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I went deep into electoral systems after the 2016 election, and emerged a tentative ranked choice voting supporter for the momentum that FairVote was accruing a
by uoaei 4y ago
I went deep into electoral systems after the 2016 election, and emerged a tentative ranked choice voting supporter for the momentum that FairVote was accruing at the time, but secretly I really considered approval voting an ideal next step in electoral reform:
1. Amending the law is relatively simple: replace any instance of only one with any when it comes to election laws regarding marking the ballot.
2. Amending the ballot is a minor change: just allow anyone to mark any (including none or all) of the bubbles representing each candidate on the ballot. The language on the ballot itself barely changes, the structure of the ballot can and would be identical to today's ballots.
3. Explaining the method to the public is dead simple: there's a pattern here, "instead of marking just one, now you can mark any of them" is a sentence that anyone can understand and implement. Explaining the calculation ("whoever gets the most votes, wins") is also dead simple.
4. Extending to multi-seat races is trivial: just take the top n vote-getters instead of the top 1.
5. It appeals to intuition: it does feel like "cast one lot per candidate you approve of" and aggregating that across a population is a fair way of distributing consensus. "Approval" means many things to many people but it is still a clear subjective threshold for each person. This also means that voters will consider the result harder to dispute on the grounds that it doesn't represent the people's will.
6. Tactical voting is straightforward and hard to do wrong: for what it's worth, tactical voting is always an option, and people are always going to use it. It's just how things work, at least for the foreseeable future. That being said, of all the systems, approval voting makes it the simplest to engage with and the least underhanded. Vote for people you want to promote in the election, don't vote for people you want to suppress in the election.
I really don't see the downsides. Deep in the discussion boards of the internet where the election nerds lurk, they complain about this or that theoretical imperfection. But as for the options that have been suggested, this one stands out as the easiest to adopt societally, with the most bullet- and fool-proof implementation.
- lostdog 4y agoIf you want A or B to win, but you really prefer A to B, then should you approve of B at all or not approve of them? This preference situation happens in every election, and approval voting has no answer to it. It's completely unclear what a voter should do to get the result they want.
- sdenton4 4y agoYou vote for who you approve of for the position in question. Whoever has the most approval wins. It's that simple: It doesn't matter whether you prefer A over B, all that matters is whether you think each is a good-enough candidate. Fiber grained preferences then emerge at the population level, not the individual level. "What the voter should do to get the result they want" assumes a level of individual agency which really isn't present in a real election: The result is always a combination of individual choice with collective will.
- lostdog 4y agoI knew tons of people with a preference of Bernie > Hillary >> Trump. They preferred Hillary but did they "approve" of her? How should they vote? This kind of situation isn't special. It comes up in every election, and approval is completely confused about how to handle it.
- sdenton4 4y agoWould you be OK with Hillary as president? If yes, give approval; if not, don't. Order of preference simply doesn't matter in approval voting. The only reason it seems complicated is because we are too used to strategic voting in the First Past the Post system. I recently had the occasion to really game out what happens in ranked choice voting. It is similar to approval voting (you should only rank people to approve of), but in practice you elect whoever gets past the 50% threshold first, which may not be whoever had the most raw approval. The first person past 50% is effectively random, especially in a large field with complicated voter preferences. So, you get an illusion of choice: everyone lists their preference, but the actual winner is a somewhat random choice amongst the candidates with >50% approval. Thus, I advocate removing the illusion, and simply picking the candidate with the greatest approval. Easy.
- ClayShentrup 4y agoi wrote a page on this very issue. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6 https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
- 4y ago