Now obviously we all espouse ranked voting, but the most popular rule—the single transferable vote—is known to sometimes eliminate candidates for getting too many votes, which is what happened in the 2022 Alaska special election (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Runoff_voting for an explanation of how this happens).
So, which voting rule do you like the most? I’m new to this world, but so far the Dowdall system seems like a good compromise.
Fair point—but simple majority rule doesn’t guarantee the rights of minorities and others disproportionately affected, either. You generally need constitutional limits to prevent abusive legislation.
I didn’t say it does.
But only allowing the people who are passionate about a given issue removes the ability to compromise on the issue. It’d polarize things; ensuring that everything was extremely one way or extremely the other way, and never in the middle.
I think that conflates the deliberative process with the actual casting of votes. The people who are passionate about the issue would still try to convince those on the sidelines that the issue was worth spending a vote on, and people who weren’t planning to actually vote could still care about the issue and participate in the debate.
Okay. So hypothetically….
I’m most passionate about climate change and resiliency, toss in abortion access, gay rights, public education, a few other issues.
Ooops I’ve spent all my votes and along comes a budgeting bill for next year that defunds all of that. So much for all those votes.
Or a storm comes up and Florida needs emergency aid. Or fires in California. Or Texas or any where.
Suddenly, I don’t get a say in that because…. I participate?
If your goal is to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, this fucks them even harder. The majority can afford to push legislation that doesn’t pass until the relevant minority can no longer vote and then push awful legislation that gets passed with 1 orn2 % of voters voting.
If we’re going to do direct democracy, then we need to give everyone and equal vote for every thing. anything that seeks to limit who can vote on what or how many times is inherently disenfranchising.
Even attempts to halt the tyranny of the majority- like, in point of fact, the senate, disenfranchises voters. (The reason the states only get 2 senators is because southern states were afraid they would be rolled over on account of their low population. So people who live where there’s more people lose voting power.)
Presumably you’d allocate the votes and announce the propositions at the same time—so for instance in one election everyone would get a ballot with twenty propositions and instructions to vote yes or no on up to ten of them.
Or come to think of it, here’s a procedure that might simplify things for voters and avoid the issue of fakeout dummy propositions, too:
So they know you get 9 votes, they slap in 10 laws, each slightly different.
Now say they also added a few laws. Maybe played the same games. Do you add more total votes?who decides how to allocate votes?
No matter, the underdogs will never get enough votes to pass their competing legislation.
It would become an unmitigated disaster as it gets too complicated, and turns people off voting.
To play devil’s advocate, the chairperson can deny these motions as frivolous and disruptive.
so… how do you decide who gets to make that decision?
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That’s the object of steps 1 & 3 above: everyone casts a (potential) vote on all propositions, and votes not required to counter opposing votes keep rolling over. So you can’t force anyone to waste a vote by dispersing them among duplicate propositions—the end result is identical either way (assuming everyone votes consistently).
Why are you making it more complicated, just to ultimately limit the voice of people who are participating in government?
Like. Seriously.
It doesn’t matter what you do to make it less unfair. it’s still going to unfairly disenfranchise people from voting on all the issues. There’s nothing in your proposals that solve that. All you’re doing is making it even more complicated, and making it harder for anyone who has… a job, a family, goes to school or any combination thereof. I haven’t not worked in some capacity (school+job/career) less than 40 hours in my life. Most of it I’ve been working 2 or more jobs 60-80 hours a week. and lets be honest, people who are retired aren’t usually able to stay informed either.
how many bills do you think congress is currently votes on in a month? and that’s ignoring all the steps leading up to it (like committees and sub-committees. i assume you’d retain congress to draft the legislation and handle all that.)
in 2023, The senate had 351-some roll call votes, the house of reps had over 421. that’s just votes. With specific bills frequently being lumped in for shared votes. 30 and 35 a month, on average. and last year was low, because of the bipartisan ship fucking everything over.
Lets say you create a monthly ballot system with every thing on it. That’s still- probably- going to be more than 50 proposed bills up for voting. Some of them are quite large, like spending omnibus bills that are hundreds or thousands of pages. and that’s ignoring people playing games or putting up competing bills.
Do you really expect people to be able to actually be an informed voter while doing all the things necessary to maintain our lives and family in good health? Are you going to pay me- and everyone else- a full time wage to actually do that? because that’s the kind of effort you seem to think people can do.
Nobody has that kind of time on their hands. This is why we have representational governance in the first place.
What about emergency measures? If there’s a bill that would’ve failed had it not underwent this measures, won’t people who oppose it just decide to make sure the next one doesn’t contain anything too important and make a proposition to repeal the bill, minorities be damned?