The US already received a more politically palatable form of UBI when the automatic child tax credit hit. Couples making up to 400k get money direct deposited every month per child. 0% chance this will ever be rescinded.
I would say Yang introduced an issue single-handedly into the conversation and it was implemented quite quickly without any discussion because of the unique pandemic situation. Will be interesting to see the long term research that emerges from this.
The Condorcet Method has a huge disadvantage that it is hard to understand.
Being simple to understand is crucial for voting systems and I would argue is the most important factor since an election without public buy-in is worse than worthless.
Well, I'm not really seeing people complain about the math itself, but instead more about fraud in the votes themselves, or machines/people cheating when tallying.
Just to be clear, the difference would be something like having to say B won because he was the most common second choice and beat every other candidates in a one on one. Versus saying B won because it had the most first choices, yet did not have a majority of first choices.
I think it's easy enough to understand that while someone had more first choices, they didn't have a majority first choices and since someone else had more second choices they took the win.
Understanding is one thing, counting is another. Plurality voting is great because it’s easy to count by hand and audit with volunteer observers. I’ve personally observed the counting of ballots as a volunteer and it gave me a lot of confidence that the election had been conducted fairly according to the law.
While I would really love to see what outcomes could be produced by a Condorcet method I can’t imagine actually implementing one without relying on computerized counting and software. This makes it impossible for volunteers to audit due to the need to audit the hardware and software of the computers doing the counting. If only security experts are capable of auditing such a system then our whole democracy is at their mercy. That’s essentially a technocracy.
The Condorcet property (not method) is easy enough to understand.
"Imagine this candidate ran in a two person race against each of the other candidates in turn. If he'd win ALL those races individually, he should win when running against all of them at the same time too."
Now, explaining various methods which guarantee this property is not as easy - nor is it easy to understand why you might prefer one such method to another.
But this isn't actually a big deal. In the many, many countries that use proportional representation, it's the outcome ("parties share of seats in parliament should be roughly the same as parties share of votes in the election") which is agreed upon. The actual mathematics to achieve it are somewhat counterintuitive and not many people are aware of them, but that doesn't matter. We can all see it works, and so we would in an election with, say, Ranked Pairs.
Sweden has an extremely complex system for tallying votes and very very few people can explain the exact algorithm that turns a collection of ballots into a list of names of people in Parliament. Even people that follow politics closely only have a vague idea of how it works. Yet most people feel the system is fair and reasonable and there is no real push to change it or make it simpler to understand.
If your business relies on some big pile of spaghetti code, you might be very reluctant to change it, but you also would be unlikely to recommend that design to someone who was starting from scratch (unless they were a competitor).
I'm not recommending the Swedish system per se. Just pointing out that as long as people feel they understand how to vote to nudge the result in their desired direction, and that the outcome (ie. who ends up in parliament) feels reasonable and representative then people probably don't care too much about the details of the voting system
Sums up most of the points about it.
I want to highlight the "leads to two party dominance in countries that use it" (australia for example) point. This is exactly what we want to avoid.
I prefer approval or score voting for single member elections as it does away with all these bad voting incentives.
But regardless, I think single member elections are stupid and proportional systems are far better and more democratic. The idea that the thing most representative of you is the piece of land you live on is very outdated. Zweitmandat is the most advanced implementation of proportional representation imo.
I absolutely agree about the Zweitmandat system. For those unfamiliar:
> The Zweitmandat (English: second mandate) is a feature in the variation of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) used to elect the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Unlike most variations of MMP, such as the German federal electoral system, Baden-Württemberg's system does not use party lists. Instead, proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes.
The main distinction is that Ranked Choice can elect someone which is not the best compromise of everyone's choices, while Schulze and Ranked pairs will always elect the best compromise of everyone's choices. If there is a candidate who is preferred over the other candidates, when compared in turn with each of the others, they guarantee that candidate will win, while Ranked Choice does not.
The downside to Schulze or Ranked Pairs is that saying that someone is your second choice could hurt the chances of your first choice to be elected, because by putting forward a compromising candidate, and since Schulze or Ranked Pairs optimize for that, you lean the tally towards your potential compromises (which are your second, third, etc. choices) in the case where the election are a "close call".
If I understand correctly.
I personally would prefer a system that optimizes for the compromise, as I think it's more important to get the candidate that the least people dislike, than it is to get the candidate that the most people adore.
So if I understand correctly, it means something like:
If you have A, B and C.
100% think B is second best.
40% think A is best.
19% think B is best.
41% think C is best.
With Schulze or Ranked Pairs B will win, but with Ranked Choice C will win.
That's because C is most people's first choice, so they win. But if you asked people to pick between C or B, B would technically win, because 19% would pick B (as it is their best), and 40% that think A is best but B is second best would also pick B, thus B vs C would get 59% votes for B and only 41% votes for C, that means that in a vote for B against C, B would win, but with Ranked Choice B loses, and C is elected.
The fallacy in the argument is that, first choice only, NO candidate has even a slim majority, let alone a strong one.
If you decay the hypothetical 3 party set of options by eliminating the least popular candidate then you're back to first past the post which is the current status quo in the US.
Schulze and similar methods use the ranked lists to evaluate pairs of candidates and eliminate the candidates that are universally the worst first / retain candidates that rank well in isolation. This is more likely to result in a compromise that works best for the most people.
Proportional representation, the federal government enacts laws and levies taxes on everyone and isn't just some far away entity you can ignore. The multi level democracy USA has now where each party sends candidates based on local votes makes sense when the federated entity doesn't have direct power over people, but since USA has such a strong federal government that taxes people directly it needs to better represent its people than now.
Alternatively we can scale back the power of the federal government massively and have it be funded by the states rather than via direct taxes, similar to how EU works. But right now it is the worst of both worlds, taxes and control like a local government but poor representation like a federated one.
> Ranked choice seems to be the best one I've read about.
IRV (sometimes called “ranked choice”, but its among the worst of the ranked choice single-member methods) can be improved by getting rid of the loser elimination step, and counting down on all ballots (instead of those with an eliminated loser) until some candidate had a total that crosses the winning threshold (this is a version of Bucklin, but historical Bucklin implementations have often done dumb things like limiting the number of preference ranks to a much smaller number than candidates (often 2-3) rather than using fully-ranked (forced preference or unforced preference) ballots.
But, other than things like unique executive offices, single-member elections should be avoided. Legislative elections with small multimember districts (say 5 members) with a system like STV (or a Bucklinish cousin, again without loser elimination) gets decent proportionality, the candidate accountability of single-member districts (but more, because parties are likely to run more candidates than they'll win seats, so there os general election accountability even within preferred parties) and avoids high-stakes districting (eliminating gerrymandering opportunities.)
Even executive offices with a designated successor (e.g., governor and lt. governor) can be made multiwinner (sequential rather than proportional) using a ranked ballots method with a normal single-winner majority threshold: once the first winner is selected, eliminate that candidate and recount the ballots (for some methods, this can simply be continue the count till the next winner crosses the threshold with the same effect) to select the winner of the successor office. This improves candidate accountability when one party is clearly preferred, because a disfavored incumbent can be demoted without abandoning the preferred party.
Ranked choice has a lot of advantages over the alternatives that are often underestimated by people too worried about theory.
The big advantage of ranked choice is that it is simple to understand and implement.
In elections, it is essential that the average person understand exactly how the system works. An election result that people don't understand/trust is worse than useless.
Approval is also simpler to count. Ranked choice ballots can't even be properly distributed among congressional districts, as a result it takes longer to get results.
The only advantages ranked choice have over approval are entirely theoretical. Another advantage approval has is that it trends towards moderation.
Approval isn't perfect though (personally I prefer STAR, but it requires ballots to change).
I would really like to see open primaries with approval voting and the top two going to the general election. I think that is much simpler than RCV and I'm not convinced RCV would ever provide a better outcome.
It seems strange to give people worse election outcomes that they have to live with for 4 years at a time just to make their 5 minutes in the voting booth feel a little more pleasant.
Approval voting may not seem "fun", But thousands of voters have used it in Fargo and St Louis without any issue. All the evidence says it gets better results, is more resistant to strategic voting, and has a better chance of replacing the status quo.
> I think ranked choice is in that sweet spot where it is reasonably simple to use and simple to count.
"Ranked choice" is a range of methods and usually people mean instant-runoff. Recognizing that no system is perfect, I nonetheless have significant worries about instant runoff.
Imagine we have a society that's predominately split into two religions, where members of each religion would love a theocracy of their flavor, would settle for secular tolerance, and is vigorously (sometimes violently!) opposed to theocracy of another flavor.
If we have three candidates, one representing each of these positions, and everyone votes their true preferences then we see maybe 40% theocracy A, 40% theocracy B, 20% secular tolerance. The very first thing instant-runoff does is throw out the compromise, and we chose violence and strife.
If we generally believe that "a good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied" then IRV will never choose a good compromise. I worry that that's a bad way of choosing what we do as a society.
Approval voting makes much more sense to me. Consider ranked-choice if it were applied to the presidency: Given that some states are slow to report their results, there are scenarios where you can't fall back to people's second choices until all the votes are in and finalized to determine who lost the first round.
With approval voting, you can declare a victor without running a state machine.
Regular voters will basically always prefer ranked choice over approval imo, because they really want to be able to rank their preferences. A leftist who wants a green party candidate but will hold their nose for a Democrat doesn't want them to be "equal" in how they vote.
Ironically, although no individual would want it, it is probably a good thing that it is hard to tell what a ballot's effect will be.
If the situation is close the best outcome may be a somewhat random outcome. Having 1,000 extra votes determine the outcome is just as arbitrary as anything else.
No it isn't, technically. I can guarantee you that most people in Norway can't explain the Sainte-Laguë divisors method which delivers proportional representation.
What is true, is that simplicity is a propaganda advantage for actually getting it passed, since "It's too complex so we can't trust it" is a good attack line even if it isn't true.
I'm not sure that advantage is worth it, given that 1. it's a terribly long shot anyway, and 2. It's the same argument which will be used to defend the status quo.
> I can guarantee you that most people in Norway can't explain the Sainte-Laguë divisors method which delivers proportional representation.
I expect most could if they spent 5 minutes on Wikipedia researching it. They don't, because they don't want to; most probably regard it as an unimportant implementation detail.
You don't need to know the method, though. You just need to know that in Norway getting above or under the 4% line drastically affects how many representatives a party will get, and vote according to that.
> The big advantage of ranked choice is that it is simple to understand and implement
No, its not. That would be a big advantage of the method equivalent to it but without loser elimination and instead counting each rank down on all ballots simultaneously, which is both easier to understand and much easier to implement.
After watching people freak out when NYC implemented Ranked Choice, I feel like most Americans won’t tolerate anything even slightly more complicated. It’s our only shot.
I'll take second worst over worst. The current system has been in place for hundreds of years, I'm not going to hold my breath for the "perfect" voting system.
The people all arguing how approval is better than ranked choice remind me a lot of people here arguing that functional programming is better than imperative, and being constantly flabbergasted that their preference isn't reflected in real world implementations.
Approval voting has advantages when you get into the weeds, but ranked choice has one big advantage right out the gate: people like it more. If you present the two systems to regular voters with simple one paragraph descriptions, people will choose ranked choice nearly every time, because they want to be able to rank candidates if they're voting for more than one person. Nobody wants to have to say that the guy there willing to hold their nose for is just as worthy of their vote as the guy they really want in office.
I’m from NZ which changed from FPP to MMP in 1993.
Two big problems:
1. Half of the politicians that make it into parliament are from the party list (which is chosen by the party) and are not voted for individually. I believe much of the power of democracy is the ability to vote people out, and the party list mostly prevents that.
2. There is a lot of talk of strategic voting. I guess all systems can be gamed, but MMP seems to encourage it.
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy... “Every candidate who wins an electorate gets a seat in Parliament. They are called electorate MPs. The remaining seats are filled from party lists. Every party has a party list, which is a list of candidates ranked in the order the party wants those candidates to be elected to Parliament. Candidates elected from a party list are called list MPs.”
The NZ voting system looks very much like the German system to me. And while that system certainly has its flaws (e.g. when a party has more directly voted members than seats from the overall proportion of votes), it does respect a higher number of cast votes than FPTP. Any vote in FPTP that wasn't cast for the winning local candidate is lost. In MMP, every vote for a party influences the result in every case.
As a german I can tell you that not being able to get rid of certain people because they will always re-enter parliament via party list is annoying as hell.
The intended way to do that is to join a party and try to work towards that from within. Parties are required to have democratic internal processes including voting on the candidate lists. But let's face it - only people with political ambitions of their own will even think about that.
> It is the second WORST voting system after first past the post
I dunno, I think random ballot is worse.
Its arguably the worst system that uses ranked choice ballots and ever considers more than the first position, though, which is why in should be called its proper name, “instant runoff voting”, and not “ranked choice”.
I think that term limits are becoming more important with longevity technology coming to the fore. While I do not believe that longevity technology is going stay in hands of the rich and powerful forever, they will surely be the first group that will use it extensively.
Even adding 15-20 years of working life would mean that 100 y.o. politicians or judges would become a normal occurrence.
For Democrats: would you like to Amy Coney Barrett to serve until 2072? For Republicans: would you like Sonia Sotomayor to serve until 2054?
In politics, a long tenure is a huge advantage. We should probably act now, before the interests of the current stakeholders are too entrenched.
We don't have longevity technology yet though, only "keep you alive whilst you get dementia" technology. I wouldn't want to live over 90, maybe not even over 80 - but we'll see what changes by then.
I agree with term limits though, but mainly to ensure that the politicians better represent those working in the economy. So many issues come from politicians effectively being idle landlords - completely divorced from the issues caused by the housing crisis and the damage that comes from the subsequent lack of economic mobility.
We cannot yet turn a 70 y.o. into a 50 y.o., no. We are nowhere near that kind of technology.
But we might be able to turn 70 y.o. into 67 y.o. relatively soon. In fact, there already was an experiment in humans which turned their epigenetic clock back 2,5 years by rejuvenating their thymuses.
(Of course, the complicated relationship between epigenetic clock and real internal state of the organism is not fully clear yet. I know. This might be a very imperfect measure.)
This kind of baby steps is going to compound. I am sort of afraid of the possibility that we will ignore the baby steps until their aggregated weight is unconquerable, much like the climate crisis, where any single added chimney meant "almost nothing", but all of them together over decades meant a lot.
A permanent but senile supreme court is an ideal substrate for permanent government; in 2100 the justices are the same ones from today, all bodies in vats, whose decisions are delegated opaquely to key party donors.
> The Platform page lists a selection of positions that I think would not be very controversial.
The positions may not be, but voting for anything but R or D is very controversial, because by voting third party in the US, you are helping the choice you like least win.
There is exactly zero chance that a third party will gain any meaningful amount of power, so all you are doing is throwing your vote away.
Maybe you're one of the five people in the country who don't actually care which of those two will win, but for some crazy reason still go to the polls - but if you're not one of those five, the best you can hope out of a third party is to produce better candidates in your preferred party's primary races.
This is a little self-defeating, even for our current political systems.
Recently, there was a Canadian election. While we use FPTP here, many chose to vote NDP. They are effectively a third party, and were unlikely to hold even a minority government.
But neither incumbent party put forward anything, or anyone, more compelling. So those voting NDP were given two choices: they could vote for something barely better than the other guy, or they could treat their ballot as a mixture of optimism and a spoiled ballot, to voice their disappointment at the current state of affairs in the hope it might lead to something better, someday.
Canada has a different political culture, and changing that is even harder than changing a political system. The only reason the Liberals and the NDP continue to exist as separate organizations[1] is because the Tories can't get more than a third of the vote in any particular riding, so the Lib/NDP leadership can continue to be big fish in their own ponds. If the CPC enjoyed the voter turnout that either of the major US parties enjoyed, Canada would either be a two-party system (as the Libs and NDP would merge, if they ever wanted to win a single seat ever again) with a regional spoiler (BQ) that ensured minority governments, or would be permanently ruled by the Tories.
[1] Their politics couldn't be more similar. Look at how provincial NDP parties govern, and tell me how it differs from the Federal Liberals. (It doesn't.)
> There is exactly zero chance that a third party will gain any meaningful amount of power
The US has had a two party system since about its second election under the Constitution, but only one of the current parties has a direct lineage to the original two. The second party of the two-party system has been replaced twice. It could happen again.
OTOH, it won't happen with a platform that isn't very controversial (that's two easy for one or the other major party to coopt—or both in pieces); it would only happen with a platform with a strong position on a controversial issue where a sizable fraction of the population has views more strongly opposed to one major parties position than the other existing major party is willing to take.
If they manage to avoid all of the current "hot button" issues, then the discourse around some of the things that they do talk about will have to be heated up, until there is suitable angry controversy.
If Yang took positions on those things it would mostly give people reasons not not support him rather than to support him, thus reducing his (and Forward Party's) overall support.
Yang probably thinks the things he's pushing -- UBI, RCV, etc -- are more important in improving the lives of ordinary Americans than those highly controversial culture-war issues.
That depends a lot on what you mean by politics. Plenty of things are unctroversial in polls of the population, but either controversial or uncontroversial in the opposite direction in political discourse (medicare for all, war in Iraq, to give two examples).
It's important to note that Yang's organization is just a PAC, and not a political party (yet). Yang doesn't need to outline a full platform because the organization will support any politician that lines up with the platform. Once the group does become a political party, it will most definitely need to stake positions on more "controversial" issues.
I like a large amount of this platform but I don't trust this guy & if this goes anywhere he's going to so wreak electoral havoc that will doom him & his natural (& most recent) allies chances harshly.
That's a weird stance. I don't know that I'd vote for Andrew Yang, but I trust him to speak honestly about what he would do if elected more than almost any other politician.
I did have interest in Andrew yang, but I think leaving the democratic party has drastically decreased his chances of making significant political moves unfortunately
I'd say that depends on whether he wants his party to have official public mandates. Those certainly help, but they're not always strictly necessary when one's goal is to influence the political discourse...
One thing people misunderstand about third parties is that they don't need to win. If they're structured correctly (this is by far the most difficult bit), they can have significant political influence without ever winning a single election.
For example, love him or hate him, Ralph Nader probably swayed the 2000 Election and had incredible influence over the outcome (for better or worse).
Coming back to the Forward Party - what I'd personally want is some minor third party that has a series of very modest goals to complete each year. If this party can complete said goals in a grassroot manner in succession every year I believe they'd eventually be a dominant (third party) player.
I think third parties should focus on minor results and less on rhetoric. Unfortunately this is very difficult to do in modern American politics. Oh well.
This isn't necessarily true. The nuance in the third party vs. aligned party is by definition the distinction between them. Depending on what you prioritize an effective third party can force the aligned party to change.
From the point of view of the third party supporter, this would be exactly what you would want.
In other words, an effective third party can be a great catalyst toward making some minor (or major) change in the most closely aligned parties.
The problem is that doesn't appear to happen in practice.
For example, how did Trump winning in 2016 help your average Green Party supporter achieve more of the change they wanted in the aligned Democratic Party?
Perhaps a better example is the UKIP party swaying the Tories to become more isolationist, and eventually triggering the Brexit referendum? A little bit different, knowing the political system of the UK enables smaller parties to be successful in a way the American system doesn't. But the principle is still the same. UKIP acting as a spoiler is factored into the strategy of the Tories policy makers, and thus they pivot their policies more in line with UKIP ideals to prevent bleeding voters to UKIP. A similar dynamic is at play on Canada's left-wing between the Liberals and the NDP
Not in a First-Past-The-Post voting system, which is used in most of the US (&afaik, in all presidential elections).
The 1PPP systems systemically trend to metastable 2-party states. Of course 3rd parties will have distinctions from their closer main parties, but it is almost impossible that a 3rd party will triangulate exactly between the two major parties.
This means that in practice, a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote for yourworst major party option. The 3rd party acts as a spoiler - always.
This is NOT true in Ranked Choice Voting systems. There, the 3rd party spoiler issue goes away, and the 3rd parties have a real chance of being able to get elected & have a real influence.
To have the effect you want (vs some perverse effect), you must vote strategically in the system you have.
That said, it is long past the time that we implemented a few upgrades from the systems of 200 years ago, such as upgrading to Ranked Choice.
Yes, from the ideological push perspective, losing a crowd to a 3rd party might cause a major party to move in that direction.
I certainly prefer a number of 3rd parties for a number of reasons, but not until we get off the 1PPP voting system. Ranked Choice, or any of a number of other options, but the role of 3rd parties as spoilers is just too great.
One advantage of Yang's platform (at least during his Presidential run) is that he was able to draw people from both sides of the aisle to his side.
He's not quite a centrist as much as he's trying to break completely out of the left/right dichotomy and compile the best policy ideas that often neither party is supporting, which appeals to a lot of people.
UKIP share of the vote had increased from 3% to 12% in 5 years and the Conservatives knew they were a threat and had to offer the referendum. It forced the Conservatives to address the issue.
> If anything, didn't Biden win by a larger margin against Bernie in 2020 than Hillary won against Bernie in 2016?
Bernie from my understanding had burned much of his base when he endorsed Hillary for the 2016 election. Also Hillary wasn't a great candidate.
Yes, it can do. Without the real threat of UKIP taking votes from the Conservative Party in the UK, David Cameron would not have promised the in/out referendum on EU membership.
UKIP went from having a 3% share of the vote in 2010 to 12-13% in 2015. People constantly downplay this to make it out as if it was only an internal Conservative party dispute. However there was growing pressure to have the referendum.
This is a fair counter example, but one also has to consider that (i) much of the referendum demand came from within his own party for ideological rather than practical reasons and (ii) he was able to implement it because the UK's electoral system and multiparty politics gave his party a clear majority with a minority of the vote .
Or put more simply: his personal standing within the party was threatened more than his party's electoral chances (UKIP votes were irrelevant in most Tory seats and took votes off Labour too in marginals), and he wouldn't have been in power anyway under a proportional system.
Ironically, EU Parliament votes being proportional probably played a major role in Farage deciding back in the nineties that he could try to win the Brexit debate from outside the Tory party too...
The votes were not irrelevant. Most people think that offering the referendum to UKIP voters is the only reason the Conservatives weren't forced into another coalition government.
They provide a very important mechanism that allows for the main party to fail in a way that it otherwise couldn’t. The only way for a “good” (according to the constituency) idea to succeed is if the “bad” ones fail. If bad ideas are prevented from failing, then the efficiency of the entire system declines.
In the two party system, the only ways for a party to fail are via apathy (not bothering to vote at all), and total defection to the other side. The small party allows voters to signal to the main party that they are failing to adequately represent certain elements of their constituency. It forces the main parties to consider all the components of their base, otherwise they’re can safely abandon them to some extent while they fight over the middle.
It’s arguably less efficient in the US due to an electoral structure that’s quite unfavorable for small parties, but it still serves an important purpose. It doesn’t make sense if you only look at one single election, but the election is the most important feedback mechanism in a democracy, and they typically happen rather infrequently. So you can look at one election, and conclude that a minor party cost one side a particular victory. But if the loser decides to examine why they lost, there’s a clear incentive to improve how they represent their constituents next time.
It’s not highly efficient, but no democracy is. Perhaps the US more than some others, but even if you look at the worlds ‘direct democracies’, you couldn’t conclude that asking the public a handful of extra yes/no questions every year is perfectly efficient either.
The main issue is that in the US, it seems like voting in the primaries is much more effective than third parties.
Look at groups like the Squad, the Tea Party and Trump. These groups are/were able to achieve substantial changes in party platform by working through the primary system and have shifted politics much more than the third parties in the US ever did.
Yeah, that’s true. But you just run into a different set of inefficiencies there. The higher the level of participation you demand for the electorate, you risk an outcome where you represent popular sentiment less and the intensity in motive and means of individual factions more.
The entire idea of electing an executive separately from the legislature is not necessarily efficient in the first place, and the higher level of important placed on for former is quite strange from some perspectives.
No, it's common for someone who's won an election somewhere, once or twice, to fail for President.
Nixon won several (Congress, VP). Biden won several (Delaware, VP). Bush 41 won Congressional elections. Reagan won as Governor. Carter won as Governor. Shall we continue?
I think the best way to think about this party is that the goal isn't to win elections (get the majority of votes, beat out the republican/democratic party) - it is to wield influence via a platform.
If you think Andrew Yang is establishing a political party to win a government race, I think its a bit too naive.
I think he is trying to use a third party lever to influence a bunch of small things to snowball into larger things, and he doesn't have the space to do that in the existing parties.
Ranked choice vote seems like the best low hanging fruit. If Yang can bring 5-10 more of these issues into the public eye, he will be the most influential person in politics, whether he is in office or not.
> If you think Andrew Yang is establishing a political party to win a government race, I think its a bit too naive.
> I think he is trying to use a third party lever to influence a bunch of small things to snowball into larger things...
If we're talking about what we're _thinking_, I think Andrew Yang is establishing a political party to make a lot of money, whether it's through direct donations or a higher profile that turns into more financial opportunity elsewhere.
I don't discount the possibility of him doing it just for the political influence, though.
That has happen. UKIP forced the Conservative Party in the UK to offer a referendum because their members were voting for UKIP (UKIPs voter share in 2015 hit about approximately 13% of the total vote). Whatever you may think of UKIP
1) That political party won't get any credit for it.
2) The policy will be implemented hardheartedly.
3) It may destroy your party if one or more of the major issues that the alternative party is implemented. As voters won't see any more need to vote as they have got what they wanted.
4) Thee political momentum will be lost for other reform / change.
5) The existing party duopoly will still exist.
To expand on the final point. I dislike all political parties (I am somewhat of a anarchist) and I don't believe in political solutions. However the Labour party in the UK immolating itself will hopefully end up with its destruction. Which will make space in the UK political landscape for new ideas, new people.
Some speculate that it may also lead to the destruction of the Conservative party. Peter Hitchens described both Labour and Conservative parties as two corpses that are propping the other up and if one collapses the other may as well. However I personally think that is a fantasy.
> "1) That political party won't get any credit for it. 2) The policy will be implemented hardheartedly. 3) It may destroy your party if one or more of the major issues that the alternative party is implemented."
None of this is a problem if you are a one-issue party. UKIP doesn't need to exist anymore because the cause it was founded on has now been taken up and implemented by "mainstream" politics. UKIP has all but vanished today, but that's precisely because it was successful.
I'm not sure this argument really holds. In the United States, third parties can have a significant influence on elections by siphoning off votes (see, Nader or maybe Perot), but they tend to have much more muted effects on policy. I would argue that Andrew Yang did more for the cause of the UBI as a loser in a widely-watched Democratic presidential primary than he would have been able to as a third-party candidate struggling to qualify for the ballot in most states. If his new goal is to focus on ranked-choice voting, I struggle to understand why the calculus would be any different.
I agree with you in wishing we had more than two parties to choose from; for one, studies have shown that negative partisanship is much lower in democracies with more than two major parties.
It reminds me of when some atheists ran a campaign to be called The Brights. A name that can be seen as a little pretentious doesn't help. I think calling his party the Liberal Party, to borrow from Canada and Australia, would have worked well.
Look, I hope people begin to understand that "ideas" in politics are just about as valuable as "ideas" in the IT field; which is to say -- they're fun to have and they can be exciting, but they're also pretty much worthless without execution.
A tough lesson: If you support a presidential candidate because of their ideas, you're unlikely to get very far.
The President usually needs to be like the boring CEO of the established company; you need a Tim Cook, not an aspiring Steve Jobs.
This is not true in history; many very important ideas need people to spearhead them over many years to get enacted.
Slavery was fought against for over 100 years amidst very fierce resistance before it was abolished.
John Quincy Adams (a failed president, but a very big abolitionist) spent 18 years to overturn a "gag rule" that automatically nullified anti-slavery legislation. Without the work of countless abolitionists bringing the ideas up again and again to the public stage, pushing for the ideas in ways that made the rest of the country uncomfortable, support for abolishing slavery would never be enough for Lincoln to do his proclamation.
The power of ideas are exactly what we need in the political sphere. Ideas in politics are very dissimilar to ideas in tech - in tech, it's all about business viability. In politics, ideas need to be about livelihoods of people.
There are two functions at play in governance; the government, which is in charge of executing the will of the people, and the will of the people itself. The will of the people is "represented" in all forms of government by parties. However representation is often taken away from the people by many things (corporate interest is a big one).
Climate change for instance is one place where the initiation belongs to the will of the people but is lacking adequate representation in political parties.
In this respect, "the Forward Party" is not really a party that will execute governance in the near future; it's a representation of the will of the people, collected together into a political body. More realistically, it's admitting that the political system is trudged up and that no political body represents what Forward wants to represent.
I think Forward is different from independents and other minor parties in the following ways:
1) it should be focused on incremental change, not on taking over the office
2) it should be focused on pushing forward ideas to limelight and holding accountability over those ideas, especially when those ideas make sense to a large percentage of the population
3) it shouldn't be a political party to directly compete ideologically with existing parties (liberals); rather it should wield its influence to pressure the competition to pick up its practical issues
Assuming it's not just another independent political party trying to run for government, I think the Forward Party is a great "idea", and is sorely needed in the political landscape of the US.
Maybe this is too mean, but: the only thing more ridiculous (in US electoral politics) than a perennial candidate is a perennial candidate with their own rubber-stamp party.
My immediate thought: no third party can succeed in the US first-past-the-post voting system. Then I visit the website, and the most prominent policy preference advertised is Ranked Choice voting.
> Cryptocurrencies now represent well over a trillion dollars in wealth. NFTs have created an entire new market, and smart contracts over the blockchain can allow for exciting new ways to transact within the economy.
Oh boy, you can buy a checksum of a url. And lock up your money so that people can try to scam you if your contract has a bug. Sure seems important compared to healthcare, climate change and the housing crisis.
I'll admit some degree of ignorance on all of the considerations with introducing a new party. But on a surface-level, I welcome more competition for ideas/platforms/parties in the American political system.
My naive fantasy would be that an increased number of viable parties would have a knock-on effect of reducing polarization/tribalization in American political discourse, and hopefully spur bottoms up thinking on good policy. If there were 6 parties for instance, it would hopefully force voters out of the 'good party vs bad party' or 'us vs them' dynamics that a 2 party system invites.
Political allegiance is a social signal today, and there are pressures to not question the party your social group votes for lest you be confused to be a bad person of the other side. This doesn't invite holding government accountable when it's your side doing the questionable things.
As long as the first-past-the-post voting system is used in the US such movements will go nowhere. Unsurprisingly ranked-choice voting is mentioned as their first core value.
Right, not only will they go nowhere but they will actively hurt the political party nearest to them ideologically unless those two parties agree to vote together on important issues.
Other countries with first past the post voting regularly manage to have more than two parties. Canada, the UK, etc. I don't think the USes problems can be solely attributed to fist past the post voting (though it certainly doesn't help).
If nothing else, RCV should help lower the political temperature in the US and soften the polarization that seems to be leading us to literal civil war.
Everyone is backed into a corner of supporting one or the other party, and it's started feeling like an increasingly high stakes game between the two that's only getting worse.
Lol we're nowhere near a civil war. The US is the the same as the pre-breakup USSR in that the peasant class fully knows that they'd be the biggest losers of any conflict or breakup.
Even with ranked choice the US will remain mostly two partied like the UK and some provinces in Canada. The parties are both so dominant already and well whipped, and not much chance coalitions form in this climate when these two parties aren't even in agreement of the same facts of reality. Maybe a centrist coalition designed to spoil dem votes.
Parliamentary systems still devolve into two-party contests in each district though, it's more that the larger number of districts means that regional parties sometimes takes one of those two slots. At their peak the Lib Dems basically only ever won MPs from a few small regions of the country, mainly Somerset, Sheffield and London. The Greens have their one MP in Brighton, and then the other parties are all regional.
That's a lot to do with their policies though. The Greens are not really different to Labour, Lib Dems ... I don't think even they know what they stand for these days.
A better recent example was UKIP. A single issue party that managed to accrue enough of the vote that they got their issue implemented without ever having to win an election. In FTFP you can implement massive change in politics, without needing to actually replace one of the big parties.
I thought the grab cursor hand over the image was intentional (like the raise hands emoji, grab the future or something), but it's a single img in a .slideshow-list
I was excited about Yang’s candidacy in the NYC mayoral election, but it didn’t take very long to see that he was out of his depth. In the end, he didn’t even rank in my top 5 (NYC has ranked choice now). Why does he keep running for top positions? He clearly doesn’t have a record of success as an executive, either in private or public sectors. He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start as a city councilor or something?
I think it's important not to confuse the goal with the action.
I don't think he wants to become a politician. He wants to enact political change. These are two very different things.
Saying "if he wants to enact political change, why not start as city councillor?" Well... how many democrats or republicans are pushing for change? No one who is born and raised in party lines is pushing for reform; they're doing the opposite.
Yang could never push for the ideas that he wants to see changed in the US as a democrat or a republican. It just isn't possible - the system is too incumbent. I think he realized this during his NY election, which was his first real taste of political competition.
I think this is the only step that he can take. This isn't a "chess move" that he's doing to brilliantly win the political arena; this is more like someone with core values believing in those core values and doing whatever it takes to push those things forward.
At the end of the day, politics is not about winning or losing elections, it's about making sure what you think as important issues are heard and addressed.
> I don't think he wants to become a politician. He wants to enact political change. These are two very different things.
No, they aren't. Well, one is an action, and one is the description of a person in a position to do that action (not every politician enacts political change, but everyone who enacts political change is a politician.)
> At the end of the day, politics is not about winning or losing elections, it's about making sure what you think as important issues are heard and addressed.
imo most politicians are not interested in the issues themselfs but in winning elections because that is their job.
What will be interesting, and telling, to watch will be who joins him. If some high profile government people join him in the Forward Party, then Yang doesn't need to be great at management or politics, he just needs to light the fire and find the kindling.
There's enough other higher profile politicians across federal, state, and local politics who don't fully align with either major party today. If even just one of them publicly joins Yang, I think that'll be enough to justify the last few years of his efforts and it will encourage others to join him, too.
>Well... how many democrats or republicans are pushing for change? No one who is born and raised in party lines is pushing for reform; they're doing the opposite.
This is factually not true. Both major parties have radical wings that have both seen measures of success in the last decade or so. The Republicans have had the tea party movement, and the democrats have the progressive caucus which are likely in the middle of setting an infrastructure budget way beyond the what people previously thought was possible. Obama had a perfectly traditional route into politics and he stood directly against the wars his party had supported 5 years earlier and passed an incredibly ambitious healthcare bill. Bernie Sanders is radical in his positions, has been effective in championing them and changing the debate and he is well within the democratic party.
What Yang is pushing for in terms of policy isn't that much more radical than AOC. What he is pushing for is more radical but arguable way less effective than the incremental changes that Stacey Abrams acheived.
I want to be clear here, I'm not saying there's no value to what Yang is doing. But it's a dis-service to the actual political reality when people pretend like nothing gets done in traditional politics.
Admit that demeaning results of the current parties is unfair to them.
Beg to differ about comparing him to AOC. Yang's forward policies much more radical than AOC's and absolutely do not belong in the democratic party.
80% of Yang's policies is all about limiting the power of incumbency (democracy dollars, ranked choice votes, open primaries, stop DC revolving door, term limits). It hurts the party a LOT to reduce the power of incumbency; no party member with any position would actually support any of this.
Comparatively, AOC's medicare for all, public safety, housing as human right, and immigration reform is super in line with democratic party issues.
Ironically a phrase made most famous by Donald Trump. It's going to be real interesting as politicians going forward analyze and adopt ideas often attributed to him while simultaneously trying to distance themselves from him.
He got to spend many millions of other people's money to run ads with his face on them, and enjoyed many millions more worth of earned media. It's not that strange. He certainly wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
He has lots of real fans now, even if they aren't enough to win a presidential primary.
I think the policies he wants to push are ahead of the times ideas that resonate.
He will be as popular as those ideas are popular, and it's his "job" to make those ideas popular. So yes, by that definition he wants to be a celebrity and he wants people to buy his book.
However, if he pushes forward ideas that just don't make sense, have bad narratives or don't connect with people's sentiment, he will be quickly forgotten.
> He clearly doesn’t have a record of success as an executive, either in private or public sectors.
You could say the same thing about Obama in 2008.
> He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start as a city councilor or something?
Nice job damning with faint praise there, well done!
Guess what, he's already in politics. He ran a wildly influential campaign for the Democratic presidential candidacy, and was a top contender in the NYC mayoral race. How many people "wanting to get into" politics could claim to have done that?
I’ve wondered about this with people like Beto in Texas and Abrams in Georgia, and used to think it’s because being a perpetual candidate is lucrative.
But I think Abrams may win the next governorship in Georgia. Who knows about Beto.
Sometimes “hopeless causes” pay off and I like to think that Yang is an idealist who really wants to make a difference.
I am a huge Yang supporter. I donated money to his political campaign, the first time I’ve ever done that in my life.
I was horrified that he ran for mayor. City politics is incredibly complex and it’s actually harder to navigate than other political positions. I felt he should have run for senator which would have been an easier job than mayor.
But overall I think him creating a new party is exactly what we need now.
I was listening to a popular media personality talking about a third party to fix our problems. It struck me as the wrong way. It would end up as just another political entity that is compromised by dogma, fanatics, money, corruption. No matter how well intentioned. I feel like it would be better to popularize the stigmatization of parties, drain the corrupt party establishments of their cash and support, and make it culturally acceptable to just support bills and politicians you like and not support ones you don’t like. I think ranked voting is good and maybe more direct voting on items instead of people.
Big time fail not making cannabis legalization a top-line plank in their platform.
It's overwhelmingly popular, and because this party (like every third party) is doomed to be a spoiler at best, they could attract enough voters with cannabis legalization to perform (optimistically) in the high single digits instead of the high fractions of a digit. High single digits is enough to swing elections, which is enough to force the major parties to adopt the popular elements of your platform.
I'm not saying that there isn't the beginning of a good idea in argument that you're making, but the way you describe it it boils down to "adopt cannabis as a popular platform plank and force one of the major parties to adopt cannabis as a popular platform plank" which might be fine but it might not be Yang's goal.
I'm not saying they should just try to get major parties to adopt cannabis legalization as a platform plank. I'm saying they should use cannabis to get adequate popular support for their party in hopes of getting the other parties to adopt the non-cannabis elements of their platform.
Federal legalization/decriminalization is going to happen eventually, so this is a limited-time opportunity for a third party. Make hay while the sun shines.
I'd argue the Green Party's main ideas are already embraced by the democrats. I'm not saying Yang's party has a prayer of picking up even a single seat, either, just picking up enough votes to get their ideas noticed.
If they put forward any form of a viable candidate that I am not 100% opposed to they will get my vote. The current 2 party system that elevates the extreme of each party has to go.
Edit: I was wrong, he's doing exactly what I thought he wasn't. See Hannibalhorn's comment below for more details.
I'm glad he supports Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), but I think he's going about this the wrong way.
Right now, he's creating a new third-party within an electoral system that effectively defaults to two existing and dominant parties. Those two parties currently control every federal and state legislature and/or election committee that has the power to alter how elections are run.
Working against them, in a system that is extremely hostile to third-parties, makes it very hard to effect change because you are almost always guaranteed to be a loser, and be viewed as an opponent.
If his interests are truly about implementing RCV nationwide, a better course of action would be to endorse and campaign for the Democratic and Republican candidates that are willing to commit to implementing RCV.
In any state where you can get a filibuster-proof majority of those candidates elected, you would have a much better chance of changing the electoral system.
Simply put, lobbying for RCV would be more effective than introducing a third-party within our current electoral system.
We will support candidates for office who align with our core principles so that we can reform the system and make it more responsive to the American people. This means that we will support Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - as well as candidates identifying themselves as Forward Party members.
One method for avoiding the problem of splitting the vote is to only run candidates in ridings which are otherwise effectively "single candidate", places where the incumbents are expected to get >66% of the vote without you running.
This also lets you focus your resources more, and lets you pander more to a specific kind of voter (the voters you need to win the otherwise-not-competitive ridings you are running in).
The Forward Party is a PAC that plans to grow its support and then petition the FEC for recognition as a political party when we fulfill the requirements, which include operating in several states, supporting candidates, getting volunteers signed up around the country, and other party activities.
MMP is way better than FPP, however the NZ version with list MPs is undesirable in my opinion, because the party gets to choose candidates who get zero votes and then get into parliament. To remove someone you have to vote out the party.
To explain: in NZ MMP, the party creates a list of candidates, and if the party is voted for, people from the list become members of parliament. NZ also has 60 out of 120 seats allocated by voting in an electorate, but even someone that doesn’t win their electorate can still become an MP if they are sufficiently high on the party list. https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy...
So basically a toned democrat?(not being fully "anti-capitalism" like many today [even if as a facade]) with UBI in mind and probably more technocratic-oriented?
People forget Trump was basically very similar(a 80's democrat, except that's considered far-right today).He wasn't conservative really culturally, but most definitely one in the economic space(even then, some would call him a progressive when you consider more extreme positions about the economy like the federal reserve).
I wouldn't call Yang a grifter because that would imply he has the chance to grift something.UBI is not popular, and if it is among the non far-left democrats, they should reconsider.It was tried several times here in Europe and the only reason it wasn't a massive failure is because people knew what they signed up for, thus at least pretending to try.
If he abandons UBI he probably would have more chances overall, even though he'll lose some younger voters.
One thing that I (almost fully) agree on and should be talked about more is the congress term limits.
I feel like a lot of people take it as obvious that ranked-choice is just better. I have an alternate take:
We just went through a simple first-past-the-post election in the US that a significant percentage of voters believe was rigged. This is the simplest system imaginable, the data is easily available to verify it was not rigged.
Do we really think the average american will be able to grok how ranked-choice voting works? Imagine for a moment the reaction from people when their candidate appears to be "winning" and then ends up 3rd after the "recalculation."
I feel like the first priority of a voting system needs to be transparency and being easy to understand, RCV isn't that. Maybe works well on small scale, I highly doubt it's a good idea nationally.
It's obvious that it's easier to show someone how public vote tallies are calculated then convince them the entire chain of custody for ballets was secure.
Even if they don't understand it themselves, it's just simple math done in public which would be easy to refute by any educated person.
This is one of the arguments for approval voting. It's simple enough to be trusted by everybody with all the good properties of RCV and some superior things like rendering negative campaigning useless.
Approval voting is my favorite method as well. The best benefit IMO is that someome who votes the same as before is still making a valid vote, they've just set their approval threshold high enough that only one candidate meets it.
Alternatively, you could view the situation as: if the even the simplest voting system can be successfully attacked by a convincing enough demagogue, perhaps the complexity of the voting system isn't that important and we wouldn't actually lose much by picking a better but more complex system.
In the end, the attacks were not on the vote system itself, but on the real-life voting process - fear of double-voting, of fraudulent votes, of dead people voting etc.
I can't support a politician or party that doesn't make healthcare a major tenet of their platform. The US is the only first world nation without universal healthcare, and it pays more than those nations for worse results[1][2].
Also, it's interesting that the "Democracy Dollars" page[3] identifies a real problem, but then does nothing to actually address the core of the issue. Doing something about Citizens United would, though[4].
From[3]:
> Legislation and policy don’t reflect the will of the people because our voices have been flooded out by wealthy donors, corporate lobbyists, and special interest groups flooding the system with their money.
> *The rich thus have outsized influence, and they have very different priorities than the rest of us. Generally, the wealthy are more conservative, respect current authority, and encourage a less radical or rapid approach to change. Candidates and politicians quickly become subject to the donor class.
* Ka-Ping Yee showing how voters' preferences would translate to ballots, then how different election methods picks winners from those ballots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329 (watch about 10 minutes).
There's also the issue that IRV is persistently biased against moderates, who might be almost everyone's second choice even if they're almost nobody's first choice.
I feel like now is the best time to make a 3rd party.
Non-loony-tunes republican voters held their noses and voted D against Trump. Progressive D are frustrated because they're not getting so much as a fig leaf after supporting the establishment candidate.
Basically: the Democratic party tent is currently busting at the seams. It seems possible that the corporate-centrist Dems and Republicans unite under the Dems flag, leaving all the non-Q populists without a sane party to represent them.
I don't think his chances are good, but the iron is as hot as it has ever been.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadhttps://www.forwardparty.com/platform
Surprisingly, the issue that Yang is known for, UBI, is not on the list.
UBI is, however, present here:
https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward
I wonder if that was accidental.
I would say Yang introduced an issue single-handedly into the conversation and it was implemented quite quickly without any discussion because of the unique pandemic situation. Will be interesting to see the long term research that emerges from this.
I'm sure I'm going to appreciate this April 15th 2022 when my liability is much larger than usual because my credit was already paid out.
It is the second WORST voting system after first past the post, which is what we have now.
Read about the Condorcet Method
Being simple to understand is crucial for voting systems and I would argue is the most important factor since an election without public buy-in is worse than worthless.
With condorcet I think you can also visualize it nicely by playing a Head to Head thing and show ok A vs B, B wins. Ok B vs C, B wins, etc.
If the 2020 US election tabulation process is any indication, yes.
Just to be clear, the difference would be something like having to say B won because he was the most common second choice and beat every other candidates in a one on one. Versus saying B won because it had the most first choices, yet did not have a majority of first choices.
I think it's easy enough to understand that while someone had more first choices, they didn't have a majority first choices and since someone else had more second choices they took the win.
While I would really love to see what outcomes could be produced by a Condorcet method I can’t imagine actually implementing one without relying on computerized counting and software. This makes it impossible for volunteers to audit due to the need to audit the hardware and software of the computers doing the counting. If only security experts are capable of auditing such a system then our whole democracy is at their mercy. That’s essentially a technocracy.
"Imagine this candidate ran in a two person race against each of the other candidates in turn. If he'd win ALL those races individually, he should win when running against all of them at the same time too."
Now, explaining various methods which guarantee this property is not as easy - nor is it easy to understand why you might prefer one such method to another.
But this isn't actually a big deal. In the many, many countries that use proportional representation, it's the outcome ("parties share of seats in parliament should be roughly the same as parties share of votes in the election") which is agreed upon. The actual mathematics to achieve it are somewhat counterintuitive and not many people are aware of them, but that doesn't matter. We can all see it works, and so we would in an election with, say, Ranked Pairs.
Sums up most of the points about it. I want to highlight the "leads to two party dominance in countries that use it" (australia for example) point. This is exactly what we want to avoid.
I prefer approval or score voting for single member elections as it does away with all these bad voting incentives.
But regardless, I think single member elections are stupid and proportional systems are far better and more democratic. The idea that the thing most representative of you is the piece of land you live on is very outdated. Zweitmandat is the most advanced implementation of proportional representation imo.
> The Zweitmandat (English: second mandate) is a feature in the variation of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) used to elect the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Unlike most variations of MMP, such as the German federal electoral system, Baden-Württemberg's system does not use party lists. Instead, proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweitmandat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
The main distinction is that Ranked Choice can elect someone which is not the best compromise of everyone's choices, while Schulze and Ranked pairs will always elect the best compromise of everyone's choices. If there is a candidate who is preferred over the other candidates, when compared in turn with each of the others, they guarantee that candidate will win, while Ranked Choice does not.
The downside to Schulze or Ranked Pairs is that saying that someone is your second choice could hurt the chances of your first choice to be elected, because by putting forward a compromising candidate, and since Schulze or Ranked Pairs optimize for that, you lean the tally towards your potential compromises (which are your second, third, etc. choices) in the case where the election are a "close call".
If I understand correctly.
I personally would prefer a system that optimizes for the compromise, as I think it's more important to get the candidate that the least people dislike, than it is to get the candidate that the most people adore.
So if I understand correctly, it means something like:
If you have A, B and C.
With Schulze or Ranked Pairs B will win, but with Ranked Choice C will win.That's because C is most people's first choice, so they win. But if you asked people to pick between C or B, B would technically win, because 19% would pick B (as it is their best), and 40% that think A is best but B is second best would also pick B, thus B vs C would get 59% votes for B and only 41% votes for C, that means that in a vote for B against C, B would win, but with Ranked Choice B loses, and C is elected.
If you decay the hypothetical 3 party set of options by eliminating the least popular candidate then you're back to first past the post which is the current status quo in the US.
Schulze and similar methods use the ranked lists to evaluate pairs of candidates and eliminate the candidates that are universally the worst first / retain candidates that rank well in isolation. This is more likely to result in a compromise that works best for the most people.
The problem is that it appears at first glance to defy the idea of "one person, one vote", so it might be harder to convince people of.
More systems here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system
Alternatively we can scale back the power of the federal government massively and have it be funded by the states rather than via direct taxes, similar to how EU works. But right now it is the worst of both worlds, taxes and control like a local government but poor representation like a federated one.
IRV (sometimes called “ranked choice”, but its among the worst of the ranked choice single-member methods) can be improved by getting rid of the loser elimination step, and counting down on all ballots (instead of those with an eliminated loser) until some candidate had a total that crosses the winning threshold (this is a version of Bucklin, but historical Bucklin implementations have often done dumb things like limiting the number of preference ranks to a much smaller number than candidates (often 2-3) rather than using fully-ranked (forced preference or unforced preference) ballots.
But, other than things like unique executive offices, single-member elections should be avoided. Legislative elections with small multimember districts (say 5 members) with a system like STV (or a Bucklinish cousin, again without loser elimination) gets decent proportionality, the candidate accountability of single-member districts (but more, because parties are likely to run more candidates than they'll win seats, so there os general election accountability even within preferred parties) and avoids high-stakes districting (eliminating gerrymandering opportunities.)
Even executive offices with a designated successor (e.g., governor and lt. governor) can be made multiwinner (sequential rather than proportional) using a ranked ballots method with a normal single-winner majority threshold: once the first winner is selected, eliminate that candidate and recount the ballots (for some methods, this can simply be continue the count till the next winner crosses the threshold with the same effect) to select the winner of the successor office. This improves candidate accountability when one party is clearly preferred, because a disfavored incumbent can be demoted without abandoning the preferred party.
The big advantage of ranked choice is that it is simple to understand and implement.
In elections, it is essential that the average person understand exactly how the system works. An election result that people don't understand/trust is worse than useless.
I'd be surprised if an average person finds ranked choice voting to be simpler to understand than approval or FPTP.
The main issue with approval voting though is that it's much harder for individuals to use when voting.
It's tricky to figure out when to bullet vote vs not bullet vote.
Simplicity to use != simplicity to count
I think ranked choice is in that sweet spot where it is reasonably simple to use and simple to count.
The only advantages ranked choice have over approval are entirely theoretical. Another advantage approval has is that it trends towards moderation.
Approval isn't perfect though (personally I prefer STAR, but it requires ballots to change).
Approval voting may not seem "fun", But thousands of voters have used it in Fargo and St Louis without any issue. All the evidence says it gets better results, is more resistant to strategic voting, and has a better chance of replacing the status quo.
"Ranked choice" is a range of methods and usually people mean instant-runoff. Recognizing that no system is perfect, I nonetheless have significant worries about instant runoff.
Imagine we have a society that's predominately split into two religions, where members of each religion would love a theocracy of their flavor, would settle for secular tolerance, and is vigorously (sometimes violently!) opposed to theocracy of another flavor.
If we have three candidates, one representing each of these positions, and everyone votes their true preferences then we see maybe 40% theocracy A, 40% theocracy B, 20% secular tolerance. The very first thing instant-runoff does is throw out the compromise, and we chose violence and strife.
If we generally believe that "a good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied" then IRV will never choose a good compromise. I worry that that's a bad way of choosing what we do as a society.
With approval voting, you can declare a victor without running a state machine.
Relevant Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
If the situation is close the best outcome may be a somewhat random outcome. Having 1,000 extra votes determine the outcome is just as arbitrary as anything else.
What is true, is that simplicity is a propaganda advantage for actually getting it passed, since "It's too complex so we can't trust it" is a good attack line even if it isn't true.
I'm not sure that advantage is worth it, given that 1. it's a terribly long shot anyway, and 2. It's the same argument which will be used to defend the status quo.
I expect most could if they spent 5 minutes on Wikipedia researching it. They don't, because they don't want to; most probably regard it as an unimportant implementation detail.
No, its not. That would be a big advantage of the method equivalent to it but without loser elimination and instead counting each rank down on all ballots simultaneously, which is both easier to understand and much easier to implement.
https://link.medium.com/mKcRWz0xR7
Approval voting has advantages when you get into the weeds, but ranked choice has one big advantage right out the gate: people like it more. If you present the two systems to regular voters with simple one paragraph descriptions, people will choose ranked choice nearly every time, because they want to be able to rank candidates if they're voting for more than one person. Nobody wants to have to say that the guy there willing to hold their nose for is just as worthy of their vote as the guy they really want in office.
Two big problems:
1. Half of the politicians that make it into parliament are from the party list (which is chosen by the party) and are not voted for individually. I believe much of the power of democracy is the ability to vote people out, and the party list mostly prevents that.
2. There is a lot of talk of strategic voting. I guess all systems can be gamed, but MMP seems to encourage it.
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy... “Every candidate who wins an electorate gets a seat in Parliament. They are called electorate MPs. The remaining seats are filled from party lists. Every party has a party list, which is a list of candidates ranked in the order the party wants those candidates to be elected to Parliament. Candidates elected from a party list are called list MPs.”
I dunno, I think random ballot is worse.
Its arguably the worst system that uses ranked choice ballots and ever considers more than the first position, though, which is why in should be called its proper name, “instant runoff voting”, and not “ranked choice”.
I sincerely hope Newsom gets successfully primaried and has no chance of a Presidential run, https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-ve...
Even adding 15-20 years of working life would mean that 100 y.o. politicians or judges would become a normal occurrence. For Democrats: would you like to Amy Coney Barrett to serve until 2072? For Republicans: would you like Sonia Sotomayor to serve until 2054?
In politics, a long tenure is a huge advantage. We should probably act now, before the interests of the current stakeholders are too entrenched.
I agree with term limits though, but mainly to ensure that the politicians better represent those working in the economy. So many issues come from politicians effectively being idle landlords - completely divorced from the issues caused by the housing crisis and the damage that comes from the subsequent lack of economic mobility.
But we might be able to turn 70 y.o. into 67 y.o. relatively soon. In fact, there already was an experiment in humans which turned their epigenetic clock back 2,5 years by rejuvenating their thymuses.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02638-w
(Of course, the complicated relationship between epigenetic clock and real internal state of the organism is not fully clear yet. I know. This might be a very imperfect measure.)
This kind of baby steps is going to compound. I am sort of afraid of the possibility that we will ignore the baby steps until their aggregated weight is unconquerable, much like the climate crisis, where any single added chimney meant "almost nothing", but all of them together over decades meant a lot.
The positions may not be, but voting for anything but R or D is very controversial, because by voting third party in the US, you are helping the choice you like least win.
There is exactly zero chance that a third party will gain any meaningful amount of power, so all you are doing is throwing your vote away.
Maybe you're one of the five people in the country who don't actually care which of those two will win, but for some crazy reason still go to the polls - but if you're not one of those five, the best you can hope out of a third party is to produce better candidates in your preferred party's primary races.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/27/new-yorke...
Recently, there was a Canadian election. While we use FPTP here, many chose to vote NDP. They are effectively a third party, and were unlikely to hold even a minority government.
But neither incumbent party put forward anything, or anyone, more compelling. So those voting NDP were given two choices: they could vote for something barely better than the other guy, or they could treat their ballot as a mixture of optimism and a spoiled ballot, to voice their disappointment at the current state of affairs in the hope it might lead to something better, someday.
[1] Their politics couldn't be more similar. Look at how provincial NDP parties govern, and tell me how it differs from the Federal Liberals. (It doesn't.)
The US has had a two party system since about its second election under the Constitution, but only one of the current parties has a direct lineage to the original two. The second party of the two-party system has been replaced twice. It could happen again.
OTOH, it won't happen with a platform that isn't very controversial (that's two easy for one or the other major party to coopt—or both in pieces); it would only happen with a platform with a strong position on a controversial issue where a sizable fraction of the population has views more strongly opposed to one major parties position than the other existing major party is willing to take.
UBI is hardly without controversy.
> abortion, evolution, religion, gun rights, etc
If Yang took positions on those things it would mostly give people reasons not not support him rather than to support him, thus reducing his (and Forward Party's) overall support.
Yang probably thinks the things he's pushing -- UBI, RCV, etc -- are more important in improving the lives of ordinary Americans than those highly controversial culture-war issues.
He's not wrong; voting reform must be priority #1 for any 3rd party.
For example, love him or hate him, Ralph Nader probably swayed the 2000 Election and had incredible influence over the outcome (for better or worse).
Coming back to the Forward Party - what I'd personally want is some minor third party that has a series of very modest goals to complete each year. If this party can complete said goals in a grassroot manner in succession every year I believe they'd eventually be a dominant (third party) player.
I think third parties should focus on minor results and less on rhetoric. Unfortunately this is very difficult to do in modern American politics. Oh well.
They draw voters from the more aligned main party, causing that aligned main party to lose elections.
Third parties hurt the interests of their own supporters.
There are good reasons why the Democratic Party tends to support the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party tends to support the Green Party [1].
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/us/politics/green-party-r...
From the point of view of the third party supporter, this would be exactly what you would want.
In other words, an effective third party can be a great catalyst toward making some minor (or major) change in the most closely aligned parties.
For example, how did Trump winning in 2016 help your average Green Party supporter achieve more of the change they wanted in the aligned Democratic Party?
The 1PPP systems systemically trend to metastable 2-party states. Of course 3rd parties will have distinctions from their closer main parties, but it is almost impossible that a 3rd party will triangulate exactly between the two major parties.
This means that in practice, a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote for your worst major party option. The 3rd party acts as a spoiler - always.
This is NOT true in Ranked Choice Voting systems. There, the 3rd party spoiler issue goes away, and the 3rd parties have a real chance of being able to get elected & have a real influence.
To have the effect you want (vs some perverse effect), you must vote strategically in the system you have.
That said, it is long past the time that we implemented a few upgrades from the systems of 200 years ago, such as upgrading to Ranked Choice.
I certainly prefer a number of 3rd parties for a number of reasons, but not until we get off the 1PPP voting system. Ranked Choice, or any of a number of other options, but the role of 3rd parties as spoilers is just too great.
He's not quite a centrist as much as he's trying to break completely out of the left/right dichotomy and compile the best policy ideas that often neither party is supporting, which appeals to a lot of people.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/oct/24/andrew-yan... appears to be a fact check of this claim, and it was rated false.
That is the entire point! The mainstream political party won't address particular issues unless it feel that it position in power is threatened.
If anything, didn't Biden win by a larger margin against Bernie in 2020 than Hillary won against Bernie in 2016?
Yes. If they lose an election or start losing their advantage it forces them to re-assess their policies and their positions.
I've explained here how UKIP threatened the Conservative vote enough that they had to offer the referendum to secure a majority in 2015:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28767473
UKIP share of the vote had increased from 3% to 12% in 5 years and the Conservatives knew they were a threat and had to offer the referendum. It forced the Conservatives to address the issue.
> If anything, didn't Biden win by a larger margin against Bernie in 2020 than Hillary won against Bernie in 2016?
Bernie from my understanding had burned much of his base when he endorsed Hillary for the 2016 election. Also Hillary wasn't a great candidate.
Or put more simply: his personal standing within the party was threatened more than his party's electoral chances (UKIP votes were irrelevant in most Tory seats and took votes off Labour too in marginals), and he wouldn't have been in power anyway under a proportional system.
Ironically, EU Parliament votes being proportional probably played a major role in Farage deciding back in the nineties that he could try to win the Brexit debate from outside the Tory party too...
In the two party system, the only ways for a party to fail are via apathy (not bothering to vote at all), and total defection to the other side. The small party allows voters to signal to the main party that they are failing to adequately represent certain elements of their constituency. It forces the main parties to consider all the components of their base, otherwise they’re can safely abandon them to some extent while they fight over the middle.
It’s arguably less efficient in the US due to an electoral structure that’s quite unfavorable for small parties, but it still serves an important purpose. It doesn’t make sense if you only look at one single election, but the election is the most important feedback mechanism in a democracy, and they typically happen rather infrequently. So you can look at one election, and conclude that a minor party cost one side a particular victory. But if the loser decides to examine why they lost, there’s a clear incentive to improve how they represent their constituents next time.
It’s not highly efficient, but no democracy is. Perhaps the US more than some others, but even if you look at the worlds ‘direct democracies’, you couldn’t conclude that asking the public a handful of extra yes/no questions every year is perfectly efficient either.
Look at groups like the Squad, the Tea Party and Trump. These groups are/were able to achieve substantial changes in party platform by working through the primary system and have shifted politics much more than the third parties in the US ever did.
The entire idea of electing an executive separately from the legislature is not necessarily efficient in the first place, and the higher level of important placed on for former is quite strange from some perspectives.
Yang ran for President. Did very poorly.
Ran for NY Mayor. Did very poorly.
Why does making him the face of a new party make any sense at all?
Highlighting that is key to his platform succeeding.
You can bemoan this and yearn for European elections where the party platform makes a difference. But that's how it is.
Nixon won several (Congress, VP). Biden won several (Delaware, VP). Bush 41 won Congressional elections. Reagan won as Governor. Carter won as Governor. Shall we continue?
I think the best way to think about this party is that the goal isn't to win elections (get the majority of votes, beat out the republican/democratic party) - it is to wield influence via a platform.
If you think Andrew Yang is establishing a political party to win a government race, I think its a bit too naive.
I think he is trying to use a third party lever to influence a bunch of small things to snowball into larger things, and he doesn't have the space to do that in the existing parties.
Ranked choice vote seems like the best low hanging fruit. If Yang can bring 5-10 more of these issues into the public eye, he will be the most influential person in politics, whether he is in office or not.
> I think he is trying to use a third party lever to influence a bunch of small things to snowball into larger things...
If we're talking about what we're _thinking_, I think Andrew Yang is establishing a political party to make a lot of money, whether it's through direct donations or a higher profile that turns into more financial opportunity elsewhere.
I don't discount the possibility of him doing it just for the political influence, though.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results
However there is several negatives to this:
1) That political party won't get any credit for it. 2) The policy will be implemented hardheartedly. 3) It may destroy your party if one or more of the major issues that the alternative party is implemented. As voters won't see any more need to vote as they have got what they wanted. 4) Thee political momentum will be lost for other reform / change. 5) The existing party duopoly will still exist.
To expand on the final point. I dislike all political parties (I am somewhat of a anarchist) and I don't believe in political solutions. However the Labour party in the UK immolating itself will hopefully end up with its destruction. Which will make space in the UK political landscape for new ideas, new people. Some speculate that it may also lead to the destruction of the Conservative party. Peter Hitchens described both Labour and Conservative parties as two corpses that are propping the other up and if one collapses the other may as well. However I personally think that is a fantasy.
None of this is a problem if you are a one-issue party. UKIP doesn't need to exist anymore because the cause it was founded on has now been taken up and implemented by "mainstream" politics. UKIP has all but vanished today, but that's precisely because it was successful.
I agree with you in wishing we had more than two parties to choose from; for one, studies have shown that negative partisanship is much lower in democracies with more than two major parties.
I also am just not a fan of “the forward party”. When I hear it the first thing that comes to mind is this
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HqjhHVUzl8o
Look, I hope people begin to understand that "ideas" in politics are just about as valuable as "ideas" in the IT field; which is to say -- they're fun to have and they can be exciting, but they're also pretty much worthless without execution.
A tough lesson: If you support a presidential candidate because of their ideas, you're unlikely to get very far.
The President usually needs to be like the boring CEO of the established company; you need a Tim Cook, not an aspiring Steve Jobs.
Slavery was fought against for over 100 years amidst very fierce resistance before it was abolished.
John Quincy Adams (a failed president, but a very big abolitionist) spent 18 years to overturn a "gag rule" that automatically nullified anti-slavery legislation. Without the work of countless abolitionists bringing the ideas up again and again to the public stage, pushing for the ideas in ways that made the rest of the country uncomfortable, support for abolishing slavery would never be enough for Lincoln to do his proclamation.
The power of ideas are exactly what we need in the political sphere. Ideas in politics are very dissimilar to ideas in tech - in tech, it's all about business viability. In politics, ideas need to be about livelihoods of people.
There are two functions at play in governance; the government, which is in charge of executing the will of the people, and the will of the people itself. The will of the people is "represented" in all forms of government by parties. However representation is often taken away from the people by many things (corporate interest is a big one).
Climate change for instance is one place where the initiation belongs to the will of the people but is lacking adequate representation in political parties.
In this respect, "the Forward Party" is not really a party that will execute governance in the near future; it's a representation of the will of the people, collected together into a political body. More realistically, it's admitting that the political system is trudged up and that no political body represents what Forward wants to represent.
I think Forward is different from independents and other minor parties in the following ways:
1) it should be focused on incremental change, not on taking over the office
2) it should be focused on pushing forward ideas to limelight and holding accountability over those ideas, especially when those ideas make sense to a large percentage of the population
3) it shouldn't be a political party to directly compete ideologically with existing parties (liberals); rather it should wield its influence to pressure the competition to pick up its practical issues
Assuming it's not just another independent political party trying to run for government, I think the Forward Party is a great "idea", and is sorely needed in the political landscape of the US.
OK, you've passed the first test!
Okay.
My naive fantasy would be that an increased number of viable parties would have a knock-on effect of reducing polarization/tribalization in American political discourse, and hopefully spur bottoms up thinking on good policy. If there were 6 parties for instance, it would hopefully force voters out of the 'good party vs bad party' or 'us vs them' dynamics that a 2 party system invites.
Political allegiance is a social signal today, and there are pressures to not question the party your social group votes for lest you be confused to be a bad person of the other side. This doesn't invite holding government accountable when it's your side doing the questionable things.
Same reason the GOP live the Green party.
Getting
Republicans
Elected
Every
November
Everyone is backed into a corner of supporting one or the other party, and it's started feeling like an increasingly high stakes game between the two that's only getting worse.
RCV might be something helps break the fever.
A better recent example was UKIP. A single issue party that managed to accrue enough of the vote that they got their issue implemented without ever having to win an election. In FTFP you can implement massive change in politics, without needing to actually replace one of the big parties.
Sounds like the slippery slope to eliminating individual rights, none of which have any "factual" grounding.
Purely-rational regimes have been tried - if you follow science/reasoning far enough, you'll end up with a eugenics program
He also seems weirdly inflexible, for someone who wants a job that involves unpleasant choices all day, every day.
How is he inflexible?
I don't think he wants to become a politician. He wants to enact political change. These are two very different things.
Saying "if he wants to enact political change, why not start as city councillor?" Well... how many democrats or republicans are pushing for change? No one who is born and raised in party lines is pushing for reform; they're doing the opposite.
Yang could never push for the ideas that he wants to see changed in the US as a democrat or a republican. It just isn't possible - the system is too incumbent. I think he realized this during his NY election, which was his first real taste of political competition.
I think this is the only step that he can take. This isn't a "chess move" that he's doing to brilliantly win the political arena; this is more like someone with core values believing in those core values and doing whatever it takes to push those things forward.
At the end of the day, politics is not about winning or losing elections, it's about making sure what you think as important issues are heard and addressed.
No, they aren't. Well, one is an action, and one is the description of a person in a position to do that action (not every politician enacts political change, but everyone who enacts political change is a politician.)
imo most politicians are not interested in the issues themselfs but in winning elections because that is their job.
There's enough other higher profile politicians across federal, state, and local politics who don't fully align with either major party today. If even just one of them publicly joins Yang, I think that'll be enough to justify the last few years of his efforts and it will encourage others to join him, too.
This is factually not true. Both major parties have radical wings that have both seen measures of success in the last decade or so. The Republicans have had the tea party movement, and the democrats have the progressive caucus which are likely in the middle of setting an infrastructure budget way beyond the what people previously thought was possible. Obama had a perfectly traditional route into politics and he stood directly against the wars his party had supported 5 years earlier and passed an incredibly ambitious healthcare bill. Bernie Sanders is radical in his positions, has been effective in championing them and changing the debate and he is well within the democratic party.
What Yang is pushing for in terms of policy isn't that much more radical than AOC. What he is pushing for is more radical but arguable way less effective than the incremental changes that Stacey Abrams acheived.
I want to be clear here, I'm not saying there's no value to what Yang is doing. But it's a dis-service to the actual political reality when people pretend like nothing gets done in traditional politics.
Beg to differ about comparing him to AOC. Yang's forward policies much more radical than AOC's and absolutely do not belong in the democratic party.
80% of Yang's policies is all about limiting the power of incumbency (democracy dollars, ranked choice votes, open primaries, stop DC revolving door, term limits). It hurts the party a LOT to reduce the power of incumbency; no party member with any position would actually support any of this.
Comparatively, AOC's medicare for all, public safety, housing as human right, and immigration reform is super in line with democratic party issues.
https://www.forwardparty.com/platform
https://www.ocasiocortez.com/issues
He has lots of real fans now, even if they aren't enough to win a presidential primary.
He will be as popular as those ideas are popular, and it's his "job" to make those ideas popular. So yes, by that definition he wants to be a celebrity and he wants people to buy his book.
However, if he pushes forward ideas that just don't make sense, have bad narratives or don't connect with people's sentiment, he will be quickly forgotten.
You could say the same thing about Obama in 2008.
> He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start as a city councilor or something?
Nice job damning with faint praise there, well done!
Guess what, he's already in politics. He ran a wildly influential campaign for the Democratic presidential candidacy, and was a top contender in the NYC mayoral race. How many people "wanting to get into" politics could claim to have done that?
I’ve wondered about this with people like Beto in Texas and Abrams in Georgia, and used to think it’s because being a perpetual candidate is lucrative.
But I think Abrams may win the next governorship in Georgia. Who knows about Beto.
Sometimes “hopeless causes” pay off and I like to think that Yang is an idealist who really wants to make a difference.
I was horrified that he ran for mayor. City politics is incredibly complex and it’s actually harder to navigate than other political positions. I felt he should have run for senator which would have been an easier job than mayor.
But overall I think him creating a new party is exactly what we need now.
It's overwhelmingly popular, and because this party (like every third party) is doomed to be a spoiler at best, they could attract enough voters with cannabis legalization to perform (optimistically) in the high single digits instead of the high fractions of a digit. High single digits is enough to swing elections, which is enough to force the major parties to adopt the popular elements of your platform.
Federal legalization/decriminalization is going to happen eventually, so this is a limited-time opportunity for a third party. Make hay while the sun shines.
I'm glad he supports Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), but I think he's going about this the wrong way.
Right now, he's creating a new third-party within an electoral system that effectively defaults to two existing and dominant parties. Those two parties currently control every federal and state legislature and/or election committee that has the power to alter how elections are run.
Working against them, in a system that is extremely hostile to third-parties, makes it very hard to effect change because you are almost always guaranteed to be a loser, and be viewed as an opponent.
If his interests are truly about implementing RCV nationwide, a better course of action would be to endorse and campaign for the Democratic and Republican candidates that are willing to commit to implementing RCV.
In any state where you can get a filibuster-proof majority of those candidates elected, you would have a much better chance of changing the electoral system.
Simply put, lobbying for RCV would be more effective than introducing a third-party within our current electoral system.
One method for avoiding the problem of splitting the vote is to only run candidates in ridings which are otherwise effectively "single candidate", places where the incumbents are expected to get >66% of the vote without you running.
This also lets you focus your resources more, and lets you pander more to a specific kind of voter (the voters you need to win the otherwise-not-competitive ridings you are running in).
Is the Forward Party a political party?
The Forward Party is a PAC that plans to grow its support and then petition the FEC for recognition as a political party when we fulfill the requirements, which include operating in several states, supporting candidates, getting volunteers signed up around the country, and other party activities.
It has not made politics sensible
To explain: in NZ MMP, the party creates a list of candidates, and if the party is voted for, people from the list become members of parliament. NZ also has 60 out of 120 seats allocated by voting in an electorate, but even someone that doesn’t win their electorate can still become an MP if they are sufficiently high on the party list. https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy...
People forget Trump was basically very similar(a 80's democrat, except that's considered far-right today).He wasn't conservative really culturally, but most definitely one in the economic space(even then, some would call him a progressive when you consider more extreme positions about the economy like the federal reserve).
I wouldn't call Yang a grifter because that would imply he has the chance to grift something.UBI is not popular, and if it is among the non far-left democrats, they should reconsider.It was tried several times here in Europe and the only reason it wasn't a massive failure is because people knew what they signed up for, thus at least pretending to try. If he abandons UBI he probably would have more chances overall, even though he'll lose some younger voters.
One thing that I (almost fully) agree on and should be talked about more is the congress term limits.
We just went through a simple first-past-the-post election in the US that a significant percentage of voters believe was rigged. This is the simplest system imaginable, the data is easily available to verify it was not rigged.
Do we really think the average american will be able to grok how ranked-choice voting works? Imagine for a moment the reaction from people when their candidate appears to be "winning" and then ends up 3rd after the "recalculation."
I feel like the first priority of a voting system needs to be transparency and being easy to understand, RCV isn't that. Maybe works well on small scale, I highly doubt it's a good idea nationally.
Even if they don't understand it themselves, it's just simple math done in public which would be easy to refute by any educated person.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
https://electionscience.org/
However, just like with pouring cold water on people in real life, you probably won't get the reaction you seek.
In the end, the attacks were not on the vote system itself, but on the real-life voting process - fear of double-voting, of fraudulent votes, of dead people voting etc.
Also, it's interesting that the "Democracy Dollars" page[3] identifies a real problem, but then does nothing to actually address the core of the issue. Doing something about Citizens United would, though[4].
From[3]:
> Legislation and policy don’t reflect the will of the people because our voices have been flooded out by wealthy donors, corporate lobbyists, and special interest groups flooding the system with their money.
> *The rich thus have outsized influence, and they have very different priorities than the rest of us. Generally, the wealthy are more conservative, respect current authority, and encourage a less radical or rapid approach to change. Candidates and politicians quickly become subject to the donor class.
[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
[2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-hea...
[3] https://www.forwardparty.com/democracy-dollars
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_amendm...
* Voter Satisfaction Efficiency: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
* Ka-Ping Yee showing how voters' preferences would translate to ballots, then how different election methods picks winners from those ballots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329 (watch about 10 minutes).
Non-loony-tunes republican voters held their noses and voted D against Trump. Progressive D are frustrated because they're not getting so much as a fig leaf after supporting the establishment candidate.
Basically: the Democratic party tent is currently busting at the seams. It seems possible that the corporate-centrist Dems and Republicans unite under the Dems flag, leaving all the non-Q populists without a sane party to represent them.
I don't think his chances are good, but the iron is as hot as it has ever been.