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
lol specifically banning RCV is on my states ballot this November, we won’t be able to do county by county in Missouri if it passes and they’ve tacked it onto some anti absentee vote nonsense so it’s probably going to pass
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?
Hmm, so I did a little research on STAR. It seems to basically just be “weighted” voting, where candidates are given a vote with a weight per voter just to select two runoff candidates. Then it goes to normal FPTP (decided by individual voter ranking) once the runoff candidates are selected.
I really do like the flexibility of the ranking system, and I think it could work very well in an actively participating citizenry. BUT:
I feel like this would just end up with American voters falling into the same 2-party trap, and 3rd parties once again splintering themselves across a bunch of different candidates that will not total up enough to make it into the runoff. Since there isn’t multiple chances to coalesce 3rd party candidates into the “most preferred” one, voters will most likely just once again pile into two big parties.
The major benefit I do see is that voters can give multiple candidates the same high rating, meaning the visibility of said 3rd party candidates could be a lot higher and end up eliminating the entire first problem I just mentioned. However, it would be entirely dependent on at least one 3rd party candidate scraping together enough 4 and 5 star votes to make it at least to 2nd place in the runoff before being killed off.
It is also harder to administer and requires a good bit more backend data handling on election workers’ side. That’s probably not a big deal, but it does add complexity and a little more effort for the public to interpret the final results.
One of the reasons I like RCV is because it sort of “filters upwards” thru candidates, giving each one multiple chances to increase their vote share.
Theoretical: If you had 5 candidates in a smaller local election, and the 1st choice results were 35%, 25%, 20%, 10%, 10%; you probably expect typical Americans used to FPTP to pile Republicans and Democrats into the upper 35 and 25%'s, and through each elimination round their first-choice votes will not change.
But if the 3rd party 20/10/10’s, now empowered to not accidentally throw away their vote in FPTP, coalesced into a single voting bloc through their second and third choices not choosing the R or D, they’ll easily hit 50%. In STAR, the election is already over; it’s a runoff between the R and D again, and now we still have the same 2 party problem.
I’m trying to be realistic though, and as an Oregon resident I want to get at least something that is better than FPTP. There were a couple STAR proposals around the state at county/city levels and they’ve failed each time, but RCV seems to be getting some momentum this year. At least enough momentum to actually make it to a statewide ballot measure, which is more than any other alternative has gotten so far, so I’m gonna fight like hell for it.
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.
I think something like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting would be much better for the US system.
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
You are talking as if the Republican party isn’t morphing into another fascist party.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Except it doesn’t, because you’ll end up boxing out voting populations that are significant, but spread evenly and thinly across your whole legislative area. If there’s a voting block that is at 20% everywhere, they will never elect their preferred candidate, because they’ll never have a majority in any district. Gerrymandering will always be a problem with single-winner districts, because the definition of fair districts has multiple inputs, and there’s no consensus on how much priority to give to each.
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.
Vote progressive and you’ll get voting system reform. And, more importantly imo, campaign finance reform.
Also vote in every local election. Even the seemingly insignificant ones like a school board election.
