You’d think midterms would be a great time to get your name out there and run high profile candidates to win House districts led by charlatans…
Just gonna throw STAR voting into the rink for the hell of it. Any of these systems is better than FPTP and I would endorse any of them in a local push for better voting.
I used to mention AV a lot, but STAR is my preference now. Of course, any improvement to the voting system makes it easier to further improve the voting system (which is why improvements are against the interest of either of the main two parties - they will not help)
Democrats have shown a willingness to work on it. If you look at Wiki’s map of ranked choice states, the ones that fully or partially adopted it are mostly blue states. The ones that banned it are almost all red states.
Let’s say one voter gives all candidates 5 stars each, except 1 who gets no stars; and another voter gives no candidate any stars, except 1 who gets 3 stars?
Couldn’t tell you the outcome unless you actually gave me the actual votes for each candidate. For personal impact, the first voters has communicated “anyone except this guy” and the second has communicated “I don’t like this guy but I hate every other option”.
STAR does have the risk of having more than two candidates win with the same rating, but the chances of that happening are astronomically low - even in town elections. You’d have to be using an insanely low number of voters for it to even be plausible.
Let’s say 101 voters each give Trump 5 stars.
Let’s say 100 voters each give RFK JR 3 stars, Biden 2 stars, and Stein 1 star.
Let’s say 100 voters each give Biden 3 stars.
301 voters
200 gave Biden stars
101 gave Trump stars
however,
Trump gets 501 stars
Biden gets 500 stars
RFK Jr gets 300 stars
Stein gets 100 stars
1401 stars, and with 501 Trump wins.
I’m not totally opposed to the idea, but it seems to have some weakness.
