Ranked choice voting seems like the most reasonable choice - the current FPP system lends itself to strategic voting and a two-party system with increasingly polarised parties.
Ranked choice allows for a middle ground to form independently of the parties at the outer fringes - it doesn't necessarily mean the centre wins, but it does exist and have a chance.
I wonder why approval voting seems to always get lost in the discussion. It seems so much simpler, and it doesn't have the frailty where a close race for third or fourth place can radically change the results for first place at the last minute.
My only guess is that people really want to say, "This one is my favorite, followed by..." instead of saying, "These ones are acceptable", but there are some real downsides to that.
In the US, we've had several states play games when it comes to counting and reporting votes. With ranked choice, these places could cause uncertainty for weeks. With approval voting, a clear winner can be known if there is one.
It's one of the reasons politics in Ireland are so stable and monotonous. Mind you, I'm not complaining. I chose to live here precisely for that reason.
In the real world there are many different types of preferential voting (ranked choice variations) systems in use across Australia and the world.
In a century of voting none of the niggling complaints made in your second link (I read rather than watched) has been an issue and such system are better than the shortcomings of FPP such as takes place in much of the US.
Point 5: What RCV Doesn’t Do: Help Third Parties seems exceptionally on the nose.
eg: "RCV’s complex tabulations don’t show support for candidates’ rankings once a candidate is eliminated." .. well, they do if the electrol commission reports them (as is done in Australia).
"Also, according to Duverger’s Law (a political science concept), a voting method needs to have at least one of two features to encourage third parties. It needs to either (1) have a lower vote count threshold for a candidate to be elected or (2) allow voters to honestly support their favorite. RCV does neither of these things."
In the US, for example, Australian preferential voting would allow for votes to Jill Stein to not spoil the vote for the proper majors (Biden | Trump) and report how many voters actually support Stein Vs Biden or Trump.
Those who wish can vote [ 1: Stein 2: Biden ] or [ 1: Stein 2: Trump ] and (if that's how it goes) if Stein loses by having less votes then the preferences go to each ballots 2: candidate.
After all is done then the winner, be it Trump or Biden, is aware of just how much they owe to voters that preferred Stein and over the course of time the support for Stein can grow AND|OR alternative candidates can move to embrace the policy positions of Stein if they're seen to be significantly popular.
Voting is not the only way that people let their preferences be known. If the President owed a huge debt to Stein supporters, they'd be aware of it. Ranked choice voting could make that "official" in some sense, but it's not a secret now.
All politicians put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what positions will appeal to voters, and assemble a coalition large enough to eke out a majority. It won't be as simple as "adding policy positions from Candidate X and gain their voters". Every policy position change attracts some people and loses others.
People seem to hope that an alternative voting system will turn up some massive groundswell of support for their specific policy, that is somehow being ignored solely because of first-past-the-post voting. That's simply not the case.
Stein's policies just aren't all that popular. Maybe they're more popular than you might infer from the vote total, but that's not what a vote is for. A vote's job is to determine a sole winner. For making finer distinctions, there are many better tools -- focus groups, polling, reading social media -- and they do indeed do that.
I don't care. I'm in Australia with preferential voting refuting the GP comments position.
> All politicians put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what positions will appeal to voters
Sure. Phone polls that now (in the US) fewer than 1% respond to and have huge selection bias issues. Internet polls that are riddled with issues. etc.
> A vote's job is to determine a sole winner.
In the US. Within an antiquated electoral system that has iteratively doom spiraled into a two party quagmire despite the founders express dislike of party politics.
That's exactly the kind of blinkered view expected of a First Past the Post voter raised with American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
Our system was established in 1900 - it has its issues, sure, but it was designed with in intent as a "Washminster system" that looked at both the UK and US systems and attempted to take the best of both and iron out some of the glaring issues with each.
> Voting is not the only way that people let their preferences be known.
But it's certainly the most on record, definitive, and breaks up Two Party non representative majority blocks, forces deals with smaller but still representative blocks, etc.
When I was young, there was overlap between the D right wing and the R left wing. That overlap is gone, and I believe FPTP (and its corollary, the gerrymander) has much to do with it.
Now I'm watching the train wreck safely, from a proportional representation polity.
* I hear the DPRK would give their POWs chocolate bars if they wrote politically correct essays; similarly when I was young I used to get "gold stars" for writing essays about how obviously N=2 parties must be better than, not only N=1, but also N>=3.
(thus far we've been able to avoid the major objection in that thread, by keeping a nearly continuous "grand coalition" government: proportional all the way up)
[we're also helped because political boundaries are not arbitrarily redrawn, but tend to be based on centuries-to-millennia-old borders; I don't know what they do in the cities, but it's undoubtedly better than Austin TX: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/new-district-maps... ]
Third and fourth parties that can't spoil are a blessing in electoral systems, they force deals in the direction of real people and increase representation.
It doesn't scale very well into a large number of votes or a large number of candidates. Unless you decentralize everything and let the computer handle all of the details. But both of those are huge issues.
I did, but it weights on my heart what is happening in my two motherlands, Brazil and Hungary (and I'm concerned I'm not completely out of the blast radius of whatever is going to happen in the US)
Almost entirely democratic societies always end up fragmented like America. This was known in Plato’s time.
Unfortunately the propaganda pushers these days get to publish articles on “science.org”, trying to convince us the system is fundamentally sound - we just need some tweaks.
You can look for ranked voting systems as a solution that prevents excessive fragmentation - if a proposal has high approval and high rejection, it'll be rejected.
You can also make that with giving people one positive vote and two negative ones to give to any candidate, provided not both negative ones go to the same candidate.
partisan animosity,which means the duopoly is uncomfortable for the beurocrats
there is no democracy to have an attitude about
I vote with my feet and my wallet,plus grind back
at whichever beurocracy is making missery personal
It depends what one means by "populism". If you include Bernie-style politics as "populist" along with the Trump variety, then polarization and an inability to find commonality are the things that frustrate populist goals: They are what keep the horseshoe split.
"Efficacious strategies for reducing support for undemocratic practices included correcting misperceptions of rival partisans’ views and highlighting the risk of democratic collapse. "
Ranked choice voting seems like the most reasonable choice - the current FPP system lends itself to strategic voting and a two-party system with increasingly polarised parties.
Ranked choice allows for a middle ground to form independently of the parties at the outer fringes - it doesn't necessarily mean the centre wins, but it does exist and have a chance.
I wonder why approval voting seems to always get lost in the discussion. It seems so much simpler, and it doesn't have the frailty where a close race for third or fourth place can radically change the results for first place at the last minute.
My only guess is that people really want to say, "This one is my favorite, followed by..." instead of saying, "These ones are acceptable", but there are some real downsides to that.
In the US, we've had several states play games when it comes to counting and reporting votes. With ranked choice, these places could cause uncertainty for weeks. With approval voting, a clear winner can be known if there is one.
It's one of the reasons politics in Ireland are so stable and monotonous. Mind you, I'm not complaining. I chose to live here precisely for that reason.
The Pollyanna view of ranked-choice voting presented on TV doesn't really work out in the real world.
Veritasium video on voting systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
https://electionscience.org/research-hub/the-limits-of-ranke...
In the real world there are many different types of preferential voting (ranked choice variations) systems in use across Australia and the world.
In a century of voting none of the niggling complaints made in your second link (I read rather than watched) has been an issue and such system are better than the shortcomings of FPP such as takes place in much of the US.
Point 5: What RCV Doesn’t Do: Help Third Parties seems exceptionally on the nose.
eg: "RCV’s complex tabulations don’t show support for candidates’ rankings once a candidate is eliminated." .. well, they do if the electrol commission reports them (as is done in Australia).
"Also, according to Duverger’s Law (a political science concept), a voting method needs to have at least one of two features to encourage third parties. It needs to either (1) have a lower vote count threshold for a candidate to be elected or (2) allow voters to honestly support their favorite. RCV does neither of these things."
In the US, for example, Australian preferential voting would allow for votes to Jill Stein to not spoil the vote for the proper majors (Biden | Trump) and report how many voters actually support Stein Vs Biden or Trump.
Those who wish can vote [ 1: Stein 2: Biden ] or [ 1: Stein 2: Trump ] and (if that's how it goes) if Stein loses by having less votes then the preferences go to each ballots 2: candidate.
After all is done then the winner, be it Trump or Biden, is aware of just how much they owe to voters that preferred Stein and over the course of time the support for Stein can grow AND|OR alternative candidates can move to embrace the policy positions of Stein if they're seen to be significantly popular.
Voting is not the only way that people let their preferences be known. If the President owed a huge debt to Stein supporters, they'd be aware of it. Ranked choice voting could make that "official" in some sense, but it's not a secret now.
All politicians put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what positions will appeal to voters, and assemble a coalition large enough to eke out a majority. It won't be as simple as "adding policy positions from Candidate X and gain their voters". Every policy position change attracts some people and loses others.
People seem to hope that an alternative voting system will turn up some massive groundswell of support for their specific policy, that is somehow being ignored solely because of first-past-the-post voting. That's simply not the case.
Stein's policies just aren't all that popular. Maybe they're more popular than you might infer from the vote total, but that's not what a vote is for. A vote's job is to determine a sole winner. For making finer distinctions, there are many better tools -- focus groups, polling, reading social media -- and they do indeed do that.
> Stein's policies just aren't all that popular.
I don't care. I'm in Australia with preferential voting refuting the GP comments position.
> All politicians put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what positions will appeal to voters
Sure. Phone polls that now (in the US) fewer than 1% respond to and have huge selection bias issues. Internet polls that are riddled with issues. etc.
> A vote's job is to determine a sole winner.
In the US. Within an antiquated electoral system that has iteratively doom spiraled into a two party quagmire despite the founders express dislike of party politics.
That's exactly the kind of blinkered view expected of a First Past the Post voter raised with American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
Our system was established in 1900 - it has its issues, sure, but it was designed with in intent as a "Washminster system" that looked at both the UK and US systems and attempted to take the best of both and iron out some of the glaring issues with each.
> Voting is not the only way that people let their preferences be known.
But it's certainly the most on record, definitive, and breaks up Two Party non representative majority blocks, forces deals with smaller but still representative blocks, etc.
When I was young, there was overlap between the D right wing and the R left wing. That overlap is gone, and I believe FPTP (and its corollary, the gerrymander) has much to do with it.
Now I'm watching the train wreck safely, from a proportional representation polity.
Have a cone while you wait: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885265 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCoRoqGz5so
I'm not waiting so much as I am following Dijkstra's dictum that doctors are not expected to suffer themselves from the diseases* they diagnose.
wrt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885514 compare a previous swap: https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce... !
* I hear the DPRK would give their POWs chocolate bars if they wrote politically correct essays; similarly when I was young I used to get "gold stars" for writing essays about how obviously N=2 parties must be better than, not only N=1, but also N>=3.
(thus far we've been able to avoid the major objection in that thread, by keeping a nearly continuous "grand coalition" government: proportional all the way up)
[we're also helped because political boundaries are not arbitrarily redrawn, but tend to be based on centuries-to-millennia-old borders; I don't know what they do in the cities, but it's undoubtedly better than Austin TX: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/new-district-maps... ]
That singular penperson A. Lincoln writes a wonderful ancedote and should consider a career in politics.
In the annals of N>=3, one of my favourite truple slogans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Democrats#:~:text=A....
Third and fourth parties that can't spoil are a blessing in electoral systems, they force deals in the direction of real people and increase representation.
It doesn't scale very well into a large number of votes or a large number of candidates. Unless you decentralize everything and let the computer handle all of the details. But both of those are huge issues.
> allows for a middle ground to form
The impatient and unconstrained may prefer to vote with their feet for those places where the middle ground has not yet been stomped out of existence.
I did, but it weights on my heart what is happening in my two motherlands, Brazil and Hungary (and I'm concerned I'm not completely out of the blast radius of whatever is going to happen in the US)
What if people democratically choose antidemocracy?
See germany:
Mar 1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_elec...
Nov 1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1933_German_parliamen...
Karl Popper's paradox - you can't tolerate that - it's a mistake a society might be unable to easily undo.
Almost entirely democratic societies always end up fragmented like America. This was known in Plato’s time.
Unfortunately the propaganda pushers these days get to publish articles on “science.org”, trying to convince us the system is fundamentally sound - we just need some tweaks.
You can look for ranked voting systems as a solution that prevents excessive fragmentation - if a proposal has high approval and high rejection, it'll be rejected.
You can also make that with giving people one positive vote and two negative ones to give to any candidate, provided not both negative ones go to the same candidate.
partisan animosity,which means the duopoly is uncomfortable for the beurocrats there is no democracy to have an attitude about I vote with my feet and my wallet,plus grind back at whichever beurocracy is making missery personal
Its "Pray the Populism Away" conversion therapy.
It depends what one means by "populism". If you include Bernie-style politics as "populist" along with the Trump variety, then polarization and an inability to find commonality are the things that frustrate populist goals: They are what keep the horseshoe split.
Bernie is just common-sense.
"Efficacious strategies for reducing support for undemocratic practices included correcting misperceptions of rival partisans’ views and highlighting the risk of democratic collapse. "
In other words, gaslighting and threats.
Is correcting gaslighting, gaslighting?
When people base their identities on being wrong (without, of course, knowing that), it becomes very difficult to enlighten them.