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Comment by grim_io | Hacker News Reader

You give the people in charge too much credit regarding any long term thinking or goals in general.

The goal is to win the next election but I think the populace is to blame for this more than anything.

The populace is who is too interested in winning politics as a sport that the politicians have really no choice other than to focus entirely on winning the next election.

If the voters treat politics as a constant form of sports entertainment, constantly checking the latest news and events, then voters are actually the fundamental problem as to why the politicians can not do anything in terms of long term planning.

I always hear this accusation of people treating politics like sports, but what do you want? It's a FPTP system, which favors entrenching two parties. In order to maintain the backing (funding, importantly) of one of those two parties, candidates can't fall too far out of line. If you can't get your outsider preferred candidate above 50%, considering there is also likely another main-party candidate with significant policy overlap, you get nothing.

If you want to reduce the spectacle, replace FPTP with a better system that eliminates the need for primaries, and get rid of Citizens United. Good luck.

America desperately needs ranked choice voting, everywhere it can implement it.

I would also argue mandatory voting would be useful but I don't think the Americans are ready for that.

The one that seems to be working is to treat the system as two-round like the French presidential elections and do the work in the primaries. Worked for Mamdani.

It is essentially a (weird-ass) two-round system when it comes to the presidency (and many lower offices). Party primaries exist, they overwhelmingly gave one of the nominations to a dumpster.

IMO, a runoff or single round instant-runoff wouldn't solve much. Like the sibling says, it's already sort of like that. The way they eliminate candidates still forces/incentivizes people to make choices against their actual preferences. Ideally, you could vote exactly in line with your preferences regardless of who you think has the best chance of winning and not risk making things being worse than they would have been if you "lied." I've heard many times during primaries things like "I like candidate A a lot more, but I don't think they can win the general, so I voted for candidate B". This is also an issue with approval voting, which many people seem to have a very favorable opinion of. If there is an election between <good candidate>, <bad candidate> and <total disaster shitshow candidate>, and you think there's a chance the top two might be Bad and Disaster, do you approve of bad? There's no way for you to indicate that you actually don't like Bad, but are just hoping to prevent the worst.

I think there's risk in not doing it right the first time, if you were ever to get a chance to change it.

Yeah, preference-based voting is better, but you have to play the hand you're dealt in the meantime. Even dealing with gerrymandering seems to be beyond feasible politics.

no, approval voting is drastically better than ranking.

1. greater voter satisfaction, with virtually any ratio of strategic to honest voting. (i.e. "more resistant to strategy")

2. drastically simpler. (same ballot, precinct summable, lower kolmogorov complexity)

3. transparent: each result is a simple scalar sum of support, so third party and independent candidates don't have their support hidden from view.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/https://sites.goo...

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-only-voting-reform-worth...

approval voting has worked great in fargo and st louis. https://approval.vote/

FPTP isn't wonderful but for those of us looking on for outside the tolerance of gerrymander, deliberate disenfranchisement of some voters and letting corporations spend unlimited amounts of money on getting political outcomes ranks higher. FPTP is merely a bad choice. The others look more like a country deliberately eschewing democracy for something else.

>tolerance of gerrymander

Yes, but for example if you had proportional representation, the power of gerrymandering would be greatly reduced.

Agree on the other two. I don't know what the answer is there.

Or thinking

They definately think.

The thinking process is just line their pockets with as much as possible before they lose their position to someone else.

Once you understand that everything is rational. If not desirable.

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