Another reason to like Tim Walz. He has openly supported RCV: https://www.rcvbloomington.org/supporters
its going to be just like marijuana reform. forcibly, by the citizens county by county, state by state and it will take another 40 years
Start by supporting the RCV ballot initiative going on in Oregon this November. Donate and volunteer even if you're not in Oregon. If we're lucky Oregon will approve it and show everyone else both vote by mail AND RCV works perfectly fine.
https://www.oregonrcv.org/
I normally was recommending RCV, but today someone mentioned STAR which is like RCV 2.0. The RCV works flawlessly with 2 parties, but as the number of candidates grows and they are equally viable then actually the less preferred candidate might win, because people place candidates in different order. This can cause candidates that might otherwise win, be eliminated too early.
STAR essentially works like RCV, but you give candidates "stars" (1 to 5 rating) and you can have multiple candidates ranked on the same level (of you like both equally).
Any idea why STAR might not be good?
Brah, we have fptp. I'd die for something like that.
We could speed things along by eliminating the Electoral College with the National Popular Vote. As Republicans lose more consecutive terms, they’ll get behind ranked-choice as an avenue for leverage.
How about just not having a winner-takes-all system?
I'm skeptical about complex voting systems, simply because they cause a lot of confusion and some people don't understand what they're voting for.
Here in Germany we get two votes for the Bundestag, it's essentially a split between district vote and federal vote. The system is pretty simple, you get two columns, one with people, one with parties. And many voters still don't understand the implications of it.
My city's council has such a stupid voting system (multiple votes, multiple districts and parties), that it took me and my friends (all having masters degrees or doctorates, one literally being a pol sci teacher) several hours and an absurd chain of local/state websites to finally find a Word(!!) document that somewhat explained the process, and we still don't really know what was happening.
My point is not that 80% of people are too stupid to understand these systems, but too lazy to look for information, and that's fine. Even the stupidest voter should be able to find and understand the system within 5min. If not, information is obscured or the system too complex.
Ah yes, the method by which the Nazi party began their rise to power
the method which almost the entire world uses in one way or another?
no it totally make sense that if a candidate wins a state by 50.1% then the votes of the 49.9% should go directly to the winner as well.
the fact that you can lose the popular vote and is win an election is fucking bananas.
winner takes all is extremely undemocratic.
the fact that you can lose the popular vote and is win an election is fucking bananas
That is not due to winner-take-all, it's due to the electoral college
does the electoral college vote proportionally
it votes for single seat positions. you can call it a winner take all or proportional or whatever you want, functionally it will be the same.
You are talking as if the Republican party isn't morphing into another fascist party.
... so you think we should help them along?
Either you fell into establishment propaganda or peddler of it. Any system will develop extremists no matter what, if the establishment are too corrupt, and people are pushed to look for alternatives. Canadian PM Trudeau scrapped his first-term election promise of ranked choice voting after "looking into Europe" and said the same thing as you; and yet the Canadians have developed their own far-right lunatics over the years. And US has the Republican Party morphing already into another fascist party, all without copying any sort of multiple choice voting system from others or developing their own.
Yeah, it was the voting system that was the problem.
/s
All the people arguing for RCV are hoping it will solve their problems. I’m skeptical.
There are loads of other voting systems in action out there. Some of them guarantee full proportional representation to their respective countries. Generally what we see in those countries is a ton of different small, special interest parties with a few seats apiece. Then you end up with these bizarre coalitions where a bunch of unrelated special interests band together to form a government which roughly half the population ends up hating anyway. Israel is a prime example of that.
The voting system allowed it.
I think something like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting would be much better for the US system.
I much prefer Approval Voting, but anything is better than FPTP.
I prefer ranked choice simply because I may “approve” of two candidates in the sense they’d do a good job, but prefer one candidate over the other. Ranked choice allows me to note my preference.
Hard agree anything is better than FPTP
The problem I run into is that RCV can be nonmonotonic, where increasing a candidate's ranking can cause them to do worse and vice versa. For most elections this doesn't matter because the vast majority are uncompetitive, but it's the tight races where whacky things can happen. Occasionally RCV will fail to elect the Condorcet winner, who (when they exist) is the person who wins every head-to-head matchup.
I would agree that more major expression is better, except we're seeing evidence that even RCV is complicated enough to disenfranchise poor people at a disproportionate rate, something that doesn't happen under FPTP. The voting system needs to be simple enough that that doesn't happen, and we're lucky that Approval Voting happens to be very good at electing the most popular candidate. It's essentially a simultaneous approval rating poll, afterall.
It'd be quite ironic if they put this to a vote and FPTP wins because because the votes of its opponents are split between Ranked Choice and Approval Voting.
Start with an end to gerrymandering
Gerrymandering will exist no matter what you do, including nonpartisan map committees, because what counts as gerrymandering is an opinion. We gotta just leap-frog that problem and move to multi-member districts.
What if we just did a standard federal grid system?
That creates its own potential (unintended) problems. There's no one size fits all solution to gerrymandering.
Dave Wasserman did a really great job going through all sorts of potential solutions and the benefits and flaws.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hating-gerrymandering-is-easy-fixing-it-is-harder/
Short answer, it's complicated. Long answer, read the piece, it's really good.
As long as you had single-member districts, there will be a significant fraction of the voting population who have no one they can lobby who will listen. If I'm a Republican in a Democrat district, I don't have representation.
Elected nixon, elected bush, elected another bush, elected donald fucking trump, every president in between is just: well at least it's not _______
We deserve better. Do you?
These kinds of reforms would be so much easier to implement under a monarchy or some kind of dictatorial state.
Lets make democracy better.
Have you tried dictators?
You just need a very very very narrow definition of your "demos".
Well golly it just takes so darn long to make systemic changes, y’know? No wonder all the Swifties, er, Lefties or whoever are so gol dang mad. It’s hard work.
I think you just gave Nathan Poe an aneurism.
I hope this is sarcastic. Because yes, one-party/dictator states CAN implement changes incredibly fast. It's why China is able to get so much infrastructure and nuclear/renewable energy installed so fast... it's just, yknow, the rest of the problems are uhhhhhhhhhhhh
Of course. I deliberately didn’t put a /s because it’s ludicrous but it was a fun litmus test
I figured so.
Unfortunately there is a statisticslly significant population of people on Lemmy who would say a statement like that unironically, so everyone's kind of on edge for such trolls...
Please go to the hospital, I think you may have suffered brain damage.
Trivially easy in fact, until they became impossible to implement when the dictator didn't step down.
Well that wouldn’t be very helpful!
We only get the endless loop of people voting out of fear or against something around these parts.
Anything that gets us out of the two-party system where either of the parties would have to agree to let people leave.
Removing the other by choking it to death via atrophy of no longer being able to win is how you get the remaining party to split along conservative/progressive lines. The resulting progressive faction will be more willing to do ranked choice. If we allow the Republican party to continue to exist - or worse, win - it will remove democracy as a whole and then you'll get the opposite of ranked choice.
It's not about supporting the lesser of two evils. Period.
It's about punishing the greatest evil through every means available until it FUCKING DIES.
Progressives after the split: "Cast it into the fire! Destroy it!"
Yes, we do, but we don't always get what we deserve.
The lotion scene would've been a lot more interesting if he captured a guy down there.
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