> Senate Bill 524 specifically said it was "prohibiting the use of ranked-choice voting to determine election or nomination to elective office; voiding existing or future local ordinances authorizing the use of ranked choice voting."
I suppose that leaves open the possibility of introducing other alternative systems like Approval Voting or Score Voting, though if that loophole exists it may not last long enough to be taken advantage of.
Make no mistake, both parties have entrenched themselves to the extent that they no longer have to serve their constituents. I moved from a red state to a blue one a few years ago, thinking it would make a difference. The corruption is everywhere.
The DNC also wants to keep FPTP, otherwise their most effective compliance tool of "voting for [policy candidates, progressives, anyone besides who DNC leadership promotes] is the same as voting for the GOP!" goes away.
This is a terrible decision, all things considered. Ireland uses this system and the result is boring, predictable politics, which, in the end, is all you really want.
There is, however, an argument that the longer it takes to produce a result from an election, the less confidence people have in the result, either because they lose the cause-and-effect feeling between going to the polling station and learning the result, or because bad actors deliberately try to undermine the process by filling social media with false narratives (and encouraging intimidation of poll workers) while the count goes on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the result should be announced immediately, using electronic counting (and definitely not online voting), but 13 counts and then 10 days of recounts for a single district (Dublin South-Central[0] in 1992) is hard to justify, and I think that the voting system makes the process slower/more expensive and more error-prone. For comparison, apparently the most recounts for a UK general election seat was seven.[1]
Also, I believe that IRV/STV/RCV doesn't support the summability criterion[2], which leads to more centralisation of the vote counting process.
Even after the 1992 incident happened, the system continued to be used. I didn't live here back then, but, according to my local friends, after that, counting was automated for a couple elections and, then, it was agreed that while automation offered faster results, the manual process was more trusted by the people.
> bad actors deliberately try to undermine the process by filling social media with false narratives
I'm glad the voting system also weeds out extremists. The problem is that, in the US, said extremists are already in power, because current voting systems don't punish extremism enough.
The article seems to confuse RCV (voting by ranking a list of candidates) and IRV (a specific way of choosing the winner from such ballots). I'm not sure to which the law applies. Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for RCV that lists these 2 concepts.
There are ranked voting schemes that obey the summability criterion, although they aren't as commonly used as IRV and STV.
It's also quite practical to use a non-summable method with a limited set of candidates since any non-contrived method can use a summary array of length n! by using a count of each possible ranking. E.g. a large 10 candidate election could use only a 15MB summary array.
I don't know that it's universally positive. In San Francisco it backfired and resulted in electing an extremist District attorney who refuses to prosecute criminals.
From the perspective of a major Boudin critic, I don't blame RCV/instant-runoff voting at all. Boudin ran on a platform that had broad appeal, albeit more appealing to some than others--thus his third-round win. The problem is that the appeal of the platform came mostly from how voters understood the issues in a national frame of context, not a local frame of context. SF criminal justice policy already had baked in all the reforms which were part of the national discussion. So ill informed people thought they were voting for one set of policies (policies they already had, in fact) but were getting something far more extreme.
It does speak to the argument that simple majority voting provides a clear mandate--clear, at least, in terms of the American tradition of elections. But that whole mandate argument isn't very persuasive. If there was a traditional runoff, Boudin might still have won, yet we'd almost certainly still be in the same position, including a recall. But let's say Boudin wouldn't have won--SF criminal justice "reform" might have continued drifting toward ever greater extremes as the Overton Window slowly shifted. (The platform had broad appeal, so it still represented a center gravity.) There's something to be said for giving people what they think they want and letting things play out unencumbered, and RCV/instant-runoff theoretically does that better than first-past-the-post or traditional runoffs on average. If preferred policies are truly poor ideas and things fall apart, it then becomes much more difficult for advocates and voters alike to dissemble later. Boudin's policies have forced every SF politician and plenty of voters to reconcile to some extent their politics with reality, and effectively forced the centrist politicians to firmly declare that reforms have become too radical and counter-productive. Previously everybody had been able to avoid that.
I find the whole mandate argument disingenuous. In theory it might make sense in some rare situations, but in practice it's merely part of the rhetoric of a national political party who couldn't care less about mandates--they'll claim a mandate whenever it suits them, and reject a mandate whenever it suits them. And, frankly, voters will often do the same. Boudin's platform had broad appeal, but that won't stop some people from claiming that RCV/IR resulted in voters being cheated; they'd say the same thing even if he won a traditional runoff.
> In 2007, Sarasota voted to use it in future municipal elections, but the state never certified the necessary software so it couldn't be used.
That's another reason to oppose voting machines: it puts the power into the hands of state officials to selectively withhold approval of machines that enable reforms they don't want.
(I'm assuming that if the officials assessed that the reform would help their party, they'd rubberstamp the software without delay, perhaps with an expiry date so they could change their mind later).
States have to certify the whole stack. Even without (electronic) voting machines, the state can deny the ballot production, tabulation, etc, softwares.
There are no longer political parties as the layperson understands it. Oftentimes, local and state orgs are antogonists with their own electeds. Electeds mosdef don't feel any obligation to those orgs.
Rather, electeds protect their own power, their caucus, their fund raising cartels, and mosdef their powerful donors and lobbyists. More often than not, against the expressed positions of the orgs.
Source: member of my local party's exec board, was also a candidate for office.
> Ranked choice voting is pushed by the Globalist network to erode democracy. It allows advanced gaming and surprise candidates without a clear mandate from the people. Voting needs to be simple and the person that wins needs to have a clear majority. Rank choice takes that away.
My response is: If you're worried about candidates gaming the system and getting a surprise win without a clear majority and a mandate from the people, then you should be campaigning against the electoral college. You also need to reject plurality voting (or having more than 2 parties), and advocate for something like a two-rounds system system.
The electoral college is not a bad idea in itself. It can be one more layer of defense against a populist like Trump. Unfortunately, it didn't act in the best interests of the country when it was needed the most.
At this point, I am much more worried with disinformation campaigns and extremism, the latter of which is neatly dealt with by IRV.
Can't remember one in the US, but it can vote against the popular vote and, therefore, it can be used to protect the integrity of the office.
Much like the Queen could have stopped Brexit (and produce an institutional crisis), because it's her job to protect the country above all else. Unfortunately, she didn't.
I would like to point out that it does vote against 'the popular vote' as both Bush jr. and Trump were elected without the popular vote (though during Bush's second bid for president he won the popular vote by less than 3%) [a]
> it's her job to protect the country above all else.
As reality has proven, she's not allowed to do that job at all. "Having expressed her views, The Queen abides by the advice of her ministers"[0].
What this shows is that there is a power vacuum at the heart of the elective dictatorship that is the UK constitutional system. Actually implementing this mythical "safety valve" would require someone with a proper mandate to exercise the powers of the monarch (vetoing laws, treaties, and wars, for example). That person could be the "Governor General" of the UK, for nominal consistency with the Commonwealth realms, and they would report directly to the Queen, just as the PM does, except they would be elected by the whole country.
To keep them accountable, they could be impeached by a majority vote in both houses of parliament, but removing them would trigger a new Governor General election (with the current holder of that office not eligible). Also, someone could only become a candidate for that role if they received the support of 20% of MPs, which should hopefully prevent a populist sweeping into power. The voting system could be something like the Supplementary Vote[1].
Specifically in the case of Brexit, we could have seen a principled Governor General (perhaps someone like John Major) threaten to resign (during the crisis of May failing to get her Brexit deal through parliament) unless a second referendum was called. An election for Governor General under those circumstances would effectively be a single-issue election on the question of Brexit anyway (without the constituency/gerrymandering problems of FPTP), so I imagine the government would have granted Major's request.
> The electoral college is not a bad idea in itself.
I'm prepared to grant the idea that an extra layer of defence against populism is in-keeping-with the idea of representative democracy itself, and even that there is some merit in giving extra representation to low-population rural states in order to reward them for joining a union where they may be out-voted by the more populous states.
What I can't concede, though, is my position that the electors for each state should be assigned proportionally, as would have been the case if the bipartisan Lodge-Gossett amendment had been adopted. The article below explains why it is an inferior solution to just implementing a national popular vote, and I don't disagree, but I think the Lodge-Gossett proposal is a more "conservative" reform and thus harder to argue against:
No. "Globalist" is an established anti-semitic slur, it derives from the "Global Elites" of the anti-semitic New World Order conspiracy.
While "Globalist" specifically has become much more prominent over the last 20 years, but Jews being the secret globalists is not new, even Hitler referring to Jews as “international elements” who “conduct their business everywhere,” posing a threat to all people who are “bounded to their soil, to the Fatherland.”.
RCV is not nearly the best alternative to FPTP, but ones that are better are much more complex to compute and the average (ahem) citizen would be skeptical of the results.
RCV, to me, is a compromise which meets the "cloneproof" criterion of voting systems, which is the glaring, known-to-all-society-as-awful things about FPTP.
I see RCV as, quite truly, one of the major initiatives we need in this country to make it more democratic. Conspiracy theorists like the one you respond to are enraging. They are not only clearly wrong about something, and have no merit to their assertion, but they are fighting against democracy, not for it.
I'm not surprised.
America really has a different culture than Europe, and takes pride in that fact.
Traveling across the country has really shown me, America is really a bunch of different countries held together loosely by corporate "cultures" like mcdonalds and coke.
As the institutional trust keeps dropping, you can expect laws will be changed so regional sections can protect their own historical culture.
After all nations, countries, counties, states, etc are not sets of abstract laws and economic zones, but groups of people.
The culture clash is especially true in Florida; you have a Latin-American diaspora, Midwestern retirees, Jewish people from New York, and the culture of the American South, depending where you are in the state.
Without ranked choice voting, nobody running has to make the case for why they, specifically, will be good. They just have to make the case for why someone else will be horrific and that they are the most likely candidate to defeat the horrific person.
With ranked choice voting, each candidate has to make the case for why they, specifically, deserve your vote. There’s no need to be afraid of “throwing your vote away” on a candidate that is perceived before the election to not have as much support as others.
For executives, RCV is the way to go for sure (or maybe approval voting).
For the representative govt, proportional voting seems like the way to go. Give each legislator voting power equal to their number of votes (with some cutoff for logistical reasons). Reducing both the need to vote strategically and the efficacy of gerrymandering (since one district can now be 45% rep from party A, 44% rep from party B, and 11% rep from party C scaled by the total number of residents).
This is a bit of a tangent, but is there a voting system that is similar to ranked choice voting but would prevent someone who had the second least number of original votes from winning?
If everyone likes pepperoni pizza but they like one of 1000 other types of pizza slightly more, but all mutually hate each other's first choices, why should pepperoni pizza lose?
45 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI suppose that leaves open the possibility of introducing other alternative systems like Approval Voting or Score Voting, though if that loophole exists it may not last long enough to be taken advantage of.
Everyone but the extremists wants ranked choice.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the result should be announced immediately, using electronic counting (and definitely not online voting), but 13 counts and then 10 days of recounts for a single district (Dublin South-Central[0] in 1992) is hard to justify, and I think that the voting system makes the process slower/more expensive and more error-prone. For comparison, apparently the most recounts for a UK general election seat was seven.[1]
Also, I believe that IRV/STV/RCV doesn't support the summability criterion[2], which leads to more centralisation of the vote counting process.
[0] https://www.thejournal.ie/closest-irish-election-results-in-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_electio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summability_criterion
> bad actors deliberately try to undermine the process by filling social media with false narratives
I'm glad the voting system also weeds out extremists. The problem is that, in the US, said extremists are already in power, because current voting systems don't punish extremism enough.
There is no faith in the system as is
There are ranked voting schemes that obey the summability criterion, although they aren't as commonly used as IRV and STV.
It's also quite practical to use a non-summable method with a limited set of candidates since any non-contrived method can use a summary array of length n! by using a count of each possible ranking. E.g. a large 10 candidate election could use only a 15MB summary array.
How could RCV be any worse?
It does speak to the argument that simple majority voting provides a clear mandate--clear, at least, in terms of the American tradition of elections. But that whole mandate argument isn't very persuasive. If there was a traditional runoff, Boudin might still have won, yet we'd almost certainly still be in the same position, including a recall. But let's say Boudin wouldn't have won--SF criminal justice "reform" might have continued drifting toward ever greater extremes as the Overton Window slowly shifted. (The platform had broad appeal, so it still represented a center gravity.) There's something to be said for giving people what they think they want and letting things play out unencumbered, and RCV/instant-runoff theoretically does that better than first-past-the-post or traditional runoffs on average. If preferred policies are truly poor ideas and things fall apart, it then becomes much more difficult for advocates and voters alike to dissemble later. Boudin's policies have forced every SF politician and plenty of voters to reconcile to some extent their politics with reality, and effectively forced the centrist politicians to firmly declare that reforms have become too radical and counter-productive. Previously everybody had been able to avoid that.
I find the whole mandate argument disingenuous. In theory it might make sense in some rare situations, but in practice it's merely part of the rhetoric of a national political party who couldn't care less about mandates--they'll claim a mandate whenever it suits them, and reject a mandate whenever it suits them. And, frankly, voters will often do the same. Boudin's platform had broad appeal, but that won't stop some people from claiming that RCV/IR resulted in voters being cheated; they'd say the same thing even if he won a traditional runoff.
That's another reason to oppose voting machines: it puts the power into the hands of state officials to selectively withhold approval of machines that enable reforms they don't want.
(I'm assuming that if the officials assessed that the reform would help their party, they'd rubberstamp the software without delay, perhaps with an expiry date so they could change their mind later).
States have to certify the whole stack. Even without (electronic) voting machines, the state can deny the ballot production, tabulation, etc, softwares.
There are no longer political parties as the layperson understands it. Oftentimes, local and state orgs are antogonists with their own electeds. Electeds mosdef don't feel any obligation to those orgs.
Rather, electeds protect their own power, their caucus, their fund raising cartels, and mosdef their powerful donors and lobbyists. More often than not, against the expressed positions of the orgs.
Source: member of my local party's exec board, was also a candidate for office.
You may not feel you owe your political enemies better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Ranked choice voting is pushed by the Globalist network to erode democracy. It allows advanced gaming and surprise candidates without a clear mandate from the people. Voting needs to be simple and the person that wins needs to have a clear majority. Rank choice takes that away.
My response is: If you're worried about candidates gaming the system and getting a surprise win without a clear majority and a mandate from the people, then you should be campaigning against the electoral college. You also need to reject plurality voting (or having more than 2 parties), and advocate for something like a two-rounds system system.
At this point, I am much more worried with disinformation campaigns and extremism, the latter of which is neatly dealt with by IRV.
Much like the Queen could have stopped Brexit (and produce an institutional crisis), because it's her job to protect the country above all else. Unfortunately, she didn't.
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
As reality has proven, she's not allowed to do that job at all. "Having expressed her views, The Queen abides by the advice of her ministers"[0].
What this shows is that there is a power vacuum at the heart of the elective dictatorship that is the UK constitutional system. Actually implementing this mythical "safety valve" would require someone with a proper mandate to exercise the powers of the monarch (vetoing laws, treaties, and wars, for example). That person could be the "Governor General" of the UK, for nominal consistency with the Commonwealth realms, and they would report directly to the Queen, just as the PM does, except they would be elected by the whole country.
To keep them accountable, they could be impeached by a majority vote in both houses of parliament, but removing them would trigger a new Governor General election (with the current holder of that office not eligible). Also, someone could only become a candidate for that role if they received the support of 20% of MPs, which should hopefully prevent a populist sweeping into power. The voting system could be something like the Supplementary Vote[1].
Specifically in the case of Brexit, we could have seen a principled Governor General (perhaps someone like John Major) threaten to resign (during the crisis of May failing to get her Brexit deal through parliament) unless a second referendum was called. An election for Governor General under those circumstances would effectively be a single-issue election on the question of Brexit anyway (without the constituency/gerrymandering problems of FPTP), so I imagine the government would have granted Major's request.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100414023100/http://www.royal....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_vote
I'm prepared to grant the idea that an extra layer of defence against populism is in-keeping-with the idea of representative democracy itself, and even that there is some merit in giving extra representation to low-population rural states in order to reward them for joining a union where they may be out-voted by the more populous states.
What I can't concede, though, is my position that the electors for each state should be assigned proportionally, as would have been the case if the bipartisan Lodge-Gossett amendment had been adopted. The article below explains why it is an inferior solution to just implementing a national popular vote, and I don't disagree, but I think the Lodge-Gossett proposal is a more "conservative" reform and thus harder to argue against:
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/analysis-fractional-prop...
While "Globalist" specifically has become much more prominent over the last 20 years, but Jews being the secret globalists is not new, even Hitler referring to Jews as “international elements” who “conduct their business everywhere,” posing a threat to all people who are “bounded to their soil, to the Fatherland.”.
Here's some recent stuff for you to read
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalism#Right-wing_usage
* https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/globalist
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-ori...
* https://twitter.com/adl/status/972235098853724161?lang=en
* https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-how-did-the-term-gl...
* https://forward.com/community/412627/globalism-anti-semitism...
* https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/what-does-the-term-glo...
* https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/quantifying-hate-a-yea...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/globalism-rig...
* https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-jewish-democrats-at...
RCV, to me, is a compromise which meets the "cloneproof" criterion of voting systems, which is the glaring, known-to-all-society-as-awful things about FPTP.
I see RCV as, quite truly, one of the major initiatives we need in this country to make it more democratic. Conspiracy theorists like the one you respond to are enraging. They are not only clearly wrong about something, and have no merit to their assertion, but they are fighting against democracy, not for it.
https://wannabewonk.com/our-votes-could-mean-more/
Traveling across the country has really shown me, America is really a bunch of different countries held together loosely by corporate "cultures" like mcdonalds and coke.
As the institutional trust keeps dropping, you can expect laws will be changed so regional sections can protect their own historical culture. After all nations, countries, counties, states, etc are not sets of abstract laws and economic zones, but groups of people.
>No no, not free voting.
How do you stay calm and polite? I cant comprehend.
Without ranked choice voting, nobody running has to make the case for why they, specifically, will be good. They just have to make the case for why someone else will be horrific and that they are the most likely candidate to defeat the horrific person.
With ranked choice voting, each candidate has to make the case for why they, specifically, deserve your vote. There’s no need to be afraid of “throwing your vote away” on a candidate that is perceived before the election to not have as much support as others.
For the representative govt, proportional voting seems like the way to go. Give each legislator voting power equal to their number of votes (with some cutoff for logistical reasons). Reducing both the need to vote strategically and the efficacy of gerrymandering (since one district can now be 45% rep from party A, 44% rep from party B, and 11% rep from party C scaled by the total number of residents).