|
The superior voting system is This poll is closed. |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| First-past-the-post voting |
|
1 | 1.47% |
| Preferential voting (IRV) |
|
67 | 98.53% |
| Total: | 68 votes | ||
|
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/10/617965150/maine-voters-to-decide-on-whether-theyll-rank-candidates-in-future-electionsNPR posted:In just a few days, Maine primary voters will participate in a ranked-choice voting experiment so unprecedented that the state's top election official sometimes compares what's about to happen to a dangerous and high-stakes mission in space. In the few times I've angrily mashed the Reply button to comment on US politics, it's often been to say how much of a raging dumpster fire your electoral system is -- not necessarily because of that Electoral College, but because you use first-past-the-post voting for everything. I'm Australian and I grew up with preferential voting/IRV/ranked-choice voting and think that it, along with compulsory voting, is what makes our electoral system far superior to yours. (And, to be fair, to many other countries'.) We might still elect bogans and racists to parliament but at least you can be drat sure that the entire population wants those bogans and racists representing them. Wikipedia has a good rundown of how it works and its benefits compared to other systems so I won't go into detail here except to shout about the biggest benefits it offers over FPTP: 1. In preferential voting, the winner of the election is preferred over the other candidates by a majority of the electorate. For example, in a FPTP system with four candidates, imagine a result like follows: Joe Blow: 31% Bill Buckle: 26% Bob Knob: 24% Fred Fringe: 19% Joe Blow wins the election because he "came first" with 31 percent of the vote -- even though this means that 69% of the electorate preferred someone other than him. Will of the people, my left nut. Preferential voting, through its progressive elimination of the lowest-ranked candidate until one candidate has 50% + 1 vote, delivers a result where the winning candidate is preferred over the other candidates by a majority of the population. In the above example, it might end up with Bill Buckle or even Bob Knob winning, depending on whom the people who voted for Fred Fringe ranked second. (This is called "winning on preferences".) It still often ends up in a two-party race, as almost every race in Australia until a few years ago when the Greens started to seriously challenge some seats, but that's not such a problem because ... 2. You don't have to vote for the lovely [Democrat/Republican] just because you don't want the even-more-lovely [Republican/Democrat] to win. Vote 1 for your favourite candidate! Vote 2 for the person you'd like to see get in if your first choice is eliminated! And so on. The seats I was registered to vote in back in the day never went Green but I could always vote 1 Green, 2 Labor so that if the Greens unexpectedly won the seat, great!, and if they didn't, at least I could support a somewhat social-democratic party instead of the loving Liberals. "What's the point of voting for a party that never gets more than 15% of the vote?" I hear you ask. I'll let Dennis the Election Koala explain that (see the firstly/secondly/thirdly/ boxes near the bottom of the comic). Anyway, I think it's clear that I'm massively biased in favour of preferential voting being used anywhere and everywhere, so I'd like to hear from people who have not yet seen the light or who think that this satanic commie system has no place in Are Country. (You'll notice that the forum polls don't allow preferential voting.  THANKS LOWTAX! )
Weatherman fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jun 11, 2018 |
#
¿
Jun 11, 2018 02:04
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 17:18 |
|
|
Thank you for the effortpost —it's great to hear from someone on the ground who can tell us what's actually going down. I've never seen political obstructionism developed to such an art form as your country has, either  Do you know or are you talking to anyone personally who is against preferential voting? I'd really be interested to hear what their objections are and how they respond when the way the system actually works and helps them is explained to them.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2018 12:41
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:It’s a bad system Oh good, I like to hear about the downsides of IRV. Let's hear them: icantfindaname posted:I don't like the people that are likely to gain from it Come on, dude. That was in no way an explanation of "IRV is a bad system". It was "I like the current system because it benefits the people I like". - Can you explain how IRV is worse than FPTP in terms of expressing the will of the electorate more accurately? - Can you explain how it inherently benefits <party currently out of power> over <party currently in power> given that those two parties could switch positions after any election? - Can you phrase your argument in terms of "IRV is bad because of <reason IRV is incapable of fulfilling certain election criteria>" instead of raising example that have nothing to do with the voting system? Fun fact: IRV was introduced in Australia by a ruling, conservative party to avoid their own vote being split by a social-democratic party. Republicans can benefit from it too!
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2018 21:50
|
|
|
PT6A posted:IRV isn't necessarily worse than pure FPTP but it does very little to correct the problems. It inherently favours candidates with a wide appeal, meaning it will always benefit centrists more than extremes on either side. I don't see how what you're suggesting is a downside. It favours candidates that appeal to the majority of the electorate? It doesn't favour candidates that are on the fringe? The candidate who wins is supported by a majority of the electorate rather than a smaller proportion? How are these not reflecting the will of the voter?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2018 21:59
|
|
|
Paracaidas posted:Alameda County ran headlong into a DOJ/Office of Civil Rights consent decree during their implementation of IRV, and it highlights one of the challenges of the system. If there's a segment of the voter base that isn't proficient in the dominant language, it's a disruptive change in process they're unlikely to hear about until election day, absent significant intervention. In other, more traditional, reforms this is less of an issue as voting in the old manner doesn't carry much risk of spoiling the ballot while the potential for suboptimal strategy is also reduced as voters will vote for the candidate they like best. Both of these are heightened in IRV. It's not that difficult that someone proficient in the relevant language couldn't write up a primer along the lines of Ken the Voting Dingo. I would agree that having that primer printed out and distributed to the right people in the US would be a task akin to cleaning up Chernobyl while everyone has ebola and North Korea is invading, though, since you guys (not you specifically Para, the American public) has such a hate-boner for anything that might help the wrong people vote. The arguments that icandfindaname is making are more along the lines of "The US sucks and it sucks exceptionally® and that's why we can't do anything at all that will objectively help since there other unconnected-but-admittedly-tenuously-related problems remain". I'd like this topic to focus more on how IRV is objectively better than FPTP and less on how "well Democrats suck and the centre sucks and gerrymandering means that  " if we can.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2018 00:08
|
|
|
The most horrific thing in the world, huh. edit: I went looking for news and the first article, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/12/17448450/maine-ranked-choice-voting-paul-lepage-instant-runoff-2018-midterms, seems fairly calm but still manages to do a bang-up job of finding both the shittiest-looking ballot paper I've ever seen—seriously, do your voters not know how to write numbers on a line?—and the shittiest-ever example of an IRV election, the mayoral election in Portland that went 14 rounds before declaring a winner. That last point is a good thing! It means that political support was wildly scattered, but by giving everyone more of a say than just "  I LIKE THIS GUY ", the process ended in a winner that the majority was agree was better than all their higher choices given that those higher choices had been knocked out of the race.
Weatherman fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Jun 13, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2018 06:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 17:18 |
|
|
Yeah, we actually use both systems in Australia - that one is called Optional Preferential Voting. I don't have anything against it. I only found out from that article, though, that if people stop numbering after they run out of desirable candidates, and the counting procedure goes for several rounds, then it's possible for the winner to have gotten less than 50% of the total number of "1" votes cast, which doesn't gel with my bleating about representing the will of the majority. That's academic though. We could also consider that if voters didn't care who got in after their chosen candidates all got knocked out, it's still a valid representation of the will of the electorate. Acolyte, what about the governor threatening to take his bat and ball and
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2018 07:23
|
|