4 ms·
> Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. The refrain essentially is that you must vote fo
by u801e 6y ago
> Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains.
The refrain essentially is that you must vote for the candidate we say is most likely to win and if you don't, then you're helping the next runner up.
I believe that if we no longer reported polling results and had election results reported at the same time, then the problem I describe above would be significantly reduced.
The fact that primaries are not held at the same time leads the results of earlier primaries influencing the results of later ones. The fact that election results from the eastern part of the country are reported while the western part is still voting influences the results.
- leetrout 6y agoWe need ranked choice voting nationwide.
- smichel17 6y agoReduced? Probably. Meaningfully? I don't think so. It's baked in to the system: if your equivalent (nth party voter) on the other side of the political spectrum switches their vote to the mainstream party and you don't, then the mainstream party you're more aligned with is disadvantaged. There's nothing subjective here; it's just how the system works. We desperately need a voting system that allows you to express your preferences honestly, and ideally across all candidates, without hurting the outcome. By far, score voting systems are the best at that. Of those, I recommend STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff), because it has some actual momentum[1] (it also has some theoretical advantages, but both it and vanilla score voting, and even Ranked Choice with a Borda count, are such a massive improvement over the status quo that it doesn't matter which we pick). [1]: https://www.starvoting.us/ https://www.starvoting.us/ -- no affiliation, just convinced by the research (edit: which you can mostly find linked from https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.equal.vote/)
- nrclark 6y agoAgreed that we need voting reform in the US, badly. It's also unlikely to ever happen, because the only ones with the power to do it are the ones that would be displaced.
- burlesona 6y agoThanks for sharing STAR, I hadn’t seen it before. How does that interact with proportional representation?
- smichel17 6y agohttps://www.starvoting.us/pr https://www.starvoting.us/pr
- maxerickson 6y agoSo just set aside freedom of the press? You've stated a goal of suppressing polling; what's the legal mechanism you use to do it?