Another reason to like Tim Walz. He has openly supported RCV: https://www.rcvbloomington.org/supporters
Anything that gets us out of the two-party system where either of the parties would have to agree to let people leave.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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The lotion scene would've been a lot more interesting if he captured a guy down there.
I much prefer Approval Voting, but anything is better than FPTP.
Then we shall institute gladiator battles to settle all disputes. /s
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.
Among voting theorists they tend to pick approval. So far the only direct heads-up vote to choose between Approval and RCV had RCV win with about 70% vs 30%. But honestly that's pretty dang good for Approval considering how relatively unknown it is.
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.
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!"
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.
So what's the actual solution? Direct democracy?
I literally said the solution in my first comment? Multi-member districts. Each district has, say, five representatives and they're elected using some sort of proportional representation. Sequential Proportional Approval Voting is probably the best for the US. You can read up on the specifics of that method if you want, but in general any proportional method tries to take into account the fact that once a candidate gets into office, the people who voted for that candidate now have representation and some amount of satisfaction, so other people's opinions should be more heavily weighted when awarding the next seat. It's easiest to explain with party-based methods, but essentially, if the vote totals are 40% Team A, 40% Team B, and 20% Team C, then the winners should approximate that vote breakdown. In this case, 2:2:1. What it means is that minority populations are much more likely to have someone in office who faithfully represents them, but majority populations are still going to have the appropriate fraction of the seats in power.
First sentence is snippy. If you didn't want engagement then why did you bother responding?
Thank you for the information I'll dig into it on my way to work tomorrow.
B-districting solves this
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.
If that 20% is evenly distributed everywhere, then they don't need their own local candidate. That's like having the men's candidate or the left-handed candidate.
They won't have any candidate. Regardless, the same problem applies. If these people are spread out unevenly, there will still be voters in districts without representation. Their rep won't give a shit about them because they vote for a different team, and the rep on their team but in a different district will care mildly at best because they can't actually vote for that rep.
We only get the endless loop of people voting out of fear or against something around these parts.
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.
Also remind all your family and friends multiple times to vote because lots of us don't even realize those elections are happening half the time
Yes, we do, but we don't always get what we deserve.
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?
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