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Sorry for the late response. I wasn't on HN yesterday. Regarding: > This isn't a neutral preference, it's obviously ideological, and targeted at one specific

Sorry for the late response. I wasn't on HN yesterday. Regarding: > This isn't a neutral preference, it's obviously ideological, and targeted at one specific legislator in Seattle. Voters should reject this measure as a transparent attack on the most effective and sincere fighter for working people in the country. This isn't ideological in any way, and it's not targeted at anyone. When I said it was non-partisan and candidate-neutral, it's really that simple. It's non-partisan and candidate-neutral. Consistent with HN guidelines, I'd ask first for an assumption of good faith. Beyond that, I can give some practical comments: 1. Our group of volunteers includes a huge range of political beliefs. There is no "one" opinion that the group could try to target even if we wanted to. The shared belief is that leaders reflect public opinion as accurately as possible. 2. This doesn't help or harm anyone. Rather, think of the current system like a grocery store where, each time you walk in, the prices on every item have doubled or halved. No one wins today: one entity (sellers/candidates) has no idea what their real support is and the other entity (buyers/voters) has to cobble together ingredients for dinner. That wouldn't be good for the dairy people and bad for the fish people, it's bad for all sellers/candidates and all buyers/voters. Our flawed system doesn't help anyone. Imagine a system where every voter could express their whole opinion, without feeling like they were throwing away their vote. Every election becomes a simple measure of how many voters approve of each candidate. 3. Just practically, no one's job - politician or otherwise - is worth a year or two of my life. It violates the "The sun doesn't revolve around any of us" theorem :-) Heck, even if I got to personally pick every Seattle legislator, I wouldn't put in this much effort. I don't care anywhere near enough. The thing I care about, and the only thing that's worth this much effort, is a system that delivers whatever voters want. PS: I would welcome your help making this happen! That's how much I mean it when I say this is candidate-neutral and we welcome everyone. As volunteers, our political preferences vary widely. Our commitment is to elect winners which best reflect voters' opinions (democracy), whether or not they match any of ours.

pagibson 5y ago
Hey Troy, I appreciate the response! I buy that you aren't motivated by this one city council position in particular. But we can't escape the fact that every policy decision exists in our particular reality and has material effects. There's no such thing as an ideologically-neutral electoral system, of all things, because a change in system will select different candidates from the actual pool of existing candidates or types of candidates. Wealthy elites don't care what policy choices are optimal in terms of some abstract desiderata[1], they push for the policies that will be best for them materially. Working people need to understand that and behave the same way. To take a different example: Republicans in the U.S. push for voter ID laws because they favor Republican election outcomes. This is pretty well understood. A voter ID law appears on its face ideologically neutral. It still is meant to bring about a certain outcome, and should be fought on the basis of that outcome. It doesn't even matter if somebody pushing the legislation has a different intention, even a noble one! --- [1] Incidentally, I'm not really sure how well AV even meets those desiderata. For example, does a non-Condorcet system really reflect voters' preferences most accurately? Later-no-harm is another criteria that comes to mind. I'm skeptical of the claim that AV is really "more reflective" in some objective sense than FPTP.

pagibson 5y ago

Hey Troy, I appreciate the response! I buy that you aren't motivated by this one city council position in particular. But we can't escape the fact that every policy decision exists in our particular reality and has material effects. There's no such thing as an ideologically-neutral electoral system, of all things, because a change in system will select different candidates from the actual pool of existing candidates or types of candidates. Wealthy elites don't care what policy choices are optimal in terms of some abstract desiderata[1], they push for the policies that will be best for them materially. Working people need to understand that and behave the same way. To take a different example: Republicans in the U.S. push for voter ID laws because they favor Republican election outcomes. This is pretty well understood. A voter ID law appears on its face ideologically neutral. It still is meant to bring about a certain outcome, and should be fought on the basis of that outcome. It doesn't even matter if somebody pushing the legislation has a different intention, even a noble one! --- [1] Incidentally, I'm not really sure how well AV even meets those desiderata. For example, does a non-Condorcet system really reflect voters' preferences most accurately? Later-no-harm is another criteria that comes to mind. I'm skeptical of the claim that AV is really "more reflective" in some objective sense than FPTP.