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, 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.