4 ms·

> it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters And your second pick, and your third pick

> it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters And your second pick, and your third pick... right? A big reason for electoral reform is to encourage a wider range of candidates to run, which means voters may be faced with having to come up with a total ordering across a dozen different options. You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away, or at least that voters who can remember an ordering for a list of a dozen names should be given more electoral power than their fellow citizens who cannot manage that feat. That's maybe not the biggest distortion and potential unfairness in the US right now (with the electoral college and partisan gerrymandering being two aspects that courts openly accept, not to mention other more insidious methods of disenfranchisement) but I think that reform advocates need to be careful not to support the equivalent of "literacy" tests, which have a disturbing past.

autoexec 4y ago
> You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away Not at all, if we get to the point where people are having to choose between and rank 50+ different candidates I might agree there's a problem, but a handful of choices simply isn't. In the Alaska election they had just three to rank, since the primary weeded out the most unpopular others right away. There's also nothing to stop someone from bringing in a list of names and ranks compiled ahead of time. No need to keep your preferred ranking in your head. These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. This is especially true for local offices. That subset of the population can continue making poorly informed choices about a few more candidates than usual without much trouble. I do appreciate that you're looking out for the rights of the illiterate voting population, but there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. Nearly half of the research into a particular candidate I do these days is in the form of youtube videos and radio interviews. It's admittedly slower than reading, but I do feel like I get a lot of information about a person by seeing and hearing them speak. Come voting day there are already poll workers prepared to assist illiterate voters with casting their vote as well and none of that will change under ranked choice voting.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. You're completely right about the possibility of bringing a slip of paper, and I was probably over-estimating the scale of the burden there. I would like to point out, though, that we really don't want to normalize the idea of people bringing out their phones while in the voting booth, as that seems like a way to encourage vote buying or coercion (even though the victim/voter may have ways to circumvent this problem, and even though phones aren't the only way someone could take a camera into a voting booth). > This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. In fact that doesn't surprise me, as I was already aware of this fact, but I see it as an existing limitation of democracy that shouldn't be made any worse. The simpler and less ambiguous the question on the ballot paper, the more of an even playing field there is for all voters. I used to think that to maximize the chances of finding the optimal winner, an election should try to demand that voters enter as much information as possible on their ballot paper, but my view has completely changed on this. Even under FPTP, the election algorithm is being fed with thousands of bits of information, and the output only needs to be roughly 1 or 2 bits of information, so there is no harm in making the ballot papers as uninformative as voters are uninformed (as long as the algorithm encourages honest votes, and combines them fairly). > there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. I agree, but my reference to "literacy" tests was meant to convey the fact that supposed literacy tests have in practice been used as pretences to exclude voters who were likely to vote for a party other than the one administering the test. As such, my objection wasn't that illiteracy itself was a major problem, but that any unnecessarily complicated process could be seen as having a disenfranchising effect, which would undermine confidence in elections even if the effect were not significant, or be used as an argument to prevent the adoption of the reform before it was even used, either by people who genuinely care or by concern trolls. Anyway, for completeness, here is an example of a literacy test issued by the state of Louisiana: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs-docs/literacytest.pdf https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs...

autoexec 4y ago

> You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away Not at all, if we get to the point where people are having to choose between and rank 50+ different candidates I might agree there's a problem, but a handful of choices simply isn't. In the Alaska election they had just three to rank, since the primary weeded out the most unpopular others right away. There's also nothing to stop someone from bringing in a list of names and ranks compiled ahead of time. No need to keep your preferred ranking in your head. These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. This is especially true for local offices. That subset of the population can continue making poorly informed choices about a few more candidates than usual without much trouble. I do appreciate that you're looking out for the rights of the illiterate voting population, but there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. Nearly half of the research into a particular candidate I do these days is in the form of youtube videos and radio interviews. It's admittedly slower than reading, but I do feel like I get a lot of information about a person by seeing and hearing them speak. Come voting day there are already poll workers prepared to assist illiterate voters with casting their vote as well and none of that will change under ranked choice voting.

dane-pgp 4y ago
> These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. You're completely right about the possibility of bringing a slip of paper, and I was probably over-estimating the scale of the burden there. I would like to point out, though, that we really don't want to normalize the idea of people bringing out their phones while in the voting booth, as that seems like a way to encourage vote buying or coercion (even though the victim/voter may have ways to circumvent this problem, and even though phones aren't the only way someone could take a camera into a voting booth). > This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. In fact that doesn't surprise me, as I was already aware of this fact, but I see it as an existing limitation of democracy that shouldn't be made any worse. The simpler and less ambiguous the question on the ballot paper, the more of an even playing field there is for all voters. I used to think that to maximize the chances of finding the optimal winner, an election should try to demand that voters enter as much information as possible on their ballot paper, but my view has completely changed on this. Even under FPTP, the election algorithm is being fed with thousands of bits of information, and the output only needs to be roughly 1 or 2 bits of information, so there is no harm in making the ballot papers as uninformative as voters are uninformed (as long as the algorithm encourages honest votes, and combines them fairly). > there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. I agree, but my reference to "literacy" tests was meant to convey the fact that supposed literacy tests have in practice been used as pretences to exclude voters who were likely to vote for a party other than the one administering the test. As such, my objection wasn't that illiteracy itself was a major problem, but that any unnecessarily complicated process could be seen as having a disenfranchising effect, which would undermine confidence in elections even if the effect were not significant, or be used as an argument to prevent the adoption of the reform before it was even used, either by people who genuinely care or by concern trolls. Anyway, for completeness, here is an example of a literacy test issued by the state of Louisiana: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs-docs/literacytest.pdf https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs...