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STAR voting actually accomplishes what ranked choice aims to do.
At this point I’ll take any improvement
At this point, when any proposal is put forth, you have to ask yourself if it’s worse than what we currently have?
Proposal: Congressmen can challenge each other to fist fights. Senators can do the same, but have the option to use a knife.
Sure, it sounds insane, but is it worse?
My main problem with STAR is that it seems to me like you should always give the highest available score to all candidates you don’t mind winning and give the other candidates a zero, because you know there are people giving the highest possible score to your dispreferred candidates and you want to offset their score total as much as possible.
So I feel like strategic voting would mostly trivialize STAR into a form of approval voting, which would still overly benefit the powers-that-be since most people would approve of the established candidates while fewer people would approve of the other candidates, who might be able to eke out a majority in ranked choice voting since they might be higher ranked than the established candidates.
But maybe I’m just not seeing the other strategic dimensions to giving the middle scores to some candidates.
Edit: The link by @themeatbridge is a very good explanation of the benefits of STAR over ranked choice voting! I for one am convinced.
Nah, doing that will actually make your ballot less useful in cases where you approve of both the candidates that made it to a runoff round, because you ranked them both the same, and thus your ballot can’t count as a “vote” for either since you indicated no preference.
For single winner this is will probably be a rare issue but for multiwinner, which is what I want, that could end up biting you as the margins close in for the last seat
That’s a viable voting strategy, if you’re voting against one specific candidate. But how often does that happen, where a voter truly has no preference between two candidates? But that’s hardly ever the case, and STAR voting strongly discourages running that kind of capaigning. Candidates want to build coalitions and find common ground, but also differentiate themselves without coming across as negative.
Ranked choice is stupid and not needed. Just let people vote for as many candidates they want and choose the one or the ones that get the most votes.
TIL about another way of voting—does it have an official name. My gut reaction is that while multiple votes would usually result in the same thing as rank choice votes, there is less preference information in your method. I suspect that it might end up electing less politically extreme candidates than ranked choice voting, but I feel like I could be wrong about that.
I do like the simplicity of your multiple votes method. I think it is easy to explain to people who maybe are off-put by ranked voting or other slightly more complex ways.
I think I would prefer ranked, but I would take pretty much anything to improve our system.
It doesn’t sound like an awful idea, but what if I don’t want my vote going to a candidate unless my first choice(s) don’t have a chance of being elected?
Like I always vote for eco or worker party here, but would absolutely put liberals as my third choice if only because I’d rather them over the conservatives.
But I really really don’t want liberals getting my vote unless I’m out of better options.
As a one-off election, you wouldn’t be able to. But in the real world, we get elections every few years, so you can see how many people approve of the eco or worker party. If it’s high enough that they can potentially take over the liberals, then you can safely drop your approval for them in the next election.
I agree.
The system relies on voters having unique opinions. There’s a lot that could go wring, but its still way better than winner takes all.
Sounds like they’re describing what we call “approval voting”
Always thinking of ways they can game the system. I’d imagine they would just flood the ballot with names and tell their base the 50 or so people they would need to vote for.
Yeah that’s another issue. You’d need a primary with a cap for the number of candidates who can win.
“Why… WHY did you succumb to this problem that we foresaw but did nothing to prevent!?”
Was about to say, this is the result of the voting system they adopted, we’re just stuck with it for the moment
Washington was not a dictator, and decidedly so?
referring to FPTP voting not the act of voting at all.
Also, he was a slave owner and personally marched against dissatisfied working class americans when they balked at new liquor taxes. He might have been elected but he had some pretty authoritarian streaks in him.
Sorry, I’m not a Washington expert and made the assumption that Washington’s feeling about a two party system was not shared by all.
To be fair, most of Washington’s concerns about political parties were about tribalism more generally.
This was already seen well before he was even done being president. By 1800 it’s obvious the 2 party dysfunction was well in motion.
I think that podcast American Elections: Wicked Game tells some of that story pretty well of the early political fighting and party divisions.
And both the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans were awful.
To be fair, the two party system was a natural evolution within the government structure created by the Founding Fathers. Whether or not any individual president was a fan or not would never have prevented it.
Yeah, but they didn’t have game theory then. Democracy was kind of new too. Basically all non-monarchists were allies, because they literally had to fight actual kings to rule themselves.
It’s not the founders’ fault that they didn’t foresee all future problems. They included the ability to amend the Constitution. It’s our fault for not doing that. Originalism makes no sense because the founders wanted us to change what they had done and improve it.
It’s not the founders’ fault that they didn’t foresee all future problems. They included the ability to amend the Constitution. It’s our fault for not doing that. Originalism makes no sense because the founders wanted us to change what they had done and improve it.
The Founding Fathers: “We’re not gods or kings. That’s literally the opposite of what we fought for.”
Originalists: “OMG God-King Founding Daddies pls rule me from beyond the grave”
Hmm isn’t this 40k as well?
The Emperor of Man: “Gods don’t exist, use logic and science!”
The Imperium of Man: “All hail the God-Emperor, where are the 1000 sacrifices?”
And that’s why it’s called grimdark
A lot also said every 20 years the Constitution needed rewritten, because expecting such a powerful document to remain relevant over such a long period of time was unthinkable to them…
Yes and no.
The Founding Fathers created the State in a manner that supported their interests, hence why it structurally supported wealthy Capitalists and slave owning white men most of all.
Over time, this has been amended, Black Americans were emancipated and every citizen can vote now, including women, but only via constant struggle against the system.
That doesn’t relate to my comment or the original post. It’s like you’re trying to shoehorn in your own ideas about class war into the conversation.
In return, I would like to add add that George Washington did not have wooden teeth. In fact, he had weird Frankenstein dentures made up of a bunch of other different teeth. This supports my pro dental care ideas.
It absolutely relates. The two party system is a symptom of designing a system to bend but never break, and retain control of the people who made the system.
Believe it or not, human history is the history of class struggle. It isn’t at all unrelated to how wealthy Capitalists designed a state to retain their power.
No, human history is the history of struggle against tooth decay. If you disagree, you are a tool of the anti-dentites.
How? He looked at history, and every two-party system that came before.
Political parties in general. The problems specific to a two-party systems weren’t understood yet. Being that the United States was figuring out how a modern democracy should work as it went, that’s not surprising.
Many countries without the two party system have the same problems though
That’s literally the point
Washington is a broken clock right twice a day, tbh. That guy owned half the slaves in Mount Vernon. He didn’t have any idea how to fix society, modern middle schoolers could debate him and win.
In such times, the lessons of history seemed less distant.
Don’t you say that about my FOunDinG DaDdy!!
If somebody is to make a 3rd or 4th party, how much and how long will it take for them to be able to compete with the other 2?
It entirely depends on what you mean. We’ve had a functioning libertarian party for a while, they’ve gotten far enough to get on the ballots in a couple presidential races and libertarian candidates have won local elections. We’ve had fairly strong socialist parties before the red scare era.
Now the libertarians kind of sucks shit, so maybe they’re a bad barometer to go off of? Maybe a super populist party would take off in a decade or two, maybe it would just flounder with the same success of the libertarian party. Part of the problem is that political opinions in the US are largely formed around binaries associated with either party, so while a new party might form, it would probably get chucked into a “left” or “right” bucket and flounder in obscurity like the green party.
We have to work together to reform voting. FPTP is bullshit and the two big parties have it locked down. Libertarians and Greens have to sue states every election to get them to follow the rules.
The Bull Moose party was closest we’ve had to an actual 3rd party. That was only because Teddy Roosevelt was running it and he was a previous president.
I assume it is possible with the modern day ability to communicate and organize. Getting a 3rd name on every state ballot will take some ground work. It might be easier, but we would need someone to get behind. Like a REAL leader and not a “pop culture icon.” I vote to get that Shawn Fain guy. He is kicking ass in the auto union, so I think he would fight for the working class all around.
That was only because Teddy Roosevelt was running it and he was a previous president.
Not just a previous president, but TEDDY fuckin ROOSEVELT.
He had all the same (imagined) qualities that make people who like Trump like that idiot, but he used them for good.
A man’s man who said it like it was and took no bullshit. Knew shit was fucked and that it needed cleaning out and said so to get elected.
Even had a bit of a cult of personality going, Teddy Bears yakno?
Not perfect or anything, but looking at Teddy I can understand to a degree why people can get swept away by big personalities.
Oh I 100% agree about the man. Teddy was a big push of progressive policies and he was a great president. We almost never had him as president because the robber barons (JP Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockafeller) used their money to put him as a VP to McKinley. McKinely was bought and paid for by them and the VP position was a place to put people to end their political career. Then the assassination happened and Teddy came in with all these trust busting ideas.
Also, Teddy first came into the political stage as a rich, fancy dressed guy. He did a PR campaign to change his image to this man’s man. Then after those photos of him in furs and an expensive hunting knife, he joined the military and did the whole rough riders thing. He became the image he portrayed and came back to NY better from it. He became a popular Governor and that’s when the robber barons got worried and wanted to stop his momentum.
T.R. was tough before he joined the war, when he came back a hero he proved it to everyone else. He’s absolutely my favorite president and a fascinating man
There’s a Pulitzer-winning biography of his I’d recommend
I would say we recently saw this happen, it’s just that the tea party overtook the republicans from within in about a decade.
Maybe he should have accepted the offer to be king after all.
