7 ms·

We don’t need a third party. We need ranked choice voting

93 points by dane-pgp 4y ago

moistly 4y ago
Approval Voting https://electionscience.org/ https://electionscience.org/ Dead simple. Put a check mark beside the names you support. That’s it.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  I agree that Approval Voting would probably be an ever better reform than RCV, but I don't think it's quite as simple as you suggest. Implicit in the voting process is deciding what you think "support" means. For some voters, that threshold will be "I like this candidate, just not as much as my top preference" while other voters will set the bar at "I could live with this candidate winning, as they're not quite as bad as the candidate I'm most afraid of". Not only does this mean that different voters are effectively answering different questions, but it means voters may feel overwhelmed or confused (as in The Paradox of Choice, and exponentially more so than picking just one top preference). This also leads to tactical voting, with some politicians or activists telling their supporters to "approve" (or remember not to approve) of some third candidates who they think might gain not enough (or too many) just-in-case votes. Perhaps these concerns aren't a reason not to try implementing it for elections, but I'd feel more confident about it as a voting method once I've seen how it stands up to large scale malicious campaigning, with groups trying to undermine confidence in the process or exploit voters' unfamiliarity with it.
dane-pgp 4y ago
The two needs aren't as orthogonal as the headline suggests, though. It might be possible, for instance, to start a third party that exists solely to pressure the Democrats into supporting RCV (first at the state level, then federally). And of course one of the main benefits of RCV is that it can allow a third (and fourth...) party to gain traction, although it can also improve politics just by making the existing parties more representative of their voters, since they won't be able to rely on the "lesser of two evils" effect.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Put another way, RCV better reflects the will of The People. And that ineffect influence the parties (not the other way around).
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  > It might be possible, for instance, to start a third party that exists solely to pressure the Democrats into supporting RCV Yes, and the more votes that third party gets, the less likely it is that the democrats have any power and therefore the less likely that they fulfill their mission. Which is the whole point why you need RCV in a system like the American. There is no way to move gracefully towards an improvement to the system, because your only options work counter to your goal right until the point where you have a full and sole majority in which case you didn’t change the two party problem, you just replaced one of the parties.
Nokinside 4y ago
Number of viable parties in long term depends on electoral system. Ranked choice alone makes multiple parties viable but it's not ideal. Yet ranked choice would almost certainly lead to more than two parties in the US. Electoral system is not only the voting system. Single member districts + plurality (current US system) is the worst system for representative democracy by multiple criteria, so almost any proposal improves the situation. Proportional representation (PR) is any system where seats are divided between parties/lists by their vote share. Ranked choice is not enough. The US would also need multi member districts. >By federal law, all members of the United States Congress are elected from single-member districts, and most states also elect their state legislators from single-member districts. Some states, however, utilize multi-member districts. For example, Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Washington elect all members of their lower state legislative chambers from multi-member districts. https://ballotpedia.org/Multi-member_district https://ballotpedia.org/Multi-member_district
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  I think that electoral reform advocates have started to accept that the public is wary of large changes to the voting system and the allocation of districts. Partly that's for good reason, since the public has seen how those aspects of the electoral process have been manipulated for partisan benefit in the past (or at least, they've been told that the other side is guilty of that, and they believe it) and it's partly because it's easy to argue against any changes by using FUD techniques, relying on people's mindset of "if it ain't broke". So it's probably right to focus on a change that's limited to just the balloting and winner-determining processes for now, hoping that a future generation of more engaged voters and more representative politicians can push for changes that lead to more proportional outcomes, as you say. The corollary of this logic, though, is that it would be better to change just the winner-determining process and not change the ballots at all. While I do think that RCV is a huge improvement to FPTP in the US, I do have some sympathy for the claim that RCV is more complicated, which can have a disenfranchising effect. For example, it introduces unfamiliar new tactical dimensions, where people might be encouraged to rank their least preferred candidate disingenuously higher than another rival in order to cause that rival to be eliminated first. More generally, it pressures voters to have to produce an exhaustive ranking of all possible candidates, some of whom they might not have heard of, and potentially penalizing voters that opt to leave some ranks unspecified. Then there's the problem of needing to use untrustworthy electronic voting machines (or a much longer manual process) to count ballot papers that have N-factorial possible markings for N candidates, in a process which strongly encourages centralization rather than being distributed. The solution to these problems is a method called Asset Voting, where ballots work exactly the same way as under FPTP, but at the end of the count, the candidates get eliminated one by one and can re-assign their votes to one of the remaining candidates. This completely removes the spoiler effect and the problem of "wasted" votes, while not introducing any extra cost or delay (other than two minutes of asking the eliminated candidates who their votes should be re-assigned to). Unfortunately, though, I don't think this method has the same momentum behind it as RCV or other popular alternatives like Approval Voting.
tomohawk 4y ago
Ranked choice voting just solidifies incumbents in power even more than now. What we need are term limits.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  RCV creates a path for new parties to form, while preventing existing parties from being taken over by extremists. This leads to parties becoming more representative of their voters (and gives more people a reason to vote). Term limits just change the balance away from elected politicians (who can build up a reputation for integrity and competence) and towards the unelected party machinery, who inexperienced politicians are more dependent on. (Of course, for life-time appointments like supreme court justices, term limits would be an improvement, you're right).
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Ranked choice voting just solidifies incumbents in power even more than now. Not only that, but they remain in power with fantasy mandates, because people who hated them were forced to rank them. In Australia, it's criminal not to rank candidates you hate, and criminal to encourage people not to include particular candidates in their rankings, aka a Langer Vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer Australia: Political activist becomes first prisoner of conscience for over 20 years (Albert Langer) https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa12/005/1996/en/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa12/005/1996/en/
sn0w_crash 4y ago
It’s confusing to normies. Anything that isn’t simple to understand will fail to get traction. Or worse, will lead to more people questioning the validity of election results. The American intelligentsia needs to better understand how and why normies feel about things, instead of throwing big words like “ranked choice voting” at them.
- antifa 4y ago
  How would it be confusing? Children seem to handle quiz questions like "rank these animals from smallest to largest" just fine.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > Children seem to handle quiz questions like "rank these animals from smallest to largest" just fine. Do they, though? Does "largest" mean "tallest" or "heaviest"? Is a tiger bigger than a lion? Do you mean the male of the species or the female? Sorry if that's strawmanning your argument, but I think that the parent post had a valid point. Ranked choice voting requires that either the voter has a fully formed opinion on all the candidates running, or that they leave some candidates unranked (which makes some people's votes less expressive/powerful than other people's). Maybe in every election you've taken part in, you've studied the manifestos and voting records of all the candidates, in which case well done and thank you for your civic diligence, but RCV would (hopefully) make it common for a dozen different parties to compete, most of which a given voter would have varying degrees of support for. Do you really think that the average US voter could memorize an ordering for a list of 12 names? Perhaps 90% of voters could, and perhaps the remaining 10% of voters don't "deserve" to have their votes fully count, or maybe RCV is such an improvement that this level of disenfranchisement is worth it, but that's not self-evidently true and I don't think the parent post's criticism can be so easily dismissed.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      > or that they leave some candidates unranked Illegal in Australia. You're required to have an ordered opinion on the relative fitness of every candidate under pain of law, or at least to pretend to have one.
black_13 4y ago
IAmLiterallyAB 4y ago
I'm a big fan of alternative voting methods. But I'm always a bit frustrated that ranked choice (or really it's IRV) is always the go-to. I'd much prefer a score based method like STAR voting. It's more expressive, scores carry more information than a ranking. It does a much better job at eliminating strategic voting. And it's still dead simple at the voting booth
- yummypaint 4y ago
  Advocating for ranked choice right now is really just a way to get people to see the enormous flaws in the current system and understand that there are real alternatives. The idea that there is more than one way to hold a vote is still an unexplored concept for most of the public. Once people understand the problem better the details of the replacement will be more competently debated. "Ranked choice" has a nice ring to it when giving someone the elevator pitch, and the name implies the voter is given more authority which is true. I find this easier than trying to start by explaining an acronym. Once they get engaged then i pivot to other methods.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    Thank you for giving that very practical advice about how to engage people on the issue of electoral reform. I think that a lot of advocates for reform (especially on a site like this) tend to think of voting as a purely abstract exercise, and that the ideal reform is one which meets various mathematical criteria, but that seems to be the same sort of mistake as thinking that the best software is the one which uses the most efficient algorithms. STAR voting, for example, may be more expressive, in that it allows the voter to input more information into the process, but I'm not actually sure that's a necessary goal, and it may even be an anti-goal, since the more input is required from a user, the higher the cognitive load, the more scope for things going wrong, the more attack surface for someone to spread misinformation, and the more error-prone / time-consuming / expensive the voting and counting process is. Given that a vote typically has thousands of bits of information in aggregate, even with FPTP ballots, and the output only needs to be a single winner, it seems that allowing more input isn't actually a benefit. Instead, what is needed is more honest input, i.e. resistance to tactical voting (which I concede STAR voting is probably better at than RCV). Unless we want to make elections forever dependent on voting machines whose firmware is written by the lowest bidder (or biggest campaign contributor) we should always prefer voting systems where the ballots can be counted by hand, in as distributed a way as possible. A team counting plurality ballots can stack them into N piles, for N candidates, and the heights of those piles are roughly proportional to the votes for each candidate. To do the same for RCV requires N! piles, and for STAR voting requires 6N piles. Approval voting requires 2^N piles (so it is preferable to STAR if there are 4 or fewer candidates) whereas asset voting requires just N, like FPTP.
unpopularopp 4y ago
And what if the GOP wins with ranked choice voting too? Cause that's the crux of the liberal media
- antifa 4y ago
  Conservatives will still win conservative districts. Ranked choice will allow everyone to confidently enter their preferences accurately and the winner will be the mutually least hated candidate.
  - throwaway81523 4y ago
    > winner will be the mutually least hated candidate. That is not necessarily desirable though. We already have that a lot of the time (not always), and it seems to systemically produce a race to the bottom.
    - antifa 4y ago
      > We already have that a lot of the time Having it under FPTP instead of ranked choice is fundamentally different, so we really don't have it at all as far as the FPTP vs RCV debate goes.
      - throwaway81523 4y ago
        In the US, we don't have an FPTP system in practice. We have a duopoly of the two major parties, that nominate candidates through a combination of voter preferences and donor/establishment preferences (controlling funding and ballot access). The nomination process tends "electable" candidates, who could also be called insufficiently hated.
yucky 4y ago
The problem is political parties, more than voting systems. The best solution would be to ban them completely. Obviously in the US you can't do that in speech, so candidates can still publicly align themselves with others or on positions. But when you go to the ballot you should know who you're voting for and not base it on the D or R next to their name. Remove party affiliation from ballots and stop supporting the primary system and that would be an enormous improvement. No wonder countries won't try it, party affiliation is their most effective means of controlling the narrative that keeps them in power.
- em-bee 4y ago
  exactly this. i have been making similar arguments here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25031034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25031034 but i'd like to go even further and eventually eliminate candidates as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32267723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32267723
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Affiliation is also what allows them to control members once they are elected. It is the tyranny of leadership. If you go away the group you get kicked out and lose your chance to affect things or get re-elected unless you are extremely popular. What the politician says or thinks doesn't matter at all. It only matters what the leadership of the party they are member thinks.
- landemva 4y ago
  > The problem is political parties ... ban them completely. Obviously in the US you can't do Political parties are creatures in the election laws of each State. The sections of State law which create (and then regulate) parties can be removed.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Banning political parties would fall afoul of the First Amendment's protections of both free speech and association. You can possibly remove laws which create specific parties but you can't make creating political parties altogether illegal.
em-bee 4y ago
related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265000 (Yes, social media is undermining democracy) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25021503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25021503 (Ask HN: Instead of picking a party, why can’t we vote on issues) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325295 (Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566 (Maine Ranked Choice Voting Initiative Approved) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597662 (What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24943441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24943441 (Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31502540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31502540 (Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477747 (Quadratic Voting) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757 (Instant runoff voting is the system we need) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551 (Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential election, court rules) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2484677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2484677 (A “perfect” voting system)
c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
We need less concentration of power on the federal level. Quit jamming policy down each other's throats on the federal level. Power should be distributed closer to constituents.
- landemva 4y ago
  Maybe words something like this? "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10 https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10

93 points by dane-pgp 4y ago

Approval Voting https://electionscience.org/ https://electionscience.org/ Dead simple. Put a check mark beside the names you support. That’s it.

dane-pgp 4y ago
I agree that Approval Voting would probably be an ever better reform than RCV, but I don't think it's quite as simple as you suggest. Implicit in the voting process is deciding what you think "support" means. For some voters, that threshold will be "I like this candidate, just not as much as my top preference" while other voters will set the bar at "I could live with this candidate winning, as they're not quite as bad as the candidate I'm most afraid of". Not only does this mean that different voters are effectively answering different questions, but it means voters may feel overwhelmed or confused (as in The Paradox of Choice, and exponentially more so than picking just one top preference). This also leads to tactical voting, with some politicians or activists telling their supporters to "approve" (or remember not to approve) of some third candidates who they think might gain not enough (or too many) just-in-case votes. Perhaps these concerns aren't a reason not to try implementing it for elections, but I'd feel more confident about it as a voting method once I've seen how it stands up to large scale malicious campaigning, with groups trying to undermine confidence in the process or exploit voters' unfamiliarity with it.

dane-pgp 4y ago

The two needs aren't as orthogonal as the headline suggests, though. It might be possible, for instance, to start a third party that exists solely to pressure the Democrats into supporting RCV (first at the state level, then federally). And of course one of the main benefits of RCV is that it can allow a third (and fourth...) party to gain traction, although it can also improve politics just by making the existing parties more representative of their voters, since they won't be able to rely on the "lesser of two evils" effect.

chiefalchemist 4y ago
Put another way, RCV better reflects the will of The People. And that ineffect influence the parties (not the other way around).
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
> It might be possible, for instance, to start a third party that exists solely to pressure the Democrats into supporting RCV Yes, and the more votes that third party gets, the less likely it is that the democrats have any power and therefore the less likely that they fulfill their mission. Which is the whole point why you need RCV in a system like the American. There is no way to move gracefully towards an improvement to the system, because your only options work counter to your goal right until the point where you have a full and sole majority in which case you didn’t change the two party problem, you just replaced one of the parties.

Nokinside 4y ago

Number of viable parties in long term depends on electoral system. Ranked choice alone makes multiple parties viable but it's not ideal. Yet ranked choice would almost certainly lead to more than two parties in the US. Electoral system is not only the voting system. Single member districts + plurality (current US system) is the worst system for representative democracy by multiple criteria, so almost any proposal improves the situation. Proportional representation (PR) is any system where seats are divided between parties/lists by their vote share. Ranked choice is not enough. The US would also need multi member districts. >By federal law, all members of the United States Congress are elected from single-member districts, and most states also elect their state legislators from single-member districts. Some states, however, utilize multi-member districts. For example, Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Washington elect all members of their lower state legislative chambers from multi-member districts. https://ballotpedia.org/Multi-member_district https://ballotpedia.org/Multi-member_district

dane-pgp 4y ago
I think that electoral reform advocates have started to accept that the public is wary of large changes to the voting system and the allocation of districts. Partly that's for good reason, since the public has seen how those aspects of the electoral process have been manipulated for partisan benefit in the past (or at least, they've been told that the other side is guilty of that, and they believe it) and it's partly because it's easy to argue against any changes by using FUD techniques, relying on people's mindset of "if it ain't broke". So it's probably right to focus on a change that's limited to just the balloting and winner-determining processes for now, hoping that a future generation of more engaged voters and more representative politicians can push for changes that lead to more proportional outcomes, as you say. The corollary of this logic, though, is that it would be better to change just the winner-determining process and not change the ballots at all. While I do think that RCV is a huge improvement to FPTP in the US, I do have some sympathy for the claim that RCV is more complicated, which can have a disenfranchising effect. For example, it introduces unfamiliar new tactical dimensions, where people might be encouraged to rank their least preferred candidate disingenuously higher than another rival in order to cause that rival to be eliminated first. More generally, it pressures voters to have to produce an exhaustive ranking of all possible candidates, some of whom they might not have heard of, and potentially penalizing voters that opt to leave some ranks unspecified. Then there's the problem of needing to use untrustworthy electronic voting machines (or a much longer manual process) to count ballot papers that have N-factorial possible markings for N candidates, in a process which strongly encourages centralization rather than being distributed. The solution to these problems is a method called Asset Voting, where ballots work exactly the same way as under FPTP, but at the end of the count, the candidates get eliminated one by one and can re-assign their votes to one of the remaining candidates. This completely removes the spoiler effect and the problem of "wasted" votes, while not introducing any extra cost or delay (other than two minutes of asking the eliminated candidates who their votes should be re-assigned to). Unfortunately, though, I don't think this method has the same momentum behind it as RCV or other popular alternatives like Approval Voting.

tomohawk 4y ago

Ranked choice voting just solidifies incumbents in power even more than now. What we need are term limits.

dane-pgp 4y ago
RCV creates a path for new parties to form, while preventing existing parties from being taken over by extremists. This leads to parties becoming more representative of their voters (and gives more people a reason to vote). Term limits just change the balance away from elected politicians (who can build up a reputation for integrity and competence) and towards the unelected party machinery, who inexperienced politicians are more dependent on. (Of course, for life-time appointments like supreme court justices, term limits would be an improvement, you're right).
pessimizer 4y ago
> Ranked choice voting just solidifies incumbents in power even more than now. Not only that, but they remain in power with fantasy mandates, because people who hated them were forced to rank them. In Australia, it's criminal not to rank candidates you hate, and criminal to encourage people not to include particular candidates in their rankings, aka a Langer Vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer Australia: Political activist becomes first prisoner of conscience for over 20 years (Albert Langer) https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa12/005/1996/en/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa12/005/1996/en/

sn0w_crash 4y ago

It’s confusing to normies. Anything that isn’t simple to understand will fail to get traction. Or worse, will lead to more people questioning the validity of election results. The American intelligentsia needs to better understand how and why normies feel about things, instead of throwing big words like “ranked choice voting” at them.

antifa 4y ago
How would it be confusing? Children seem to handle quiz questions like "rank these animals from smallest to largest" just fine.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > Children seem to handle quiz questions like "rank these animals from smallest to largest" just fine. Do they, though? Does "largest" mean "tallest" or "heaviest"? Is a tiger bigger than a lion? Do you mean the male of the species or the female? Sorry if that's strawmanning your argument, but I think that the parent post had a valid point. Ranked choice voting requires that either the voter has a fully formed opinion on all the candidates running, or that they leave some candidates unranked (which makes some people's votes less expressive/powerful than other people's). Maybe in every election you've taken part in, you've studied the manifestos and voting records of all the candidates, in which case well done and thank you for your civic diligence, but RCV would (hopefully) make it common for a dozen different parties to compete, most of which a given voter would have varying degrees of support for. Do you really think that the average US voter could memorize an ordering for a list of 12 names? Perhaps 90% of voters could, and perhaps the remaining 10% of voters don't "deserve" to have their votes fully count, or maybe RCV is such an improvement that this level of disenfranchisement is worth it, but that's not self-evidently true and I don't think the parent post's criticism can be so easily dismissed.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > or that they leave some candidates unranked Illegal in Australia. You're required to have an ordered opinion on the relative fitness of every candidate under pain of law, or at least to pretend to have one.

black_13 4y ago

IAmLiterallyAB 4y ago

I'm a big fan of alternative voting methods. But I'm always a bit frustrated that ranked choice (or really it's IRV) is always the go-to. I'd much prefer a score based method like STAR voting. It's more expressive, scores carry more information than a ranking. It does a much better job at eliminating strategic voting. And it's still dead simple at the voting booth

yummypaint 4y ago
Advocating for ranked choice right now is really just a way to get people to see the enormous flaws in the current system and understand that there are real alternatives. The idea that there is more than one way to hold a vote is still an unexplored concept for most of the public. Once people understand the problem better the details of the replacement will be more competently debated. "Ranked choice" has a nice ring to it when giving someone the elevator pitch, and the name implies the voter is given more authority which is true. I find this easier than trying to start by explaining an acronym. Once they get engaged then i pivot to other methods.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  Thank you for giving that very practical advice about how to engage people on the issue of electoral reform. I think that a lot of advocates for reform (especially on a site like this) tend to think of voting as a purely abstract exercise, and that the ideal reform is one which meets various mathematical criteria, but that seems to be the same sort of mistake as thinking that the best software is the one which uses the most efficient algorithms. STAR voting, for example, may be more expressive, in that it allows the voter to input more information into the process, but I'm not actually sure that's a necessary goal, and it may even be an anti-goal, since the more input is required from a user, the higher the cognitive load, the more scope for things going wrong, the more attack surface for someone to spread misinformation, and the more error-prone / time-consuming / expensive the voting and counting process is. Given that a vote typically has thousands of bits of information in aggregate, even with FPTP ballots, and the output only needs to be a single winner, it seems that allowing more input isn't actually a benefit. Instead, what is needed is more honest input, i.e. resistance to tactical voting (which I concede STAR voting is probably better at than RCV). Unless we want to make elections forever dependent on voting machines whose firmware is written by the lowest bidder (or biggest campaign contributor) we should always prefer voting systems where the ballots can be counted by hand, in as distributed a way as possible. A team counting plurality ballots can stack them into N piles, for N candidates, and the heights of those piles are roughly proportional to the votes for each candidate. To do the same for RCV requires N! piles, and for STAR voting requires 6N piles. Approval voting requires 2^N piles (so it is preferable to STAR if there are 4 or fewer candidates) whereas asset voting requires just N, like FPTP.

unpopularopp 4y ago

And what if the GOP wins with ranked choice voting too? Cause that's the crux of the liberal media

antifa 4y ago
Conservatives will still win conservative districts. Ranked choice will allow everyone to confidently enter their preferences accurately and the winner will be the mutually least hated candidate.
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  > winner will be the mutually least hated candidate. That is not necessarily desirable though. We already have that a lot of the time (not always), and it seems to systemically produce a race to the bottom.
  - antifa 4y ago
    > We already have that a lot of the time Having it under FPTP instead of ranked choice is fundamentally different, so we really don't have it at all as far as the FPTP vs RCV debate goes.
    - throwaway81523 4y ago
      In the US, we don't have an FPTP system in practice. We have a duopoly of the two major parties, that nominate candidates through a combination of voter preferences and donor/establishment preferences (controlling funding and ballot access). The nomination process tends "electable" candidates, who could also be called insufficiently hated.

yucky 4y ago

The problem is political parties, more than voting systems. The best solution would be to ban them completely. Obviously in the US you can't do that in speech, so candidates can still publicly align themselves with others or on positions. But when you go to the ballot you should know who you're voting for and not base it on the D or R next to their name. Remove party affiliation from ballots and stop supporting the primary system and that would be an enormous improvement. No wonder countries won't try it, party affiliation is their most effective means of controlling the narrative that keeps them in power.

em-bee 4y ago
exactly this. i have been making similar arguments here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25031034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25031034 but i'd like to go even further and eventually eliminate candidates as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32267723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32267723
Ekaros 4y ago
Affiliation is also what allows them to control members once they are elected. It is the tyranny of leadership. If you go away the group you get kicked out and lose your chance to affect things or get re-elected unless you are extremely popular. What the politician says or thinks doesn't matter at all. It only matters what the leadership of the party they are member thinks.
landemva 4y ago
> The problem is political parties ... ban them completely. Obviously in the US you can't do Political parties are creatures in the election laws of each State. The sections of State law which create (and then regulate) parties can be removed.
- krapp 4y ago
  Banning political parties would fall afoul of the First Amendment's protections of both free speech and association. You can possibly remove laws which create specific parties but you can't make creating political parties altogether illegal.

em-bee 4y ago

related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265000 (Yes, social media is undermining democracy) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25021503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25021503 (Ask HN: Instead of picking a party, why can’t we vote on issues) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325295 (Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566 (Maine Ranked Choice Voting Initiative Approved) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597662 (What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24943441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24943441 (Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31502540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31502540 (Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477747 (Quadratic Voting) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757 (Instant runoff voting is the system we need) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551 (Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential election, court rules) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2484677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2484677 (A “perfect” voting system)

c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago

We need less concentration of power on the federal level. Quit jamming policy down each other's throats on the federal level. Power should be distributed closer to constituents.

landemva 4y ago
Maybe words something like this? "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10 https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10