American people don’t have a federal holiday on elections, am I right?
Edit: I didn’t mean federal holiday. Just a holiday that’s mandatory to follow even for private firms.
That’s correct. It’s just a normal weekday.
Makes it easier for the richer people with flexible jobs and the retirees with no jobs to vote.
3 guesses which party is always against making it a federal holiday…
But a federal holiday doesn’t really help though right? People working at Wendy’s don’t get existing federal holidays off so it wouldn’t change for the majority of people who can’t get to the polling stations because of what job they have.
Just because something isn’t a 100% solution doesn’t mean that it doesn’t help.
But it wouldn’t help really at all? Seems like a waste of political capital when mail in ballots/mutliple voting days would actually help something.
Giving it the American legal designation of federal holiday won’t help. Barring nonessential businesses from operating on that day and barring the essential businesses from having a shift that lasts longer than eight hours would do a lot. I’m never clear which people mean when they say to make it a holiday.
A political party that wants to make it harder to vote for politicians… Gee I wonder!
Fortunately I have a flexible job and live in a small town, but it looks like it gets ridiculous in other parts of the country.
Hell, they could just hold it over a weekend. Why does it need to be just one day, let alone a weekday (or more importantly, a work day)?
Because the polls are in buildings that typically are staffed by public sector workers who don’t get paid to be there on weekends.
I’m pretty sure poll workers are volunteers. Maybe it varies by state.
They usually are. But the polls themselves are often in community centers, schools, and other public sector buildings.
Utterly insane that elections are held on weekdays. I’m so thankful we have mandatory voting, easy early voting, voting by mail, elections on weekends, and protections for employees who need to vote on the day they if they’re working in Australia. We also already have ranked choice voting by single transferable vote as well as proportional representative voting in most jurisdictions (all bicameral parliaments).
Unfortunately we have a beyond-uncomfortable fraction of the population that are totally cool with trying to prevent/discourage people from voting, as long as the near term political benefit is in their favor.
But I’m still glad to hear about other governments doing things for the good of the people. One of these days maybe enough of the US population will realize we can implement things that worked in other countries!
Just have to convince them that other countries exist…
Honestly the election day thing is more of an excuse at this point. Really, you get like a month or maybe two weeks to put your vote in. Most people who didn’t vote just don’t care.
ACT is unicameral, and I don’t think we’re the only ones
Yeah, as are NT and QLD. My comment was stating that all bicameral parliaments in Australia have proportional representational voting; not that all parliaments in Australia are bicameral.
I mean even federal holidays don’t help. At least for the lower classes since businesses are not forced to follow said holidays. It may be good for federal/government workers but from the private sector it will mean very little.
In Australia pre-polling places open like 2 weeks in advance. (I don’t know the exact number but you don’t have to vote on election day if you can’t make it on election day)
And election day is always a Saturday.
But I am not talking about federal holidays. I am talking about holidays in both the private and government sector for elections. That’s a fairly reasonable/old law in many countries including mine.
Voting is not governed on the federal level. That power is reserved to the states. Most reasonable states have 30+ days of early voting. The people complaining about no federal holiday for voting have probably never voted. If your state does not have early voting then get on that shit and stop bitching online.
Having most governance at the state level is a good thing. You are 1 voice in a million instead of 1 voice in 300 million. It is easier for people to influence state government. State laws have a bigger impact on people’s lives.
If someone isn’t knowledgeable and involved in state politics but is posting online about politics then they are just another braying jackass doing nothing to fix things.
Dude, have you considered the possibility that people canNOT be Americans also?
RCV does have a name recognition and a perceived ‘hotness’ that other voting systems haven’t really matched. And in politics, name recognition matters. I think it is counter productive to attack it to push another voting system. Instead, imo it makes more sense to push the alternative voting system by comparing it to FPTP, our current voting system.
Meanwhile the heritage foundation goes on and on about how this bad for freedoms lol
As a general rule anything the Heritage Foundation supports you should probably be against, but it didn’t exactly solve all problems immediately in the countries, and yes, some US states, that have it.
Good example of just how shitty and disingenuous Heritage Foundation can be:
Just a reminder to people that the Heritage Foundation are the ones propagating the horrifying "Project 2025”(
The only people that it’s confusing for are those who fear a 3rd part option. Preference 1, preference 2 preference 3 is all the end voter needs to know. If they can handle the myriad of different ballot formats out there that’s not asking too much
Yep. I have three brothers. My dad used ranked choice voting for us when we were kids all the time on “flavors” of things we needed to buy: ice cream, candy, toothpaste, etc. We understood it with no issues.
it was amusing seeing the look on a friend’s face when my dad would barge into the room with 5 different toothpastes and ask, “which of these do you like the best?” Followed shortly by “which of these do you like 2nd best?”
Next step should be universal mail in voting. Ranking 3 or more choices per contest will make voting take twice as long or more and it will discourage people from voting when they see lines wrapped around the building.
I’m actually surprised we don’t have more in the way of e-voting somehow. We file countless sensitive docs online each day including tax returns, and outside of the occasional technical glitches we don’t hear of massive complaints of fraud the way people go on about it with elections regardless of in person or by mail. Yeah, putting it all online has its risks, but it shouldn’t be impossible.
For most any sensitive document multiple parties can maintain their own copies and even encrypt them if they feel like it and there’s plenty of ways to verify their authenticity. This can’t as easily be applied to voting because you also want anonymity. Cryptographic systems do exist to provide a high level of confidence in integrity and anonymity but misapplication of any step of the process can completely ruin the entire thing. This happens in computer systems all the time. Seemingly secure programs suddenly have massive holes because a new exploit was discovered.
Paper systems are much more difficult to exploit or foul up. Obviously election mishaps happen all the time but I haven’t heard of any such that would alter an outcome AND do not get caught prior to certification.
Me:
APPROVAL VOTING AND FIVE MEMBER DISTRICTS, DAMNIT!
Sounds like you want the Fair Representation Act
Thought it doesn’t go all the way with approval voting, It’s still just a PR-STV, but still a massive step.
So, I understand what approval voting is, but I’m not sure I follow with “fiver member districts”. Is this referring to something like congressional districts, but instead of electing one person they elect five? Or maybe it means breaking a constituency into a huge number of tiny 5 voter districts?
EDIT: Seems like maybe combining districts that only have 1 representative into larger districts that elect 5 representatives?
Yeah 5 member districts is just saying that every legislative district elects 5 members at the same time instead of just 1. You assign winners using a proportional method so that the winners parties/opinions totals look like the general population. In a simple example, if a district has voters that are 40% blue, 40% red, and 20% yellow, 2 winning candidates should be blue, 2 should be red, and 1 yellow.
Having multiple winners and assigning seats proportionally gets rid of the winner-take-all problem, which encourages a two party system regardless of what voting system you use.
Sounds like a parliamentary system with extra steps.
The only thing that makes a parliamentary system such is that the head of state is elected by the legislature. Single-seat districts can and do exist under parliaments.
While I agree, Ranked is a solid improvement over FPTP.
EDIT: After some reading, I retract my statement, Ranked has a bunch of glaring flaws and can be worse sometimes. Still good that people are talking about it though.
The biggest advantage of ranked choice is that it allows third (… tenth) party votes
It’s also more fun television, watching as candidates come last and their votes flow
SVT or Approval voting wpuld both be significantly better than just RCV though.
EDIT: After some reading, I retract my statement, Ranked has a bunch of glaring flaws and can be worse sometimes.
Care to elaborate? Ranked choice isn’t perfect, (a perfect voting system is mathematically impossible : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow’s_impossibility_theorem ) but I don’t see where it would be worse than FPTP.
Among other things discussed ITT, ranking your second candidate higher can result in your first candidate loosing in basically a spoiler effect.
I assume you mean ranking your second choice lower can make your first choice win? I would say that’s actually a great advantage of RCV, it means moderates have more chance to win. Someone who’s liked by everyone but is nobody’s favorite can win.
No, ranking your second higher can make your first (and second) loose. The spoiler effect still exists, except it punishes moderates instead of extremists. If the orange party gets larger than the yellow party, it becomes an election between the greens and oranges, despite most people being okay with yellow. The compromise is unlikely to win.
I though FPTP was so aweful that basically anything is better, but a few variants of ranked voting are nearly as bad for selecting prefered candidates, and encourage extremism, while being more complex (difficult to trust) and possibly a fraud risk (because all votes need to be processed together, double checking and anti-tampering is more difficult).
You mean like explained here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ ? That’s indeed not ideal, but I would say still absolutely better than FPTP?
That said, approval voting does look better to me.
Yes, that. It’s kust burying the spoiler a little deeper, causing a bad situation at the most important time.
Just that is still better than FPTP, but it’s not that much netter, is more complicated, and needs to be switched to. I’d bet that if IRV was implemented without good explanation (which it won’t get), it would become the scapegoat for the loosing parties (especially the loosing major party).
There’s also the potential security flaws of needing all the votes in one place to be counted, which significantly reduces the number of hands the votes pass through, which may allow larger scale fraud.
If we’re going to go through with switching systems and adjusting how we vote, the new system needs to be a clear and significant improvement to avoid being blamed for everything.
But I haven’t really looked into these systems deeply, so there’s lot’s of nuance I’m missing. Something with a better Condorcet result would be nice though.
That’s what is frustrating it is very marginally better yet consuming all the discourse, probably bc it would not dramatically change election results.
👆👆👆
Here’s what you should know: You’re not getting it anywhere that needs it.
Could be a way to get blue states more left representation, which is still needed in a lot of ways. The dems still have a bunch of people beholden to corporations
I really wish IRV advocates would stop lying about things like:
since voters can feel free to support them without fear of inadvertently helping a candidate they definitely don’t want to win.
There is absolutely a spoiler effect in IRV, and it isn’t just theoretical – it happened in one of the elections the article praises as successful.
Any election system works well with only two choices. IRV improves very slightly on plurality and works well with many choices, provided only two of them matter. But as soon as you get three competitive candidates, exactly the thing many election reformers want to see, really counterintuitive things start to happen.
In practice the spoiler effect is far smaller and harder to take advantage of than it is in FPTP. So unless you think another system has a chance where you are, it makes sense to support a switch to IRV if it’s on the cards.
I usually promote approval for its simplicity and intuitiveness. STAR also seems respectably decent, and a significant improvement over plurality and IRV.
It would be vanishingly rare to have a tie. If three are left, one will have gotten the fewest votes and their votes would be divided between the two remaining according to the preference of the voter, leading to one of them winning
Ranked Choice has some fundamental flaws that make it a very poor replacement for the broken system that is First Past the Post.
I’ll list the flaws in no particular order, but each one is enough of an issue that RCV should never be used in a real election.
First is election security. All ballots cast in an RCV election must be tabulated in a central location. This means that a malicious actor could introduce extra ballots, and those ballots would likely be counted.
This has happened before. There was no malice in the 2021 NYC Mayoral race, but there were extra ballots that were counted.
The next issue is one of counting procedure. It’s confusing as hell. I know it is because in Alameda County, the wrong candidate was actually sworn in before anyone noticed the issue.
Then there was Burlington in 2009. The Condorcet winner was eliminated in the second round. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Condorcet winner is also called the Pairwise Winner, in that if you were to take all candidates and pair them off, the Condorcet winner should win every matchup.
This leads to a discussion of Monotonicity. RCV is one of the only voting systems ever designed that fails monotonicity.
An election method is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot).
I’ll spell this out a bit because it’s fucking amazing, in RCV it’s possible to make a candidate lose by ranking them higher on a ballot.
Then there are issues of ballot spoilage (incorrectly filled ballots) at rates about twice that of simple Plurality. These rates tend to be higher in low income or marginalized areas.
The next issue is Ballot exhaustion. Say you only get 5 choices on a ballot that has 6 or 7 candidates. You rank your 5 and the first round sees your second choice eliminated. Then your third, then your fourth, then your fifth, and finally your first.
Your ballot is thrown out and is not counted at all. Now, RCV rules say that the winner must have 50% of the vote, but that’s 50% of the final vote. Your ballot doesn’t count anymore.
There are studies that say that ballot exhaustion rates can be up to 18% of the initial votes cast. So the final winner can be liked by just 41.1% of the initial voters.
There’s also the issue of those eliminated candidates. Say your first choice was eliminated early. Then your second might have had that extra vote to stay in, and eventually win. But no, your ballot was gutted down the middle before being thrown out.
There are still more issues with RCV, but this is already an essay, so I’ll leave it at that.
There is a better option. A few actually, but the one I currently prefer is called STAR. It’s simple and it’s actually good at all the things RCV claims to be good at.
I don’t doubt that RCV has flaws. But we know that FPTP has flaws. So the question then becomes, Is RCV or FPTP the better voting system? If RCV is a better voting system than it should be pushed for and supported because of that fact.
Perfect is the enemy of good. It is relevant in life and in politics.
For example, If someone is so obsessed with making sure your comment is completely accurate and factual that they end up deleting and never posting the comment, then that comment will not help anyone. Or for another example, I shouldn’t wear a mask because it won’t fully protect me or others from coronavirus. Doing something even is if it is an imperfect improvement is better than doing nothing.
I believe an RCV system is better than FPTP and therefore support it. I also would support STAR for the same reason.
I am usually the one making the “perfect is the enemy of the good” argument, and you make excellent points in this case.
I will add some nuance to the enemy of the good argument, in that:
Doing something even is if it is an imperfect improvement is better than doing nothing.
does not factor in the potential harm of the imperfect thing. It’s a no-brainer with masks, because there is none. But it is worth taking a close look at whether the problems with IRV are less harmful than FPTP, and, more importantly, if implementing IRV prevents the institution of a better system (like potentially STAR). If there’s one opportunity to switch our voting method, and we go with a less effective one, would that prevent changing it again to an even better system?
I’ll give you an example: I’m not sure if this is still going on, but the Salvation Army was found to be rejecting LGBTQ people from shelters and support. Now, you can say “they still help a lot of people, so not supporting them harms those who do get support from the SA.” The perfect being the enemy of the good. But establishing a monolith of an organization like the Salvation Army as the go-to charity for the poor and/or homeless cuts the legs out from any charity that may support everyone, not just straight cis-gendered people.
In the same way, if IRV gets popular and cements itself as the alternative to FPTP, it could be that it prevents other forms like STAR from even being considered. It’s worth considering, particularly as FPTP alternative implementation is in its infancy, what alternatives are available.
Why not say you would support IRV or better, especially multi member districts and proportional results? Why put so much effort in trying to push against the facts about IRV? Frankly if IRV gets put in place and people are not aware of its strange chaotic behavior it will get repealed, which isn’t my conjecture its reality.
Why not say you would support IRV or better, especially multi member districts and proportional results?
I do and I did. See my last paragraph. Sure, I used different words than you did but I was trying to imply the same thing.
Why put so much effort in trying to push against the facts about IRV?
I did no such thing. Don’t strawman me by putting works in my mouth.
Frankly if IRV gets put in place and people are not aware of its strange chaotic behavior it will get repealed, which isn’t my conjecture its reality.
That is your conjecture, unless you give an example of that happening. I will grant you that it is conceivable that such a circumstance happen, but that doesn’t make it not a conjecture.
I guess my point is that it isn’t really helpful for us to argue about different voting systems when we largely agree that we need to move away from a FPTP system. It just serves to promote division. Unless we are actually doing the groundwork of pushing for different voting systems, arguing about the details of the different systems is just not needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_use_of_instant-runoff_voting?wprov=sfla1
Both Canada and the US had and repealed irv in multiple jurisdictions.
Your whole post is to tell everyone to chill on the criticism of IRV, its not a strawman its your actions.
I guess my point is that it isn’t really helpful for us to argue about different voting systems when we largely agree that we need to move away from a FPTP system. It just serves to promote division. Unless we are actually doing the groundwork of pushing for different voting systems, arguing about the details of the different systems is just not needed.
Right there, you just did it.
IRV is not a good enough solution to promote, imo. I don’t agree with you and you are actively hurting the adoption of a proportional system, the only election system that results in a meaningful number of parties. STV is fine, IRV is not.
I don’t agree with you and you are actively hurting the adoption of a proportional system
Kinda low to attack me and not the argument. That is otherwise known as an ad hominem.
It’s pretty clear your treating this as a pissing match and I have no interest in that.
Is there any voting system that doesn’t have flaws? I mean these are serious concerns, but what can we do to fix FPTP and have an electoral system that will allow us to get the people in that aren’t literal greedy psychopaths?
No, Arrow’s impossibility theorem says that all voting systems have flaws, if you agree with the things it defines as flaws.
The most doubtful of the flaws is the “Independence of irrelevant alternatives” criterion, which says that: if you run two elections in which voters change rank candidates A and B the same with respect to one another, the elections will both rank those candidates the same.
The problem with this is that if voters change their ranking for some other candidate C it can end up affecting the outcome for candidates A and B, when arguably it shouldn’t. But this makes less sense if you realise that aggregating voter preferences can end up implying that candidate A is better than B who is better than C… who is better than A. This setup makes it impossible to maintain the principle.
Arrow’s Theorem only really applies to Ordinal voting systems like RCV and Plurality.
Cardinal systems like STAR, Score, and Approval are all immune, but have other quirks, but seem to better represent the desires of an aggregate population.
I think people are wary of systems where you assign a relative score for good reason. Is my favourite party twice as good as the major party that kind represents my views, or is it only a little bit better? It’s kind of impossible to make those judgements well IMO. In STAR in particular, what you actually want to do is rank your preferences, but if there are many candidates are forced not to because you only have five scores available.
Also you seem to have replied about STAR to just about every comment in the thread… maybe chill? lol…
STAR is great, but I can also talk about Approval. That one is dead simple.
The ballot is the same as a FPtP ballot except instead of it saying “mark one” it says something like “mark one or more”.
Approval says vote for as many people as you want, and if any of them win, you’ll be happy. Or not. I’m not the boss of you.
As to “forcing you to rank candidates” that’s hogwash.
Forcing people to use a bad system because you think they aren’t smart enough to rate someone on a scale of 0-5 is kind of mind-boggling.
I like STAR.
It has far fewer flaws than any other system I’ve seen.
For the voter. It’s dead simple. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Multiple candidates can be rated the same.
To count, you just add up the ratings for each candidate. Take the top two and then look at each ballot. If A is rated higher than B on that ballot, then the vote goes to A.
That’s it.
The fact that each candidate’s vote doesn’t detract from any other vote means there’s literally no way for a spoiler candidate to exist. They’re just another option on the ballot.
The automatic runoff in the end encourages voters to rate on a scale and not just bullet vote. But even if they bullet vote, the system is still spoiler free.
You had me until STAR. STAR is just approval voting with extra steps, since min/maxing your ballot is the easiest way to game it, and, perhaps I’m missing something, but I have no idea how a runoff is actually supposed to stop it. Seems like a waste to give a middling score to someone I’d want in the 2nd place spot. I’m open to alternatives to RCV, but I don’t see STAR as an improvement.
I actually think a major part of the problem in US politics is that the balance of power is effectively upside down compared to most modern democracies.
Here in Ireland for example, we have three levels just like you: the Dáil is like the House of Representatives, the Seanad is the senate, and we both have presidents. However the head of government here is the leader of the largest party in the Dáil, and the other two are really figureheads. It means that other parties are way more involved in government and lessens the tendencies for a single figurehead to run rampant, changing stuff to suit himself every 4-8 years.
Ireland also uses PR, but we’ve actually gotten quite good at the vote counts, and we probably don’t have the same threat of bad actors in some other countries.
It’s the same in the UK - parliament is the actual government, while the House of Lords and the king are at this stage vestigial. But they use fptp, which is making it difficult to remove a minority government for the last dozen years or so.
Ah wall of text is there nothing that can make me ignore an argument faster ?
If reading makes you ignore intelligent arguments, that says more about your intelligence than the argument.
I wouldn’t say that it is worse than what we have. It’s different from plurality voting but fixes a few things. The biggest problem is that it isn’t all of the things it claims to be, and you still need to be strategic with your vote.
Ranked Choice is literally a series of plurality elections on the same ballot.
So it’s exactly as bad as plurality, but worse because it’s also confusing to count, and has inherent security issues from needing to be counted in a centralized location.
You cannot fix the problems of plurality by iterating plurality.
If say, your goal is elevating third parties, ranked choice is very attractive, as 3p voters can do so without “throwing away” their vote.
Not refuting your concerns, just saying folks are drawn to systems for particular reasons.
Ranked Choice is very attractive to people who don’t realize that it marginalizes third parties even more than a simple plurality election.
Here’s the thing, if your third party is small and has no chance of actually winning, then Ranked Choice will keep them from ruining the election for the two major parties.
The thing is, the second that third party becomes even slightly more popular than the major party closest to them on the spectrum, the candidate furthest from them on the spectrum wins.
See, if A B and C are in an election where A has 40%, B has 29% and C (the new third party) has 31%. When B is eliminated, it doesn’t matter that Every single C voter put B as their second, because B is gone.
All it takes is for a third of B voters (10% of the total) to put A first for A to win. This is the absolute worst outcome for C voters, and if just a handful had voted dishonestly for B first, B would have won.
This is a high bar to hit when there are only three candidates, but when there are five? Well, the numbers get worse. More than that, and RCV just starts breaking in new and interesting ways.
Ranked Choice is a broken system pretending to be a viable one. In my top comment, I pointed to a bunch of real world examples of it breaking down in ways that no other voting system is subject to.
It’s not exactly as bad, because it does present opportunities for breaking the deadlocked two party system. It does not go far enough to improve on plurality, and I agree that the logistical issues make implementation a fools errand. The spoiler effect is still an edge case that has much less effect than a simple plurality vote between 3 candidates.
I’m not advocating for ranked choice. I’m on board with STAR voting, and I also like almost any other voting system better than both plurality and ranked choice.
It does not, in fact, break the two party system. Full stop.
RCV still has the spoiler effect, and is in fact worse for third parties.
If the third party is small, then RCV will sideline them harder than FPtP, if they get big enough to matter, then RCV will break and the worst candidate will be elected.
See any RCV election with three or more viable candidates, but particularly Burlington 2009.
So RCV fails to do the one thing that people say it’s good for. It does not break the two party system. Something we’ve known for a long time, seeming as how it’s used in one category of Australian elections, and that particular category is dominated by two parties. (other areas of Australian politics use proportional elections, but one section of their government is single winner RCV)
You’ll have to run a better campaign than Massachusetts did when they tried to get it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_2
Their neighbor to the north—Maine—successfully passed it, but guess which party has been trying to revoke it or stymie it at every turn?
I live in a RCV country (Ireland), and it’s got its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, you can always make sure that your vote will count. In addition, RCV tends to push the final result towards the political centre, with fringe extremist parties getting less popular vote than in other voting systems. The biggest drawback is that once a party gets entrenched near the centre, ir’s very hard to dislodge it. Ireland had been governed for over 100 years by the same two parties - sometimes alone, other times (like now) in a coalition.
- “Your vote always counts”
- “Governed by the same two parties”
- “Sometimes in a coalition”
Right now, for the US, your vote doesn’t count if you vote 3rd party. We only have two political parties and they vehemently oppose each other (mostly in the House and SC).
Sounds like RCV would just fix the part where 3rd party voting typically is throwing away your vote.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Advocates say ranked choice voting could help take some of the toxicity out of American politics while giving voters access to a broader swath of ideas.
“A lot of voters are frustrated with the status quo in politics, and this method is not a huge change,” said Deb Otis, who oversees research and policy at FairVote.
“If a legitimate third-party challenge happens this year, all of the other voters in all the other states are going to have a really hard time with that, trying to navigate what to do, trying to play the strategist and figure out how to make our votes most impactful without harming our own side.”
But Jason Snead, of the Honest Elections Project, also told NPR that ranked choice makes voting more confusing, which isn’t what the U.S. needs at a time when many voters are already sitting out of the democratic process.
Jacobs, of the University of Minnesota, co-wrote a paper poking holes in a number of claims ranked choice advocates have made about the voting system.
She’s optimistic about the potential of ranked choice voting to improve representation in the U.S., but at the end of the day, any real transformative change to the political system will only come from higher voter turnout.
The original article contains 1,662 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Ranked choice didnt save the nyc mayoral election
