Cool. Can we also get moving on Ranked Choice Voting?
I’d take RCV over nothing, but STAR and approval are significantly better like the other user said.
Some reasons for approval
- Addition is the only math involved. So it is extremely easy to get live results during counting. It makes auditing votes extremely easy.
- It is dead simple to understand, so the least amount of voters will be confused by it.
A longer form explanation of some of the other stuff:
Approval voting sounds good.
One issue I see with the star system is that people tend to have preconceptions about star ratings. E.g. some people never rate 5 stars on principle or will rate something 3 stars without realizing that is a 60% rating. My point is I think you might see some weird skew in the results based on this.
I can see that happening, which is why I think approval is the best of them all.
And with that said, so long as not all the votes are given equal scores, their votes would still matter even if they don’t believe in 5 star perfection.
And IIRC, there is nothing actually stopping a STAR system from using a 1 to 10 point scale instead of 5, which would further help with that issue.
I love how this video explains the differences between the voting methods. It’s what made me prefer STAR over RCV.
This is the only issue worth campaigning on. Fuck everyone for not realizing it. We will never get this system under control if it continues to misrepresent what the majority wants. There is no amount of bargaining and compromise that will ever bring forth the change we need to stop global climate change. Ranked choice - for its simplicity. Star - for its utility. Etc. Etc. Make the debate strictly about how we will reform voting and push everything else to the end of the list.
BTW, I’m not asking politicians to do this. I’m ask you, the people, if you will make your voice heard and enshrine it with a government that truly represents you.
This is the only issue worth campaigning on.
You’re not going to like the people campaigning on it, though.
Spoilers: It’s the Spoiler Candidates
Every candidate should be campaigning on it. Not until the Republicans are brazenly defending the broken system, or alternatively join the move for reformation because they think they can capitalize on it, is the country moving in the right direction.
When the pollsters call you your answer to every question should be, “I don’t care we need vote reform.”
When the media focus groups you,“I don’t care we need vote reform.”
When the NAZIs try to bait you, “I don’t care we need vote reform.”
I know, this isn’t a fully fleshed out strategy but it is a stance that will elevate the discussion.
You’re not going to like the people campaigning on it, though.
Spoilers: It’s the Spoiler Candidates
…because the Dems and GOP benefit from the current system. Any move away from FPTP harms them, so they aren’t going to support it and any other party is a “spoiler candidate” because of how FPTP works.
Tough luck, if you want to ask the people and want to have a say in national discourse, you have to buy a media outlet like billionaires do.
Approval voting is the only method that meets all the requirements for a fair election without elevating an unpopular candidate.
Approval voting still encourages strategic voting and “dishonesty” and does not strongly correlate with actual preference. If there are three candidates, Love, Tolerate, and Hate, 60% could strongly prefer Love, and 30% strongly prefer Hate, but both groups would prefer Tolerate over the other alternative, then Love voters would be smart to not make a second choice even though they would approve of Tolerate.
I’ll take better over perfect especially since better is on the ballot as an option this year for me, but who knows might try to get approval voting on the ballot for next time
I remember being in 3rd grade and learning about the electoral college and thinking, “that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of”. Still true to this day.
Learning that it was so rich white people in the south could substitute the votes of newly freed black slaves with theirs is what got me.
All this shit is because they were too fucking nice to the slavers.
Should have solved that problem back then.
Note how racist and evil the south still is, and compare it to Germany, and they had 1/3 the time to get better.
Okay guys stop up voting this! Simply let me assure you that I will upvote for you!
If you upvote this comment to 100, I will upvote the way you want me to upvote.
Actually I’ll do you better! Look. I know these guys who can upvote. If you upvote my comment past 100, I’ll have them vote for you just the way you telepathically have told me to upvote by up voting for me…what? Why would you even need to know me or my friend who hasn’t even talked to you directly? That’s crazy talk! I’m an upvoter, I upvote. They. My friends who can upvote are true upvoters too. Soon you won’t even need to upvote at all! You can just go read all the shit we Upvoted for you! Yey! We call our selves the “Upvotlectoral” college. We learn algebra in this college too, but we never graduate…at least you don’t know if we have graduated or not.
Sounds like this clown lives in that one blip in Nebraska or whatever that can impact shit, you know what to do bois. Electoral vote this mofo out the comments section! /s (chill)
Then how do you stop urban concerns from completely trouncing rural concerns? Voters from rural areas have valid concerns which are largely opposite of urban voters. If you get rid of electoral college, candidates will campaign in major cities and that’s it. Nobody else will matter.
For anyone downvoting me- you should know I’m a liberal-libertarian registered Democrat from Connecticut, who’s very much against Trump and most of the BS today’s GOP is peddling. I just don’t think disenfranchising anyone who doesn’t live in a city is the answer.
So the people in cities should just be worth less when they vote? It’s a federal vote for a federal office, everyone in the country should count the same.
The individual states already have their own powers which make sure the federal government doesn’t make decisions that are bad for those states. And each county and town have their own governments that pass local laws.
I’ve also heard this argument so many times but I haven’t heard any actual examples.
and what has that gotten us? rural communities are subsidized out the wazoo as the urban centers across America are strangled and starved. as the more powerful minority of people is catered too
It’s almost like many people are getting taxed w/o proper representation…
As opposed to now where like 10 states are tossups and the rest are locked in?
Which would be replaced with “Can the Democrat win California by a large enough margin?”
Which was literally the case when people complain about Clinton winning the popular vote in 2016 - across the 49 states that aren’t California more people voted for Trump, but she won California by such a large margin that she won the popular vote because of California alone. Same thing in 2000, where Gore’s popular vote lead was smaller than his margin in CA.
You should read what the electoral college does, because that’s not what it does.
Not the previous commenter, but I’m pretty certain that the, apparently fictional book, that Leave Burton showed on either The Daily Show, or Last Week Tonight, entitled It’s all Because of Racism, would cover what the EC’s actual purpose is. Though in this particular case it may be fairer to say classism.
Sure, then we can have another republican get elected against the will of the people. Clearly rural concerns are more important than preventing authoritarian idiots like trump from being able to undemocratically take power.
Cities matter more. Sorry, but that’s the reality.
Cities are where people live. People matter.
Cities are where culture happens. Culture matters. You’re not going to have a big art/music/anything scene in bumbleweed, NE because there aren’t enough people there to constitute a scene.
Cities are where economy happens. Money moving around matters. There are more transactions per day in the corner shop by me than a whole week in some country town with 700 residents.
Rural people still have the Senate and local government. Their rep in the house (which should be expanded) also should speak up for their region.
Everyone deserves some minimum respect, but the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane. A minority holding the majority garbage is not good. Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.
I say it all the time - places like California and New York are strategically more important, too. Most of the game development, the movie/tv industry, software, even a lot of our food, happens in CA. And then a great deal of finance happens in NYC. Lots of defense industry stuff is clustered around DC as well.
It’s called “flyover country” for a reason. If you want to partake in what is happening, then move to those locations. Unfortunately, our backwards slave-era system gives wayyyy too much power to regions that just don’t matter as much.
With respect sir (or madam), you are personifying the ‘ivory tower elite’ attitude that so many conservatives make fun of. 'I matter, others don’t.
You think there’s no culture in rural areas? That you need a giant festival to have culture?
That corner shop that has 100 transactions an hour… where do you think the bread they sell comes from? The flour? The avocadoes on the avocado toast? (sorry, I had to :P ) Sure as fuck doesn’t come from the city. You can write the rest of the nation off as unimportant and then see how unimportant they are when your fridge is empty. They matter.
the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane.
And the idea that Queens should be able to dictate policy that applies nationally including Nowhere, UT is just as insane.
Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.
I’ll give you that- most of the conservative platform these days is a bit on the batshit side.
But there’s other parts that make sense. Take guns for example. A liberal in NYC has the 11th largest army in the world 3 digits away. Police response time is seconds or minutes. So ‘nobody needs a gun’ is a common urban liberal position.
Go out in rural areas, there might be two deputies for an entire county with police response time in the range of 30-120 minutes if at all. And that county may have 4-legged predators like bears, wolves, etc that can threaten humans. So that guy wants a GOOD gun to defend himself and his family, because if there is a problem nobody else is gonna arrive until it’s too late.
The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?
Guns are just an example, but that overall is why I think the electoral college has a place. House is based on population, Senate based on statehood, Presidency is in the middle with influences both from statehood and population. That’s a good way to go.
And FWIW, I also support INCREASING the population representative in the House. The current cap of 437 has not served us well with the expanding US population, and there’s now over 700k citizens per representative. That’s far too many to get voices heard, and one rep covers far too many disparate people. And it also in the House increases influence of smaller states (to a minimum of 1/437th).
I believe the cap should be raised to a very large number, perhaps several thousand. It may no longer be possible to have the entire House convene in one building, but technology has solved that problem. If you have one representative for every say 10,000-25,000 citizens, it becomes much easier for a representative to truly represent their citizens in detail and gives a citizen much greater access to his or her representatives.
That’s what the Senate is for. Two senators per state regardless of population. Wyoming has as much of a say as California does.
In all honesty, that should change as well. I don’t think that’s doing any good, either. It gives people with completely backward and insane ideas the impression that their positions should be on equal footing with normal people’s ideas.
And what of the House? It’s largely based on population. If the White House and the House of Representatives are both population heavy then the Senate is entirely outnumbered.
The point is supposed to be that the House is population based, the Senate is state based, and the Presidency is somewhere in the middle.
There are simple and solid answers to this. First of all, dozens of other countries make it work. So there’s nothing magical that needs to be done. Second, the Bill of Rights is there to protect the minority from the majority. It’s also there to protect the people from the government, which is partly synonymous. Third, right now everyone in the minority in a winner-take-all state is being disenfranchised. My vote never mattered, not once in my entire life. I think that’s far more important than rural voters having cool voting power. At least they would still have some voting power, whereas I have none.
Even if the 10 largest cities all voted Democrat that would only account for 8% of the vote. And not everyone votes the same way in a city either. There are plenty of republicans voting in major cities but their vote doesn’t matter because of the college. Long Island went to Trump. NYC still got 400,000 votes for Trump. All this means is more people get a voice.
That’s great but do an electoral college majority want to end the electoral college?
Doesn’t matter. Ending the electoral college would require an amendment, and amendments require 3/4 of states to approve them. Abolishing the electoral college benefits California and the smallest states that expect to always side with California no matter what, which doesn’t get you to the 38 states required.
It would not. There is already a pact with a bunch of states that say once they have enough support they will put their electoral votes towards the popular vote of the country not the popular vote of their state. If enough states get on board the EC becomes powerless. Because the states determine how they vote.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
They are getting close. A couple more states needed for activation.
And if and when it gets passed, the conservative scotus, which has constantly ruled in favor of states rights being nearly unlimited and that precedent or other writings about the cotus don’t count, will buck both these trends and vote that this violates the cotus based on some obscure writing by some founding father.
Doesn’t end it, merely does an end run around it. Also unlikely to ever take effect, because to get to 270 electoral votes worth of states supporting it you’re going to need to get states on board with it who will directly lose influence and/or who generally don’t vote in line with California and moving to the winner being decided by national popular vote (whether directly or by using it to pledge electors) essentially makes the result largely determined by turnout in California (both times in recent history the popular vote and electoral vote were not in alignment, the margin for the national popular vote was smaller than the margin in California).
It’s a lower bar to reach than actually ending the electoral college, but it’s unlikely to succeed for essentially the same reason - you have to get multiple states that will essentially lose any influence over the executive branch if they approve it to approve it.
Yea you’re right. I just thought it was funny that a majority of Americans disprove of something that prevents a majority of Americans from being able to choose something
Fair enough. There’s an interstate compact that’s been joined by several states that does an end run around the electoral college (all member states agree to give their electors to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of their state’s votes once 270 electoral votes worth of states join). That’s a lower bar than the 3/4 of states needed for an amendment, but will also inevitably face a legal challenge regarding needing federal approval as an interstate compact.
It’s still…several states away from going into effect for basically the same reason an amendment on this won’t pass - it benefits California and the smallest states that expect to always side with California, which isn’t enough to get to 270 electoral votes.
Wha?.. Math hard you go ungabunga? California population has 38 million. That’s only 8 million more than Texas.
Also, voting wouldn’t be by state anyway, so it wouldn’t matter? Not all 38 million Californians will vote the exact same way.
Err, ending the electoral college requires a constitutional amendment. Proposing a constitutional amendment requires either 2/3 of state legislatures or 2/3 of both houses of Congress to set in motion and requires 3/4 of states to approve. This is why the ERA was never ratified - it only got 31 states.
Add Ranked choice voting along with getting rid of this.
Some Democrats oppose ranked-choice voting (RCV) because they fear it could threaten their incumbency and power. For instance, the District of Columbia Democratic Party has opposed a ballot initiative for RCV, with Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser calling it “a bad idea.” source
Cool. Too bad it’s never going to happen. The entire US political system is designed to prevent the will of the people from being enacted.
America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare
Madison and Hamilton believed that Athenian citizens had been swayed by crude and ambitious politicians who had played on their emotions. The demagogue Cleon was said to have seduced the assembly into being more hawkish toward Athens’s opponents in the Peloponnesian War, and even the reformer Solon canceled debts and debased the currency. In Madison’s view, history seemed to be repeating itself in America. After the Revolutionary War, he had observed in Massachusetts “a rage for paper money, for abolition of debts, for an equal division of property.” That populist rage had led to Shays’s Rebellion, which pitted a band of debtors against their creditors.
Madison referred to impetuous mobs as factions, which he defined in “Federalist No. 10” as a group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Factions arise, he believed, when public opinion forms and spreads quickly. But they can dissolve if the public is given time and space to consider long-term interests rather than short-term gratification.
To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.” The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.
The people would directly elect the members of the House of Representatives, but the popular passions of the House would cool in the “Senatorial saucer,” as George Washington purportedly called it: The Senate would comprise natural aristocrats chosen by state legislators rather than elected by the people. And rather than directly electing the chief executive, the people would vote for wise electors—that is, propertied white men—who would ultimately choose a president of the highest character and most discerning judgment. The separation of powers, meanwhile, would prevent any one branch of government from acquiring too much authority. The further division of power between the federal and state governments would ensure that none of the three branches of government could claim that it alone represented the people.
