NPR:
Amid growing frustration with both major political parties, voters are open to some big changes.
A new poll, commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, shows there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House… Continue reading
The post “Voters are sick of the 2-party system. A new poll shows they’re open to big changes” appeared first on Election Law Blog.
Ranked choice voting open to all.
RCV is just one of many alternative voting systems that has alot of warts. I think there are better options that should be explored:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison/_of/_electoral/_systems
It has already been preemptively made illegal in several states.
Ranked choice pls
Approval voting, please.
Anything clone-independent will make further reforms much easier.
True. Ranked choice is progress. My problem with it is that still makes polarizing politics an advantage.
Example: 3 candidates run, A is leftwing, B is more center (leftwing or right leaning), C is right wing. A and C both get 40% of rank 1 votes because they benefit from the polarized atmosphere, B only gets 20% of rank 1, so they are eliminated and their voters are run off to either A, C or dropped if they didn’t pick a second candidate.
Say after runoff A has 44%, and C has 45%. Or vice versa, it doesn’t matter. The winner doesn’t even have support of the majority of voters and polarized politics continues to be an advantage. But if you look at those who voted for A or C as their first choice, of the 40% for A 25% had B as their second, and of the 40% for C 18% had B as their second. So 43% of the voters gave a ranked 2 vote for B and 20% gave a ranked 1.
Approval voting is similar to ranked choice where you vote for every candidate you would be happy with. But you don’t rank them and there is not elimination and runoff. You just give 1 vote to every candidate you would approve of and the highest wins. So let’s look at the results with approval voting.
A has 44% approval. C has 45% approval. And B has 63% approval. B is the clear winner, despite being the first eliminated in Ranked Choice.
If the goal is to have a representational government that is approved of by the governed, where oppositional polarizing politics and manipulation holds less sway, then Approval voting is the goal to shoot for.
Few people want B over their extreme I think. They want their lesser desired B vote to run off to A. Approval disproportionately advantages the middle, least desired by all parties.
Well first, the middle is where it should be pushed if representational goverment is the goal. They should represent the most people. Not the most popular minority group on election day. Not your politics over everyone else’s no matter what. But also, it can work in favor of the the more extreme candidate too when the electorate feels like the more central, safer option has the better chance and vote accordingly.
Example, the Socialist candidate is charismatic, popular, and has good ideas, but the term socialism leaves people uneasy or unsure if they can get enough support. So under Ranked Choice, many hedge their bets and vote Democrat as their first rank and the socialist as their second. 12% for as first rank for the socialist, 55% for the democrat, and 33% for the republican. After runoff, the socialist is elminated and dems win. But with approval, 45% of the 55% of dems actually approve of the socialist. Now the socialist has 57% support. The results then entirely hinge on on how many socialist first voters also support dems.
In such a case, shouldn’t they have voted 1 social 2 dem? Approval voting is fine, it allows cross aisle winners which are impossible now, but definitely has the chance of being a weak middle that’s always walking on eggshells.
I personally wish we used issue voting: each candidate takes a test, then you take a test, and an algorithm matches your answers with the candidate to avoid a huge number of problems with media driven campaigns.
Not if you think socialist won’t get enough/majority support. There is still a spoiler effect with ranked choice due to the elimination.
Imagine socialist gets 35% of first choice, dem gets 28%, republican gets 47%. Dem gets dropped but only 6% of the 28% also ranked the socialist while 25% of socialist first voters seconded dems. Then republican wins even though dems had more support overall. If you are being strategic and expect that sort of outcome, even if you prefer the socialist, you still might ranke the dem as a 1 to prevent that occurrence and ensure that at least your second choice wins.
Approval is more idealistic, but it also incentivizes idealism and cooperation. If people don’t approve of you or the job you have done, they don’t vote for you when they have a better alternative. And people of different parties can campaign together, boost one another, cooperate to get stuff done, etc. and boost their own approval numbers in the process.
And I don’t hate the issues based idea, so long as the tests, questions, and results are not controlled by any political bodies and have completely open processes for oversight. And there is also no reason that such compatibility and approval voting couldn’t coexist either. In that case the approval would be based on the policy positions, not the individual. There are kinks to work out there. For example, if someone lies on the tests, or you agree with them on the majority of the policies, but have other valid reasons to not support them like a particularly important policy for you that they differ on, or they have a criminal history, etc.
RCV is just one of many alternative voting systems that has alot of warts. I think there are better options that should be explored:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison/_of/_electoral/_systems
alaska has it and lets just say the independant candidates can be weird
GOOD.
You suggest that the main party candidates can’t be?
the main party candidates generally don’t sue their ex husbands over vaccinating their kids
Weirder than the Epstein class!?
That’s why I established residency in a State with Rank Choice
There are only two states with ranked choice voting, I think: Maine and Alaska. A number of smaller municipalities also have it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States
Hey Democrats and Republicans, will you allow for the possible destruction of your parties? No? …oh
Remind me which party is the one that wants to send armed enforcers to voting places?
When someone on the internet ignores the spoiler effect: You miserable cretin! It’s been obvious since the 2000 election! You’re clearly a Russian LLM.
When someone running for office ignores the spoiler effect: This innocent flower just has so many bigger things to worry about. I’m sure they’d oppose FPTP if they only knew.
We’re also open to executing politicians for treason when they hold more allegiance to money and Israel than the people they represent.
Like seriously NPR. Clean it up a bit and ask that fucking question. Report on how many people you interview agree with that sentiment.
Report on actual sentiment.
That critical 5% that can make a party completely lose. DemSocs can do it to Democrats in pretty much the same way as Libertarians can do it to Republicans.
The 2 party system only works for business and power. We need a system that works for the people.
They’re open to big changes because corporations have captured our political parties and neither party answers to the population, you know, like a functional democracy. Citizens United and deregulation of corporations is where things went wrong.
Our de facto two party system isn’t statutory. It’s not written in the constitution that there can only be two parties. It’s just the natural consequence of a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post election system. All a candidate has to do is win 51% of the votes to get 100% of the political power. It makes third party candidates essentially nonviable. That’s what would need to change if we want to ditch the two party system.
Plug for https://fairvote.org/ . We have a long way before ranked choice voting gets to federal elections, but many local elections are using it now and once people are familiar with it we can hopefully push for more far -reaching adoption.
It’s not in the constitution, but the power of voting lies in the states. So we’d need state to slowly change their voting systems for this to happen properly.
The electoral college for nationals is a whole different ballpark. Also not in the constitution, but I think that still lies with states?
Two parties? Who is the second party?
“Evil Light” I think.
The two-party system in the United States consists of “Republicans” and “Everyone else”.
One of the biggest issues I see on the ground is that voters aren’t stepping up. This is even at the local level. This is a problem all across the USA. Good people aren’t willing to run for a lot of these local offices. Nobody’s preparing the next generation / replacements to take over once older candidates age out or move up the chain. Then even if you get multiple people to run for a local office, these voters who are supposedly tired of the 2 party system don’t volunteer, donate, or even bother to show up to events where the candidates are making themselves available for dialog. They aren’t interacting with candidates’ social media. So realistically, if voters don’t change, nothing’s going to change about the 2-party system.
I prefer Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog
You, sir, are a mouthful.
Yes, these are the types of structural changes that need to be made before all the wishful thinking guiding people’s voting behaviors can amount to anything positive. Looking at the current landscape, ranked choice specifically, Democrats are receptive to the idea because they want leftists to at least put Democrats second while the GOP hates the idea so much they’re passing laws per-emptively banning ranked choice for more or less the same reason. There’s the path forward.
Drutman found that 6 in 10 Trump voters who have an opinion on proportional representation said they back it, too….
Okay, but like, what tiny percentage of those people could understand the concept, much less have an opinion about it? heh
Ranked Choice Voting. If anyone is curious just know that it’s illegal in some places in USA. Similar with general work striking.
general work striking is actually illegal across all of the US unfortunately. The Taft–Hartley Act actually forbids solidarity strikes as a whole, which is what a general strike is. It also forbids secondary strikes, which is someone boycotting or striking to show support for another strike or group.
It’s really sad the amount of rights that the country has stripped away from it’s standard working class.
RCV is just one of many alternative voting systems that has alot of warts. I think there are better options that should be explored:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison/_of/_electoral/_systems
It’s my personal opinion that a lot of the support for Ranked Choice specifically is astroturfing from groups that don’t want real change. It’s nearly as bad as First Past the Post and is still subject to spoiler effects for example. Also too confusing for voters to trust.
My preferences are for approval or score voting. With those there isn’t a situation where voting for someone you want increases odds for someone you don’t.
It’s not astroturfig. That’s the way a lot of local elections (and 1-2 statewide elections) work. It’s a system that has precedent, so it gets the most support.
But yes, there’s more than one way to shear a sheep. I’m open to any variety of choices not based on winner-take-all.
there isn’t a situation where voting for someone you want increases odds for someone you don’t.
RCV barely increases the odds for someone you don’t want. The whole idea is that it rewards moderate views so that “everyone’s 2nd choice” is better than a radical first choice. The Spoiler effect will almost always be there, but Nothing is worse than FPTP for that effect. Especially with Score based voting that can (and given experience with internet ratings, will) degenerate to “0 or max score”. Score based voting works best with high information electorate, and the US… hell, pretty much all global politics aren’t full of people laser focused on every little law.
I like Approval based voting, though. The issue lies more in excessive runoffs when we get the most popular candidates (or the worst case where none of the candidate are approved enough).
This can be done on local level but on national level you would need constitutional reform which is extremely unlikely.
Nonsense. The constitution grants states almost complete control over the handling of national elections. There’s nothing stopping them from doing ranked choice for president/Congress.
You’re technically right but the real issue is electoral college. For ranked choice to work on national level you would have to get rid of if. Which would require constitutional reform. Without it ranked choice and winner-take-all electoral college would result in a big mess. The most likely scenario would be for Republicans to organize and vote for one candidate while Democrats would split the vote between establishment Dem and some DSA candidate. To actually end 2-party system without giving the presidency to Republicans forever you would need ranked choice popular vote or 2-turn elections.
The electoral collage only applies to the presidency, though. The power of Congress matches or exceeds that of the president. It would make a huge difference in which senators/representatives are elected.
Never gonna happen. The duopoly is never gonna allow it.
