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You know, when I lived in Seattle, my biggest problem when voting was never, "I approve of too many of these candidates and it's hard for me to choose just one"
by philwelch 5y ago
You know, when I lived in Seattle, my biggest problem when voting was never, "I approve of too many of these candidates and it's hard for me to choose just one".
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoWell, having lived and voted in SF and Portland, I would say that I can think of races where I would have been fine with several of the contenders, but would have really not wanted an outlier to win, so AV seems like it could work. In my undergrad days I got to experience a ranked system, which is interesting, but seems sort of inefficient.
- titanomachy 5y agoInefficient in what way? Surely the small amount of computing power needed to process the ballots and determine the winner is not significant when compared to the increased democratic power of the system. Or do you mean inefficient in the sense of "more effort for voters"? You could always just rank your favorite candidate as 1 and leave the rest blank, which should give you the same amount of voting power you had in a single-vote system.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoMostly the potential for ties and then run-offs, which obviously can happen with other systems too.
- godelski 5y agoI'd argue that cardinal systems are much more efficient, on two accounts. First, you just need to do reduced sums to determine the winners, whereas ranked systems you have blocks at each round (preventing it from being asynchronous). Second, you have a better embedding space for cardinal systems than ranked. In ranked you're saying that your preference is equidistant. This is not a requirement in cardinal systems (e.g. score or star). Thus you can express that you ''really,, like candidate A over B rather than just A is better than B.
- philwelch 5y agoMaybe the better system would be disapproval voting.
- bpodgursky 5y agoI live in Seattle and would benefit from being able to protest-vote for goodspaceguy or whoever the lunatic of the month is, at the same time I hold my nose and vote for the least awful "likely" candidate.
- taurath 5y agoI don’t think the voting system will be around very long if we end up with goodspaceguy.
- philwelch 5y agoIf enough people do the same thing, you just end up electing GoodSpaceGuy.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoYeah. They won't, though.
- marcosdumay 5y agoI don't live in the US, but I can't remember a single election where I wasn't ok with more than one candidate for majority positions. And it is really enraging to see random extremists win because the people vote strategically. Are you sure your situation isn't due to too few candidates?
- r00fus 5y agoIs this a case where "one person one vote" going away may allow more candidates to actually appear? If you're a fringe single-issue candidate, you can more easily push your issue by running on that issue (while adopting most other parts of the most similar mainstream candidate). In our current system you would be a spoiler. With a better voting system like Approval, you would not. I prefer RCV to Approval (so the single-issue candidate can signal issue strength) but either are a big improvement to the status quo.