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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Primaries are only needed if your voting system cannot handle multiple candidates. Just run the general election with everyone who qualifies. But yes, use STAR because that system can easily handle massive candidate pools.
IRV cannot handle multiple candidates. It will almost certainly break after about 5.
Proportional representation is alright if you want to lock in political parties as part of your government, and are alright with needing massive majorities to get rid of bad actor politicians. You need over 80% of the population to vote against an incumbent to get rid of them if you are filling 5 or more seats.
Political ads are fine, if you limit spending. Strict campaign finance laws should apply. But I do like the fact that you should also apply the existing truth in advertising laws to political ads.
As to the process, FPTP and Arrow's Theorem say that you get two party dominance. Ordinal voting systems just result in two paty systems.
Do note that Arrow's Theorem also applies to IRV/RCV. But does not apply to STAR or Approval, as they are Cardinal voting systems.
And have like 20 candidates on the ballot? That's just ridiculous! Have you seen the crazy primaries with over a dozen candidates, it's just nuts!
The point of a primary system is to narrow the field, and the point of a voting system is to help convey voter preference. Both are valuable.
My preference is for the primary system to act like "playoffs" for the general election, as in less popular candidates are weeded out throughout the primary process until there are <=5 candidates remaining, and those would then go to the general election.
We already have that though, it's just not written into law. Do you really think that ~98% of the population fits cleanly into two parties? There are 3 independent US Senators, and they all caucus with Democrats.
I think proportional representation would work way better in smaller states with fewer reps. For example, look at Utah, which has 4 representatives, all of which are Republican, yet the state votes like 60% Republican in general elections. So with proportional representation, there should be at least one seat going to another party. Or look at Connecticut, all five reps are Democrat, yet ~40% voted for Trump in 2020, so I'd expect the representation to be more like 3 Democrats, 2 Republicans if Connecticut adopted proportional representation.
Yeah, my main complaint is with the blatant lies in political ads, but it's also quite true that candidates with more screen time tend to win more. This puts way too much power in the hands of media companies, and large donors can influence elections by working around donation restrictions through PACs.
So either we need to drastically step up our enforcement game here (unlikely given how much power is involved), or we need to just ban it all (much easier to enforce). But if we can effectively enforce fact-checking, I'd be on board.
I think that applies to a single vote, but perhaps it doesn't hold for a gradual system, like a "playoff" system. As in, you can have multiple winners at each stage, so all of the winners are preferred over the losers by the general population.
I'd like to see some research on if it applies to iterative voting schemes, and whether that would be fitting solution.
That said, I do tend to prefer STAR and Approval voting in general, but RCV has a lot of momentum and I think it could be adjusted to result in a much better system than we currently have.
The problem with RCV is that it's a bad system.
Like voting for your favorite can make them lose bad.
And the fact that it needs centralized counting means that it can be attacked via one centralized point of failure.
The rate of ballot spoilage is often twice what it is even under FPTP elections.
Ballot Exhaustion means that candidates can be elected with far less than the 50% of the vote that the system claims to require.
And the fact that it still falls victim to Arrow's Theorem.
It has momentum, but it's also so bad at being a voting system that it has actually set voting reform efforts back in several places.
Let's talk about that Ballot Exhaustion. Ballot Exhaustion happens when your ballot no longer has a valid candidate due to them being eliminated. What RCV advocates will tell you is that "if your first choice is eliminated, your vote transfers to your second choice".
This statement is only true in the first round. In all rounds after that, it could be a very false statement. Say your first choice survives round 1, but your second choice does not. Now when your first choice is eliminated, your second choice doesn't get that vote, your third choice does. If your first choice survives long enough, none of your other choices get that vote, and eventually you run out of choices and your ballot is thrown out.
I hope you can see the problem here, but I'll spell it out. If 90% of voters list the same person as their second choice, then that second choice will be the first eliminated and those 90% of second choice votes will be ignored.
Another fun fact, that 50% mark that RCV must reach? That's 50% of remaining ballots. Data on RCV elections show an average ballot exhaustion rate of about 18%. Which is just wild. 18% of ballots cast do not count towards the final count. Most competitive races are decided on single digit percentages.
So no. I actively advocate against RCV.
And in doing so. I can talk about why STAR is just so much better. First, it's immune to Arrow's Theorem.
Being immune, you can actually load up the number of candidates in an election. Seriously, the system can handle 20-30 candidates as easily as it handles 2-3.
This means you don't need any imposed gatekeeping events to winnow down the field.
STAR also handles clone candidates as easily as ideologically opposed candidates. So again, you don't need to winnow down the field.
If you have 5 widely liked clone candidates and one narrowly supported ideologically opposed candidate, a system like RCV will always elect the ideologically opposed candidate. STAR will likely elect one of the clone candidates. Easily.
So no. No primaries. It also removes the ability to artificially gatekeep a popular left leaning candidate. Which has happened a few times now.
But back to Arrow's Theorem. Since STAR can support a wide candidate field, it can support independent candidates and third party candidates. And opening up the General election would let some of these people win. This would vastly weaken the major parties.
It wouldn't kill political parties, but it would make them less important. Given time, they might be able to fracture and fade.
I know the problems with RCV, but I think implementing it is still a net positive.
People are frustrated with FPTP, especially in the majority of areas where a single party dominates. RCV is popular, so people are probably more likely to vote if they get RCV in their area (it doesn't decrease turnout, either maintains or improves). At the very least, it seems to encourage more voting from younger voters, which is usually an underrepresented democratic.
In other words, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. RCV has momentum, so we should be using that momentum to get something passed. It's easier to switch to STAR or Approval voting later, provided the public has already agreed to replace FPTP, whereas pushing for something that the public understands less less may result in nothing getting changed. In other words, if we don't all get behind one solution, we could end up with the same spoiler effect we're trying to prevent.
So RCV isn't my first choice or my second choice, but I prefer the momentum of change to trying to find the ideal solution. Most people I talk to haven't heard of either Approval or STAR voting, and STAR voting is conceptually more difficult to understand than either RCV or FPTP, so pushing for RCV, which people are familiar with is a much easier sell.
What I've read about anti-RCV talking points is mostly FUD. Yes, there are cases where you won't end up with a majority, but you will always arrive at a plurality result. It's not always clear which should be the winner, and each voting system could pick a different winner. For example, in the Birmingham, VT election, STAR voting could very well have had the same result, it just would've looked better since the winner would likely have a majority due to how votes are counted. With Approval, you can have multiple candidates with a majority of the votes, which is also different than FPTP.
I think RCV is net better than FPTP, even if the optics aren't as convenient in some edge cases. It's at least a step toward getting voters thinking about what the voting system should look like.
RCV deeply flawed. Implementing it is a step back, not forward.
Linking to Fairvote won't change my mind, those guys are smoking crack or something. They don't even acknowledge ballot exhaustion as a problem, and pretend that the spoiler effect doesn't pop up in election throwing ways.
Here's a three-hour-long video that goes into the problems of RCV. If you want to get into the breakdown of RCV specifically, it starts at about the 56-minute mark
Honestly, the main reason why you should advocate against RCV is that it's almost as bad as FPTP and yet sold as this amazing solution, so when problems inevitably crop up, problems that don't crop up in FPTP, people become incredibly resistant to real voting reform. They say, "you pushed this broken system on us, why should we try this other system?" Not knowing that it's a small group of bad actors like Fairvote who are pushing this shit.
My point is; Bad reform often does more damage than doing nothing, because it makes it much harder to get good reform passed. RCV is bad reform.
Thanks for the video! I watched about half of it, and will likely watch the rest today at work.
The main thing I got out of it is the election security issue in that all ballots need to be centralized for the voting process to work properly. I forget where exactly they discussed this, but it was around 1:15:00, give out take (where they're reviewing the video the host made comparing voting systems).
So that's a nonstarter for me.
However, earlier in the video they discussed what actual people understood from what RCV is, and that explanation looked a lot like STAR voting. If you look at the SF/Alameda County issue, the rejected ballots were largely cast as they would in a STAR voting ballot. So I think it's completely reasonable to use RCV as a "category" and push for the implementation to be STAR voting. After all, STAR voting in essence is a ranked choice system, it just uses a different mechanism for the counting and loosens up restrictions on ballots.
My preference is still Approval (it's dead simple, and I want a "disapprove" option as well so people can protect their ballots), but I'm happy to get on board the RCV bandwagon, provided it's used as a category and not a specific implementation. The implementation pushed by Fairvote is absolutely flawed, but the argumentation on their end is correct and compatible with STAR and other scored voting methods. The average voter doesn't need to know the precise mechanism of how votes are tallied, so using imprecise language that they're familiar with is acceptable, provided they can access the details if desired and public audits are feasible (RCV makes that difficult, STAR doesn't).
Again, we should not be pushing any form of RCV, not even as a bait and switch. It's a bad system that is bad.
It's not a category, it's a bad voting system. Words have meanings, and sloppy use of those words helps no one.
Hell, STAR isn't an Ordinal system (where a list is ranked in order), it's a cardinal system (where preference is indicated independent of other options). So saying it's a "Ranked Choice" system is just wrong on every front.
As was said in the video, there's a problem when you rank choices against each other, where is the cutoff between like and hate? Some election formats force you to rank everyone on the ballot. You like your first choice, but your second could be someone you hate just a bit less than your last choice. Ranked Choice doesn't let you give that sort of information.
All the ballot tells us is that A is preferred to B. Is B a walk in the park? or is it bathing in shit? We don't know.
That's why ranked systems suck. Cardinal systems can tell you that a walk in the park is a solid 5 out of 5 and bathing in shit is a 0 out of 5. The other thing about a Cardinal system, you can have a bunch of 5 out of 5s on the ballot. Because there are a bunch of things you can be happy with. No artificial ranking needed.
The average voter doesn't know the difference between an original or cardinal system, and when they hear "ranked choice voting," they think of something more like range/score voting, not RCV. So whether you like it or not, the public has already essentially categorized it.
So the question is, do we try to change the vocabulary the public uses, or embrace it to push a related system they already think they're talking about?
So I support movements like RCV because of the network effect, but I don't actually support the specific solutions they put forward. As RCV gets more press, so will the problems with it, and that gives alternatives a platform. If you instead push against RCV, you need to start from scratch, and people are more likely imo to ignore you because you're positioning yourself as an enemy of something they think is the way toward.
So no, the goal isn't a discussion about the best solution, but a discussion about problems with the current system and potential solutions. RCV has started under discussion, and most people don't really understand it anyway, so I'm going to use that terminology to redirect people to alternatives that I think are better.
The vocabulary is important. And the only people pushing "Ranked Choice" hare from Fairvote, and they mean RCV.
They want you to use the term "Ranked Choice" so that they can push RCV. That's it. They know damn well that it's a deeply flawed system, and don't care, because they set themselves up as the Ranked Choice experts. They actually consult on elections using their system, and have done their own recounts that once changed the outcome of an election (30 days after the wrong candidate was sworn in).
So no. Don't use vocabulary from a group pushing for something bad.
As to the problems of RCV getting more press as more people hear about it, that's from pushback. See, Fairvote, the people who push RCV have a tendency to outright lie about the system, and then people like me have to spend hours explaining to people that RCV is a deeply broken system.
As the old phrase goes, "A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."
The solution, then, don't spread the lie. Don't pretend that RCV is anything but a bad system.
Say STAR or Approval or whatever system you really want to push for. Don't be lazy and give Fairvote more of a lead than they already have.