If you live in New Hampshire, I suggest you call your state legislators to support this bill. Approval Voting is a very small change that goes a long way! If you don’t live in New Hampshire, send this to someone who does!
If you live in New Hampshire, I suggest you call your state legislators to support this bill. Approval Voting is a very small change that goes a long way! If you don’t live in New Hampshire, send this to someone who does!
Yes I did reference the electoral college. But we aren’t asking the states to fill out an RCV ballot are we? It’s the people in the states. Then the plurality winner of the state gets the electoral college vote. How do I have to explain this to someone whose pushing a new voting system?
And no. Only 8 states require a majority winner. In which case you likely just have a run off anyway.
The problem with “voting right away” is there’s no protection. People are forced into the same trap they’re already in. They must vote for their safety candidate over their preferred candidate. At best they could also vote for their preferred candidate, but it’s functionally useless because the base of the safety candidate is not going to vote for anyone else. So we just have the same problem. The same “vote for the lesser evil”. And if people know it’s going to come down to an automatic run off, ala STAR, then they’re going to exhibit the same behavior. No amount of math modeling or naive thought experiments is going to change that.
None of these systems except RCV actually breaks the major parties hold on the electoral system. RCV means you can vote for Bernie and Biden without worrying that your Biden vote will dilute your Bernie vote.
The idea that you should rank you candidates lowest chance to highest depends on the belief that you need to be counted every round. That’s just another fallacy. If you skip a bunch of candidates and end up on the safety pick then that’s where it was supposed to end up. Those other candidates didn’t do enough to rank higher. This is the same line the GOP keeps running about RCV and it boils down to, “Oh no RCV works as advertised!”
I honestly thought it was higher than that. There’s often a lot of drama when a candidate wins without a majority.
I should’ve checked, thanks for the correction.
The common example here is the Burlington, VT 2009 Mayoral election (biased breakdown from STAR voting perspective). The winner was neither the plurality or Condorcet (winner of all individual matchups) winner, so there was absolutely a spoiler effect. After the election, they abandoned RCV and went back to FPTP.
If voters changed their preferences (i.e. strategic voting), the outcome would’ve been different, so I don’t think the outcome of a close election in a RCV system necessarily represents the will of the people.
Voting for Bernie and Biden could increase the chances that your less desirable outcome (e.g. Trump winning) happens, depending on which order you and other voters put candidates in. Let’s make a hypothetical with four candidates (I’ll use I for an independent):
Let’s say the initial vote tallies are something like this:
Biden gets knocked out, resulting in:
Then Bernie gets knocked out, so I wins.
If Bernie didn’t run, we’d have something like this:
Since I pulls more from Biden than Trump, Biden would win once I gets knocked out.
So by removing Bernie (who wouldn’t win in either case), the winner switches from I to Biden. So voting for Bernie resulted in a worse outcome.
In Burlington, VT, that’s essentially what happened. Basically, R wouldn’t win in any matchup, but they pulled enough votes from D that D had the lowest #1 votes, so P took their place. Voters preferred D to P and R individually, but P won because of IRV.
Look. Just because they fell for the party propaganda does not mean the progressive candidate won unfairly or spoiled the election. The entire point of RCV is to vote for your preference first. The Democrat was not preferred. End of story. Also whoever wrote that Wikipedia entry doesn’t understand what’s going on because they claimed the Republican was the plurality winner for having the highest support in round 1. Which is explicitly not how RCV works.
And in your example, Biden wasn’t preferred either. Oh no. I guess he didn’t work hard enough for votes and we get a different president. By your definition of spoiler any candidate that loses is a spoiler.
Yes, RCV doesn’t recognize the plurality winner, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Looking at plurality and Condorcet winners is a valid and interesting way to evaluate voting systems.
He was preferred over the independent, he just wasn’t in the number one spot as much. Look at the Condorcet evaluation, that’s the best way to evaluate who voters preferred since it isolated them to 1:1 matchups.
Him not being having more votes than Bernie means he was not preferred. You can’t semantics your way around that. It’s the entire point of RCV.
And without knowing the political realities on the ground math is horrible at telling who the plurality winner would be. In the case Bernie, Biden, and any Republican, Bernie would have campaigned for Biden to solidify the voting block. So to just look at the numbers is ridiculous. Voting is not a mathematical equation.
And when the voters in Burlington, VT realized that, they abandoned RCV because they wanted either the plurality winner or the Condorcet winner, and RCV guarantees neither.
What does “political realities” have to do with anything? You’re making vote counting sound like a subjective thing, and that’s explicitly the opposite of what it should be.
With a ranked ballot, it’s trivial to run some math equations on it, provided you make some assumptions (e.g. the difference in preference between #1 and #2 is the same as between #2 and #3, and so on). Those assumptions are necessary because RCV doesn’t prioritize individual expression beyond a simple ordering. If it had more context (e.g. like range voting or STAR), the analysis would be more useful. That’s another fault of RCV, and why I don’t recommend it for a crowded field.
It certainly is. The entire point of tabulating votes is to find the candidate the voting public prefers, and that absolutely is a math equation. Some voting systems use a simple sum, some use a Condorcet system to evaluate preferences, and others use a scoring system. All of them are, at their core, a math equation, and their formulation is designed to improve the inputs to that equation.
RCV chooses to go the route of a more complex algorithm (still a math equation) that knocks out candidates and applies their votes elsewhere. That decision has benefits and drawbacks, and I personally find other systems to have a better set of tradeoffs.
Yup they hated it so much they’re going back to it. Almost like they got lied to about the results in 2009 and they realized it.
And the reason voting isn’t a mathematical problem is because of human behavior. You keep treating candidates as completely distinct entities with distinct voting blocks. But that’s not how humans are. And your tradeoffs for the other systems don’t actually provide better results because people still vote to defend themselves instead of for a good candidate.