the only "job" a Cardinal has that's not just him being a bishop).

Currently, bishops are generally expected to submit their resignation to the pope upon turning 75 years old, although the pope may elect to retain the bishop.

And maybe elders should be excluded for the same reason!

That is: Why do we exclude people under 18 from voting? Because we think they don't have the mental tools to understand policy well enough to make an informed decision. Well, if seniors don't have the mental tools anymore, should they be allowed to vote?

And this is even stronger with holding office. You can vote at 18, but you can't be a representative until 25, or a senator until 35. Why? Because you need to be old enough to (hopefully) have some judgment. Well, what if you're too old to have judgment?

So, yeah, excluding seniors from office would in fact be reasonable. Or at least requiring an annual mental competency test.

Unfortunately, we'll never get it without a state-driven constitutional convention, because those with the most power in Congress are highly correlated with those with the highest age.

Remember that much of our current system has been a slow increase of the "popular" vote, from landholders to men to adults. At some point it'll go to "everyone above the age of 0" but let's not ignore that kids will at first vote the way their parents do, and then vote the exact opposite for awhile.

I don't think we need to assume that actual children will someday vote. It's not punitive to say that we should have some age threshold into adulthood and its responsibilities. There are so many facets of society that necessitate some degree of protection of young people that it isn't unfair or unrealistic to also create a barrier around their full participation in our Democratic society.

If lower bounds are reasonable for certain reasons, then it seems reasonable to apply those certain reasons to upper bounds.

Not every 15 year old would make an unsatisfactory legislator, and yet ...

Why exactly should the elderly be exempt from proper representation? There are plenty of things to criticize Nancy Pelosi about, for example, but still she's more intelligent and coherent than 99% of Congress.

Those in their first ~2 decades of life have long been exempted from proper representation, and I've never heard the elderly complain about that. Having both ends cut off sounds more fair and balanced to me.

Comparing a child to someone in their 70s with a lifetime of experience is silly. Maybe there should be limits once in office at a certain age, but not everyone ages the same.

Having a lifetime of experience does not necessarily make someone smart, rational, or even coherent. It especially does not make someone interested in voting for changes that will improve the lives of people younger than them.

That’s why we have elections. Being youthful doesn’t imply any of those things either and guarantees limited experience. I’m not arguing that young people shouldn’t be in office. I’m just not sure an arbitrary age limit is appropriate either.

"Adolescence" was a made-up term to remove personal sovereignty over younger people who know full well, and would do, but aren't legally permitted to do so. They're also subject to our laws. They should have their say as well.

And then we see under-18 routinely be charged as adults.

And yes, if 15 year olds could vote and run for office, I do think we'd see more issues aimed at the younger generations ALONG WITH longer views of how our government is run. And we're seeing the judicial side of this with youngsters suing for climate devastation, like https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/1...

I used to believe this - and even advocate for change - then I watched my children become teenagers.

There is truth to the idea that, whether due to life experience or brain development, teenagers struggle with proper decision-making.

I don't like the arbitrary nature of age cutoffs, but I would no longer support the idea of giving more political power to anyone under 18.

> There is truth to the idea that, whether due to life experience or brain development, teenagers struggle with proper decision-making.

I don't like the arbitrary nature of age cutoffs, but I would no longer support the idea of giving more political power to anyone under 18.

while that's just an anecdote, even if it were the norm, it is also the norm for old people of a sufficient age

if it makes you feel better, we can administer cognitive tests to old people and determine at what point they fall into "teenager" level of mental acuity

There is much less variance on cognitive ability on the younger end of our lives than the higher end. Arbitrary age limits in youth are unfair, but less unfair than the same on the upper end of life.

I had a friend who remained sharp until her mid 90s. I have family members who shouldn't be voting in their early 70s. That range is massive, whereas we can mostly agree that nearly all 14 year olds aren't capable, but most 20 year olds are - unfair but not as vast a range.

> There is much less variance on cognitive ability on the younger end of our lives than the higher end.

I'm not sure that's true. Mental maturity in kids varies widely, too. There are some pretty mentally mature kids changing the world. Look at Greta Thunberg.

There are also many fewer years for older people to live with the consequences of their votes. Everything has trade-offs. In this case, the loss would not be as bad as the loss we get from excluding those below 18.

Whatever the counterexample of sharp old people, I can think of one for sharp young people. We ignore those exceptions for young people, we can ignore them for old people, too. And if you're worried the old-age cutoff will be too young, just pick whatever age's median mental acuity matches 18 year olds - what's good for the gosling is good for the goose.

Your friend could still vote, just not run for office at 90 years old. This seems like a fine compromise to avoid the Feinstein/McConnell/RBG/etc pattern.

Then why is anyone under 18 charged in criminal court as adults?

If you get ages can be seen to have the same legal cognitive patters as an adult, why shouldn't they also have the same rights as an adult?

Part of the criminal justice system is removing dangerous people from society. Sometimes you can make this determination before their 18th birthday. In general I agree with you though.

I don’t believe they should be.

We already allow 19-30 year olds to vote, and it doesn't really seem to move the needle much in areas they are supposedly interested in.

My father is in his 70s and can barely remember what he had for breakfast. He should not be representing anyone, or even voting for that matter.

There's no way to separate the able minded from the seniles fairly, so an age limit is the best way to do it.

Does your father continue to vote the same way he has most of his life?

can you call it voting if they have less idea what's going on around them than a teenager?

Yes. But his party has changed a little in the last few years and I feel he would not be voting for them now if he could understand that.

> There's no way to separate the able minded from the seniles fairly, so an age limit is the best way to do it.

Sorry about your father, but there are plenty of 70 year olds who are extremely competent, capable and that also bring valuable connections and experience.

If you've been around many kids, you know that "18" is completely arbitrary, and adult-ish maturity comes to some far sooner than to others. (And to a few, it never does seem to come.)

And if you've been around many elderly people, you know that quite a few are less competent to vote than the average 14-year-old student council member, and that letting ~all of them do so is no less arbitrary than that "18".

They shouldn't, though Congress has a massive skew towards them. The median senator is on Social Security. The median House member is just shy of being able to make tax-free withdrawals from their 401(k)s.

The minimum ages necessarily put an upward skew on it, but very few are anywhere near the minimum. There is little need to ensure representation for the elderly. And meantime, anybody of working age is badly under-represented.

Very few young people have the privilege to afford campaigning. It makes sense most people able to do so are old enough to have the savings, skills or passive income that allows them the freedom to hit the campaign trail.

Which is yet more reason to give us something to put a thumb on the younger side of the scale.

An age limit would be a crude form of that. So would a term limit.

We could alter the seniority system that gives much more weight to people who have been there the longest. But that's a rule Congress passes for itself, and it's hard to imagine many incumbents giving up on a privilege they've been waiting for.

>not the only one who is (edit: was)

is: "McConnell’s frozen moment renews questions about America’s aged leaders" https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/31/politics/mitch-mcconnell-...

Reagan wasn’t all there for his second term.

As far as I'm concerned, his entire term.

Also see FDR...

And Woodrow Wilson and Strom Thurmond and Fetterman and...

wait, what exactly gives you the impression that Fetterman isn't all there?

this is an interview he gave within the last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qldqgtCYMs0

Say we have a professional psychiatrist, or a whole board of them, evaluating the mental competence of candidates. Occasionally they would designate one as incompetent, who would then be removed from the election.

This would seem to be less democratic rather than more. The voters have less options than before, so the shift in power is from voters to experts.

There is no way to make it politically neutral and hard to game? I guess that would lead it to be more biological based?

So at least age limits are something everyone can prepare for and expect, rather than it being a surprise?

> There is no way to make it politically neutral and hard to game?

No. Psychiatry, like politics and law, depends much on the personal beliefs of the human in charge. Look at our supreme court. Justices are supposed to be impartial, but they still tend to decide cases based on their political leanings.

That's a feature, not a bug, of being human.

Do we really want political games around deciding who is fit or unfit for office? I can 100% guarantee that this will cause more shit-slinging from both sides at each other than meaningful action

I've been really surprised by the conversation around this being centered around age when, in my opinion, the controversy should be about a group of staffers exercising the power of a Senator with the tacit backing of the party. There is video/audio of staffers actively teller her what to say and how to vote. The office appears to have usurped her power. Voters aren't being represented by the person they elected.

Her staff could just finish out her term and nothing would change but that's illegal because she's dead.

All of my political rivals are mentally unfit to serve and I have a physician donor/friend who can attest.

It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year olds in for a 6 year term. If she can’t be beat in a primary, then we need something like ranked choice voting so people can safely vote for an alternative third party without risking spoiling the election for a candidate they definitely don’t want.

I'd rather see a proportional system.

The problem is first past the post is in the running for the worst way to run a democracy, so basically any reform option would work, and it's hard to get consensus around change.

Are you saying that First Past the Post won at being First Past the Post? :-)

(Closed-list) proportional system wouldn't stop an unfit party insider being put at the top of the list.

Proportional has other flaws too, like small parties playing 'kingmaker'. As in: say the two major parties each get 45%, and I run an outfit that got 10%. To have a majority, you're going to have to deal with me, so I'm going to have way more influence than my 10% would warrant.

I've seen this happen in the real world in Italy.

A proportional system will still have one of the primary issues with the current system: the parties choose their representatives, and the two major ones will continue to trot out just the worst people they can find.

(Yes, there are primaries, but the DNC and RNC hold an astronomical amount of power in picking the candidates and influencing the winners.)

But that's not a problem when you can just defect from the major parties with no penalty. The major parties are only able to continually put up garbage candidates because there are no other options.

Ranked voting for single offices (president, governor, etc), and proportional for any representative body, like the House and Senate.

Or, if the Senate is really meant to represent the states rather than the people, it should only be concerned with state issues: which issues belong at the federal level, and which at the state level, for example.

I'd be fine with a literal random selection with the people being able to trigger "no-confidence" at set intervals.

Can't be much worse and statistically it should have basically the same outcome.

I encourage you to run a campaign, just in a local county. You will find there are things one can't see from the outside that make this sentiment naively false.

List them here! You aren't actually saying anything.

My wife was part of a congressional primary campaign so I got to see some of this close-up. It’s hard to list all the reasons, but there is definitely a sort of institutional inertia that makes it hard to primary someone on the story of merely being the better candidate, unless there is an a prior consensus among voters that the incumbent needs to go.

Some examples:

- Congressional elections are expensive; incumbents have deeper-rooted donor networks to tap.

- Civic groups that are already working with the incumbent want to continue the relationship.

- General voter apathy around primary elections; even regular voters often skip primaries so finding people who will actually vote gets harder.

- Name recognition; if someone shows up to the polls to vote for another ballot item but hasn't followed the congressional race, they'll probably put a box next to the incumbent unless they have a particular reason not to.

I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing -- high turnover of elected officials is disruptive to the system -- but there are clearly cases in which it overcorrects.

The part about voter apathy towards primaries is important. It means that the sort of people who vote in primaries don't represent an unbiased sample of their party: they skew towards the extremes, because those people can be more easily mobilized. This means that primaries don't produce candidates capable of representing the median voter very well, and we end up with a choice between the canonical Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich. That's why the Freedom Caucus doesn't want McCarthy to use funding to influence primaries in their states; it would allow him to enforce party discipline on them.

This becomes even worse when combined with "safe" districts where whoever wins the primary for the district's ruling party is nearly guaranteed to win the general election as well. It makes one wonder how democratic we should consider such an election to be.

All this is to say that it's important to not just look at whether an institution is democratic in form, but whether it is also democratic in outcomes. The Law of Unintended Consequences will be obeyed.

[https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h...]

I feel that in the last 20+ years or so, the candidates have seem to forgotten the "appeal to the crazies in the primaries, pivot for the general".

Then again, the whole point of democracy is that the voters will get what they want and get it good and hard.

The voters don't get what they want, they get what you offer them. With a good marketing budget, you might be able to convince voters to want what you're offering them. That's called Manufactured Demand.

Other comments have gotten at the nuts and bolts of administrations, and here's the PR side of it:

Do the 'Mom Test' on any candidate and you will see why 9 out of 10 times a challenger to an incumbent fails [0]. The only challengers who succeed beat the 'good enough test' while simultaneously fending off the current administration's inertia (aptly put by paulgb)

[0] https://www.momtestbook.com/

what is "the mom test"?

the link seems to be an entire marketing campaign selling a book and a brand, with no "test" clearly specified - can you summarize it, please?

“Is it good enough”

It’s running through questions like so: When you have an issue with county government, how do you handle it?

Their answer will tell you many things. Is it actually a concern the county can address? If it is not an issue the county can address, why do they think it is? If it’s a strong held belief, what experiences solidified it (buying a lot and being told one thing by a realtor, for example) - etc. you then use all of that to create a product (a campaign messaging) that aligns with the candidate and public’s opinion / current default mode.

From chatGPT: "What is the mom test?"

The "Mom Test" is a term from a book by Rob Fitzpatrick titled "The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you". It is about customer development and strategies for entrepreneurs to properly validate their business ideas.

The title refers to the notion that even your mom, who generally loves you unconditionally, would lie to you to spare your feelings if your business idea wasn’t good. So, the "Mom Test" suggests a method of asking the right questions to get honest and useful feedback from people, including those who might be predisposed to be nice to you.

The key principles of the Mom Test are:

    Talk about their life instead of your idea: Ask about specific behaviors and thoughts in their past and present, not about hypothetical futures. Avoid asking whether they think your business idea is good. Instead, focus on their problems, pains, and needs related to the area your business is focused on.

    Ask for specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future: People's predictions about their future behaviors are typically inaccurate. By asking about their past actions, you can gather more reliable information.

    Talk less and listen more: This is about them, not about you or your idea. The goal is to gather insights, so avoid leading questions and let them do the talking.

By following these principles, entrepreneurs can gather real insights into customer needs and challenges, which is crucial for validating and improving business ideas.

I ran for a city councilmember:

1) You opponents campaign manager will lie about their candidate without qualms. 2) Donors will give money to a scoundrel, as long as they think the scoundrel will win. 3) Voters are actually good at picking up bullshit - in aggregate. 4) Rich white liberal female voters will not vote for a man. 5) Plenty of Black, Asian, and Immigrant voters are conservative, but many reflexively vote liberal. 6) Do it, even if you lose by a small amount like I did, you'll learn a lot and have a lot of fun

That doesn't sound even the tiniest bit fun. I'm genuinely curious about what made it fun, presumably something you didn't mention?

I grew a lot and made a lot of friends in so many communities, and I learned from immigrants about the values my great grandparents also had.

I'm conservative and found that I have so much in common with so many people that I'm sort of pissed that our culture has done it's best to keep us apart.

Thanks for this analysis. I feel like there is a big diconnect between what groups of people are assumed to be like vs what they actually do. Point 5 being the most apparent for me

Ranked choice voting (the brand name for Instant Runoff or Hare voting) neither theoretically [0] nor empirically [1] has the outcomes for third parties that you think it does. This combined with its other flaws makes it worse than plurality.

Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections but monotonicity is the worst criterion to give up, especially when the system has so many other flaws.

[0] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html

[1] see examples cited in https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html

[2] sure, you can transmit the contents of all of the ballots, but then it's still a centralized count...

[3] n! grows much much larger than population, so you can encode ballot ID

[4] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

The real problem with RCV is that it doesn't intuitively make sense to an average person. I wrote a web app for RCV and spent months trying to build a user experience that would help people understand the concept and it just doesn't work.

People come to the question of voting assuming it's easy to understand...We've never had to deal with complexity around the concept so we expect it to be simple.

Introducing an algorithm plays into the fears of people who believe in a deep state which is secretly trying to manipulate people.

We deeply need a better voting system, but one of the core requirements must be that one can explain it to a middle schooler in 30 seconds.

How is it hard to explain: please put these names in a row from best to worst.

Citizens of other countries have figured it out. Which means, of course, Americans can't. And yes, I'm an American.

When I tested out of high school, one of the test questions gave you a list of planets and their diameters.

The multiple choice question was: which of these answers lists the planets in order from smallest to largest diameter?

This was for a high school diploma equivalent! I was stumped for a while wondering if I was understanding the question correctly.

Anyway, I passed the test, but the fact this question was on there gave me serious doubts as to the general skill of the populace. I'm a fan of RCV over the current system, but I know it's going to trip a lot of people up.

It's the way this leads to a specific outcome that's hard to explain.

An additional problem is trust.

With any RCV method, you win because math says so. In a normal election you count.

It's basically 100% guaranteed that someone who won most first choices but lost the election will try to delegitimize the election with stupid populism.

The first and most important job of an election is to ensure peaceful transfer of power.

My favorite alternate system is approval voting. Vote any number of candidates rather than just one. Most votes wins. 5 seconds and no nerd required.

> “The real problem with RCV is that it doesn't intuitively make sense to an average person.”

And yet it’s happening in NYC:

_“The first Ranked Choice Voting election was on February 2nd, 2021 in a special election for NYC Council District 24 (Queens).”_

If you can make it in NYC, you can make it anywhere.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/civicengagement/voting/ranked-choic...

When do you think some third party is going to arise out of the broken cesspool of one-party machine politics in the state of dementia known as California? Please, fill us in.

no need to single out california. this is prevalent in so many places. texas. south carolina. wyoming. new mexico.

We should have the ability to do a recall when mental faculties come into question. Have a bare minimum mental fitness test: Time awareness, location awareness, action consequence relationship, grade 6 comprehension and control over bodily functions

Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not a commentary on reality.

Putting it on your radar: Approval Voting

Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation.

https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/

Doesn’t seem to allow people to express their natural feelings. RCV does. I absolutely have a favorite. And I want to be able to encode that. I also have a 2nd choice, and so on.

Imagine a case where I really really want one guy, and between the remaining two I have a strong preference for one over the other. RCV lets me express that.

Approval would have been stuck. Should I mention the 2nd guy? I do want them if it came to having to choose but I’d hate to place them on even footing with my top top pick.

this is a common intuition-based fallacy. i'm an expert with almost 20 years of experience working in this field with various phd's in political science, math, and game theory. i explain this here:

https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034b...

tl;dr - for any two candidates, X and Y, the voters who approve only one of them express a "ranked preference" between them. and because those voters are, on average, a good statistical sample of the X-vs-Y preference of the entire electorate, approval voting turns out to measure voter preferences very accurately.

whereas instant runoff voting can actually have much bigger problems in preference detection because it only looks at one layer of preferences at a time. for example:

35% left center 33% right center 32% center

in this example, center is preferred to both the left and the right by a LANDSLIDE 2/3rds majority, yet is the first candidate eliminated. this happens because of "vote splitting" (spoiler effect) between the two more partisan candidates. so it might _feel_ like you expressed your preferences better. but you didn't really.

and what about STRATEGIC VOTING?

if right wins, then the left supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that. and if left wins, then right supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that.

approval voting satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion", which means it cannot possibly hurt you to support your sincere favorite candidate.

for these and many other reasons, approval voting is vastly superior to ranking. https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...

Another system similar to this but with more information is STAR voting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting

They all have different strengths and weaknesses. We should be trying to move to more optimal systems.

A major, important difference between the two is that a median HN user can read the Wikipedia page on STAR voting and come away not fully understanding it and have further questions (do score difference magnitudes matter in the runoff? Or only which is higher?).

Meanwhile approval voting is exhaustively explained by "vote for as many candidates as you like. Candidate with the most votes wins."

A "more optimal" voting system doesn't exist in a vacuum, public understanding and trust make a voting system more optimal. Just not more mathematically optimal.

cardinal (rated) voting methods are better than ordinal (ranked). so score voting, approval voting, and star voting are all good.

approval voting is just score voting on a 0-1 binary scale. star voting is score voting on a 0-5 scale, followed by an "instant runoff" between the top two highest rated candidates.

> public understanding and trust make a voting system more optimal.

star voting: score the candidates from 0 - 5 and the winner is the majority favorite between the two highest rated overall.

there's no risk with public understanding here. i've worked on this subject since 2006, and conducted exit polls with score voting ballots within months of getting into this issue. people understand it just fine. it's radically simpler than ranking.

And there is an additional check: the Senate itself can expel individual members. We elected her, and they didn’t expel her. RIP Senator Feinstein.

RCV advocates miss the point entirely. It's not that people want to vote for third parties but can't. It's that the candidates that survive the major parties' primary elections have only to pander to their insane bases. In California where no-party-indicateds outnumber Republicans, the top-2 system is effectivley a Democratic primary.

Alaska has the right idea: a jungle primary where the top-4 advance, followed by an RCV general. RCV by itself doesn't do much. You have to weaken the primary electorate, as Alaska does.

If you're going to lay responsibility at the feet of the voters it isn't fair to throw out a "It is how it’s supposed to work.". The voters decide how it is supposed to work by making arguments and talking to each other and expressing opinions. If voters have power then expressing what qualities a politician should have helps the process.

And while ranked choice voting is probably superior, it'd be a lot easier for one of the parties to implement RCV internally then call it a day. The major problem is that the primary system is too incumbent-friendly, making it hard for challengers to grow organically.

And I don't buy the argument that the US Congress Regulars have done a good job. They look like they've mucked a lot of stuff up, badly, and left a series of ruins behind them. Literally in many cases.

She held a position of incredible importance (chair of the senate judiciary committee). Her leaving would cause a stalemate and block all judicial nominations.

That's a fact, not a guess.

She should have left, but the reason she didn't should be happening either.

Yeah this is just an unfortunate reality of the situation we're living in today. People think she was on some sort of ego trip by remaining in the senate or something, when really it was just the best option for making sure Biden is able to appoint judges. She was able to get a bunch of them approved recently, we should be thankful for that. People saying stuff like "thank God she's finally gone" are so ignorant. Newsom will appoint a democrat, that democrat will get no meaningful committee appointments, and we'll be in a worse situation than we were.

The argument we're making is she should have retired twenty years ago, when she was "just" 70 years old.

why should a 70 year old retire if her constituents continue to support her?

To avoid the whole "walking dead" thing that keeps happening to elderly politicians. I think it is self-evidently bad when the people running the country cannot remember what happened yesterday.

Apparently you are in the minority. Her constituents had no problem voting for her in the last election despite her advanced age. They either don't care or value experience over other concerns.

Yeah. Both "she's too old to run" and "she's the best candidate under our current system" can be true at the same time. Elsewhere in this thread, I proposed changing the system to have an upper age limit (65) on running for office, which nicely solves the problem, as someone else would have had to step up before her brain turned into pea soup.

her constituents above a certain age*

many of her constituents aren't allowed to vote

The voting age is 18. Children shouldn't vote.

There must be age limit for any job, including senators and presidents.

Or, test them for physicals and minds before they can take on the job, do it annually, it's a normal practice in all other fields, it's good for all sides.

She was also incredibly right wing vs. her constituents and was extremely bought off. She did some civil rights stuff early in her career, but it’s been 100% corruption and destroying the environment for this entire century.

She wasn’t senile that entire time.

(I’ll quantify right wing: She voted with the Trump administration more than any other democrat, and voted like an average republican senator during his administration.)

> (I’ll quantify right wing: She voted with the Trump administration more than any other democrat, and voted like an average republican senator during his administration.)

That's nonsense. She voted like every other cookie cutter corporate Democrat, i.e. whatever her handlers told her to do. At the tail end of her career, it was pretty explicit (and disgusting to watch): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-dianne-feinste...

Some stats on here "voting with Trump": https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/

She's clearly not at the top of that pile when sorting by Democrats.

she wasn't right wing, she was centrist.

80 years should be the absolute upper limit. After that one should really look at relaxing in their final decade.

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