• Liz
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    3 months ago

    I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. We need Approval Voting at every level so that showing your support for your favorite candidate can’t possible impact the results in any other way than helping them win. Supporting your favorite shouldn’t be able to help your least favorite, no matter the scenario.

    Edit:
    Approval voting:

    1. pick all you like.
    2. Most votes wins.

    There’s a proportional variant, which has the same voting instructions, but seats are awarded one by one. The weight of your ballot is divided by the number of winners you’ve voted for before the votes are recounted for the next round.

    • @BuffaloxOP
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      3 months ago

      IDK is that like ranked voting? It’s better but I think that’s a bit too complicated, I prefer proportional voting like we have here in Denmark. This is rated as among the most fair and democratic election systems in the world.
      It’s also simple and easy to understand for everybody. I think that too is important for democracy to work properly, because it makes it more likely that people want to participate.

      USA is only barely a democracy, and first past the post, is definitely one of the major problems.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        Even single transferable vote/preferential voting, as used in the Australian lower house and (until recently) the London mayoral election, would be an improvement: you’d get to number your candidates in order of preference, giving 1 to your favourite implausible utopians and/or single-issue advocates, but as long as you put your least-disliked major party ahead of the other one, your vote won’t be wasted.

        In fact, one could reduce this even further to two votes: your favourite party and whom you’d want to give your vote to if they don’t win.

        • @BuffaloxOP
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          23 months ago

          I can see it is suitable for electing a single person, as I understand it you tend to get the least disliked instead of the most liked. I’m guessing least disliked is a better protection against extremes, while not compromising democratic values. Whether this is true in practice though I don’t know.

      • Liz
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        23 months ago

        I started an edit to my comment and then got carried away, but yes, any proportional system is better than what we have.

        • @BuffaloxOP
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          23 months ago

          I can see Approval Voting is cool, and simple enough. That would absolutely work.

      • @barsquid
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        23 months ago

        I would prefer proportional voting, and that would work for Congress. It isn’t really a workable thing when electing an individual, tho I would not mind seeing some candidates split down the middle so only half goes into the office.

        • @BuffaloxOP
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          3 months ago

          Yes I can understand that, we don’t have elections of individuals in our democracy, the government is chosen by the parlament, among the usually about 12 parties that represent the people.
          If the government performs very poorly, parlament can vote a lack of confidence, in which case a new government must be formed, and the Prime minister can choose to have a new election.

          The idea of a president running the government is problematic IMO. In Denmark there is absolutely zero doubt that no member of parlament or the government or otherwise are above the law.
          There are protections against frivolous lawsuits for EU politicians, but that protection goes away as soon as they leave/lose their seat, and is always removed if there is an actual case.
          Unfortunately we saw that last year, where the protection was lifted for a corrupt member of EU parlament from Greece.

          Whatever happens, I wish the Americans best of luck, unfortunately it seems like it’s very much needed.