7 ms·

It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year o

It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year olds in for a 6 year term. If she can’t be beat in a primary, then we need something like ranked choice voting so people can safely vote for an alternative third party without risking spoiling the election for a candidate they definitely don’t want.

Enginerrrd 3y ago
I'd rather see a proportional system.
- wolfram74 3y ago
  The problem is first past the post is in the running for the worst way to run a democracy, so basically any reform option would work, and it's hard to get consensus around change.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    Are you saying that First Past the Post won at being First Past the Post? :-)
- grotorea 3y ago
  (Closed-list) proportional system wouldn't stop an unfit party insider being put at the top of the list.
  - davidw 3y ago
    Proportional has other flaws too, like small parties playing 'kingmaker'. As in: say the two major parties each get 45%, and I run an outfit that got 10%. To have a majority, you're going to have to deal with me, so I'm going to have way more influence than my 10% would warrant. I've seen this happen in the real world in Italy.
- banannaise 3y ago
  A proportional system will still have one of the primary issues with the current system: the parties choose their representatives, and the two major ones will continue to trot out just the worst people they can find. (Yes, there are primaries, but the DNC and RNC hold an astronomical amount of power in picking the candidates and influencing the winners.)
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    But that's not a problem when you can just defect from the major parties with no penalty. The major parties are only able to continually put up garbage candidates because there are no other options.
- mcv 3y ago
  Ranked voting for single offices (president, governor, etc), and proportional for any representative body, like the House and Senate. Or, if the Senate is really meant to represent the states rather than the people, it should only be concerned with state issues: which issues belong at the federal level, and which at the state level, for example.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I'd be fine with a literal random selection with the people being able to trigger "no-confidence" at set intervals. Can't be much worse and statistically it should have basically the same outcome.
anonymouse008 3y ago
I encourage you to run a campaign, just in a local county. You will find there are things one can't see from the outside that make this sentiment naively false.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  List them here! You aren't actually saying anything.
  - paulgb 3y ago
    My wife was part of a congressional primary campaign so I got to see some of this close-up. It’s hard to list all the reasons, but there is definitely a sort of institutional inertia that makes it hard to primary someone on the story of merely being the better candidate, unless there is an a prior consensus among voters that the incumbent needs to go. Some examples: - Congressional elections are expensive; incumbents have deeper-rooted donor networks to tap. - Civic groups that are already working with the incumbent want to continue the relationship. - General voter apathy around primary elections; even regular voters often skip primaries so finding people who will actually vote gets harder. - Name recognition; if someone shows up to the polls to vote for another ballot item but hasn't followed the congressional race, they'll probably put a box next to the incumbent unless they have a particular reason not to. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing -- high turnover of elected officials is disruptive to the system -- but there are clearly cases in which it overcorrects.
    - philipov 3y ago
      The part about voter apathy towards primaries is important. It means that the sort of people who vote in primaries don't represent an unbiased sample of their party: they skew towards the extremes, because those people can be more easily mobilized. This means that primaries don't produce candidates capable of representing the median voter very well, and we end up with a choice between the canonical Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich. That's why the Freedom Caucus doesn't want McCarthy to use funding to influence primaries in their states; it would allow him to enforce party discipline on them. This becomes even worse when combined with "safe" districts where whoever wins the primary for the district's ruling party is nearly guaranteed to win the general election as well. It makes one wonder how democratic we should consider such an election to be. All this is to say that it's important to not just look at whether an institution is democratic in form, but whether it is also democratic in outcomes. The Law of Unintended Consequences will be obeyed. [https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h...]
pxx 3y ago
Ranked choice voting (the brand name for Instant Runoff or Hare voting) neither theoretically [0] nor empirically [1] has the outcomes for third parties that you think it does. This combined with its other flaws makes it worse than plurality. Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections but monotonicity is the worst criterion to give up, especially when the system has so many other flaws. [0] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html [1] see examples cited in https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html [2] sure, you can transmit the contents of all of the ballots, but then it's still a centralized count... [3] n! grows much much larger than population, so you can encode ballot ID [4] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
- iambateman 3y ago
  The real problem with RCV is that it doesn't intuitively make sense to an average person. I wrote a web app for RCV and spent months trying to build a user experience that would help people understand the concept and it just doesn't work. People come to the question of voting assuming it's easy to understand...We've never had to deal with complexity around the concept so we expect it to be simple. Introducing an algorithm plays into the fears of people who believe in a deep state which is secretly trying to manipulate people. We deeply need a better voting system, but one of the core requirements must be that one can explain it to a middle schooler in 30 seconds.
  - matt-attack 3y ago
    How is it hard to explain: please put these names in a row from best to worst.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - taylodl 3y ago
      Citizens of other countries have figured it out. Which means, of course, Americans can't. And yes, I'm an American.
paradoxyl 3y ago
When do you think some third party is going to arise out of the broken cesspool of one-party machine politics in the state of dementia known as California? Please, fill us in.
- swasheck 3y ago
  no need to single out california. this is prevalent in so many places. texas. south carolina. wyoming. new mexico.
mc32 3y ago
We should have the ability to do a recall when mental faculties come into question. Have a bare minimum mental fitness test: Time awareness, location awareness, action consequence relationship, grade 6 comprehension and control over bodily functions Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not a commentary on reality.
yboris 3y ago
Putting it on your radar: Approval Voting Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation. https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/ https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/
- matt-attack 3y ago
  Doesn’t seem to allow people to express their natural feelings. RCV does. I absolutely have a favorite. And I want to be able to encode that. I also have a 2nd choice, and so on. Imagine a case where I really really want one guy, and between the remaining two I have a strong preference for one over the other. RCV lets me express that. Approval would have been stuck. Should I mention the 2nd guy? I do want them if it came to having to choose but I’d hate to place them on even footing with my top top pick.
  - ClayShentrup 3y ago
    this is a common intuition-based fallacy. i'm an expert with almost 20 years of experience working in this field with various phd's in political science, math, and game theory. i explain this here: https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034bc65 https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034b... tl;dr - for any two candidates, X and Y, the voters who approve only one of them express a "ranked preference" between them. and because those voters are, on average, a good statistical sample of the X-vs-Y preference of the entire electorate, approval voting turns out to measure voter preferences very accurately. whereas instant runoff voting can actually have much bigger problems in preference detection because it only looks at one layer of preferences at a time. for example: 35% left center 33% right center 32% center in this example, center is preferred to both the left and the right by a LANDSLIDE 2/3rds majority, yet is the first candidate eliminated. this happens because of "vote splitting" (spoiler effect) between the two more partisan candidates. so it might _feel_ like you expressed your preferences better. but you didn't really. and what about STRATEGIC VOTING? if right wins, then the left supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that. and if left wins, then right supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that. approval voting satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion", which means it cannot possibly hurt you to support your sincere favorite candidate. for these and many other reasons, approval voting is vastly superior to ranking. https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...
SllX 3y ago
And there is an additional check: the Senate itself can expel individual members. We elected her, and they didn’t expel her. RIP Senator Feinstein.
the_snooze 3y ago
RCV advocates miss the point entirely. It's not that people want to vote for third parties but can't. It's that the candidates that survive the major parties' primary elections have only to pander to their insane bases. In California where no-party-indicateds outnumber Republicans, the top-2 system is effectivley a Democratic primary. Alaska has the right idea: a jungle primary where the top-4 advance, followed by an RCV general. RCV by itself doesn't do much. You have to weaken the primary electorate, as Alaska does.
roenxi 3y ago
If you're going to lay responsibility at the feet of the voters it isn't fair to throw out a "It is how it’s supposed to work.". The voters decide how it is supposed to work by making arguments and talking to each other and expressing opinions. If voters have power then expressing what qualities a politician should have helps the process. And while ranked choice voting is probably superior, it'd be a lot easier for one of the parties to implement RCV internally then call it a day. The major problem is that the primary system is too incumbent-friendly, making it hard for challengers to grow organically. And I don't buy the argument that the US Congress Regulars have done a good job. They look like they've mucked a lot of stuff up, badly, and left a series of ruins behind them. Literally in many cases.

Enginerrrd 3y ago

I'd rather see a proportional system.

wolfram74 3y ago
The problem is first past the post is in the running for the worst way to run a democracy, so basically any reform option would work, and it's hard to get consensus around change.
- mcphage 3y ago
  Are you saying that First Past the Post won at being First Past the Post? :-)
grotorea 3y ago
(Closed-list) proportional system wouldn't stop an unfit party insider being put at the top of the list.
- davidw 3y ago
  Proportional has other flaws too, like small parties playing 'kingmaker'. As in: say the two major parties each get 45%, and I run an outfit that got 10%. To have a majority, you're going to have to deal with me, so I'm going to have way more influence than my 10% would warrant. I've seen this happen in the real world in Italy.
banannaise 3y ago
A proportional system will still have one of the primary issues with the current system: the parties choose their representatives, and the two major ones will continue to trot out just the worst people they can find. (Yes, there are primaries, but the DNC and RNC hold an astronomical amount of power in picking the candidates and influencing the winners.)
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  But that's not a problem when you can just defect from the major parties with no penalty. The major parties are only able to continually put up garbage candidates because there are no other options.
mcv 3y ago
Ranked voting for single offices (president, governor, etc), and proportional for any representative body, like the House and Senate. Or, if the Senate is really meant to represent the states rather than the people, it should only be concerned with state issues: which issues belong at the federal level, and which at the state level, for example.
bombcar 3y ago
I'd be fine with a literal random selection with the people being able to trigger "no-confidence" at set intervals. Can't be much worse and statistically it should have basically the same outcome.

anonymouse008 3y ago

I encourage you to run a campaign, just in a local county. You will find there are things one can't see from the outside that make this sentiment naively false.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
List them here! You aren't actually saying anything.
- paulgb 3y ago
  My wife was part of a congressional primary campaign so I got to see some of this close-up. It’s hard to list all the reasons, but there is definitely a sort of institutional inertia that makes it hard to primary someone on the story of merely being the better candidate, unless there is an a prior consensus among voters that the incumbent needs to go. Some examples: - Congressional elections are expensive; incumbents have deeper-rooted donor networks to tap. - Civic groups that are already working with the incumbent want to continue the relationship. - General voter apathy around primary elections; even regular voters often skip primaries so finding people who will actually vote gets harder. - Name recognition; if someone shows up to the polls to vote for another ballot item but hasn't followed the congressional race, they'll probably put a box next to the incumbent unless they have a particular reason not to. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing -- high turnover of elected officials is disruptive to the system -- but there are clearly cases in which it overcorrects.
  - philipov 3y ago
    The part about voter apathy towards primaries is important. It means that the sort of people who vote in primaries don't represent an unbiased sample of their party: they skew towards the extremes, because those people can be more easily mobilized. This means that primaries don't produce candidates capable of representing the median voter very well, and we end up with a choice between the canonical Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich. That's why the Freedom Caucus doesn't want McCarthy to use funding to influence primaries in their states; it would allow him to enforce party discipline on them. This becomes even worse when combined with "safe" districts where whoever wins the primary for the district's ruling party is nearly guaranteed to win the general election as well. It makes one wonder how democratic we should consider such an election to be. All this is to say that it's important to not just look at whether an institution is democratic in form, but whether it is also democratic in outcomes. The Law of Unintended Consequences will be obeyed. [https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h...]

pxx 3y ago

Ranked choice voting (the brand name for Instant Runoff or Hare voting) neither theoretically [0] nor empirically [1] has the outcomes for third parties that you think it does. This combined with its other flaws makes it worse than plurality. Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections but monotonicity is the worst criterion to give up, especially when the system has so many other flaws. [0] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html [1] see examples cited in https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html [2] sure, you can transmit the contents of all of the ballots, but then it's still a centralized count... [3] n! grows much much larger than population, so you can encode ballot ID [4] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

iambateman 3y ago
The real problem with RCV is that it doesn't intuitively make sense to an average person. I wrote a web app for RCV and spent months trying to build a user experience that would help people understand the concept and it just doesn't work. People come to the question of voting assuming it's easy to understand...We've never had to deal with complexity around the concept so we expect it to be simple. Introducing an algorithm plays into the fears of people who believe in a deep state which is secretly trying to manipulate people. We deeply need a better voting system, but one of the core requirements must be that one can explain it to a middle schooler in 30 seconds.
- matt-attack 3y ago
  How is it hard to explain: please put these names in a row from best to worst.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - taylodl 3y ago
    Citizens of other countries have figured it out. Which means, of course, Americans can't. And yes, I'm an American.

paradoxyl 3y ago

When do you think some third party is going to arise out of the broken cesspool of one-party machine politics in the state of dementia known as California? Please, fill us in.

swasheck 3y ago
no need to single out california. this is prevalent in so many places. texas. south carolina. wyoming. new mexico.

mc32 3y ago

We should have the ability to do a recall when mental faculties come into question. Have a bare minimum mental fitness test: Time awareness, location awareness, action consequence relationship, grade 6 comprehension and control over bodily functions Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not a commentary on reality.

yboris 3y ago

Putting it on your radar: Approval Voting Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation. https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/ https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/

matt-attack 3y ago
Doesn’t seem to allow people to express their natural feelings. RCV does. I absolutely have a favorite. And I want to be able to encode that. I also have a 2nd choice, and so on. Imagine a case where I really really want one guy, and between the remaining two I have a strong preference for one over the other. RCV lets me express that. Approval would have been stuck. Should I mention the 2nd guy? I do want them if it came to having to choose but I’d hate to place them on even footing with my top top pick.
- ClayShentrup 3y ago
  this is a common intuition-based fallacy. i'm an expert with almost 20 years of experience working in this field with various phd's in political science, math, and game theory. i explain this here: https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034bc65 https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034b... tl;dr - for any two candidates, X and Y, the voters who approve only one of them express a "ranked preference" between them. and because those voters are, on average, a good statistical sample of the X-vs-Y preference of the entire electorate, approval voting turns out to measure voter preferences very accurately. whereas instant runoff voting can actually have much bigger problems in preference detection because it only looks at one layer of preferences at a time. for example: 35% left center 33% right center 32% center in this example, center is preferred to both the left and the right by a LANDSLIDE 2/3rds majority, yet is the first candidate eliminated. this happens because of "vote splitting" (spoiler effect) between the two more partisan candidates. so it might _feel_ like you expressed your preferences better. but you didn't really. and what about STRATEGIC VOTING? if right wins, then the left supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that. and if left wins, then right supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that. approval voting satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion", which means it cannot possibly hurt you to support your sincere favorite candidate. for these and many other reasons, approval voting is vastly superior to ranking. https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...

SllX 3y ago

And there is an additional check: the Senate itself can expel individual members. We elected her, and they didn’t expel her. RIP Senator Feinstein.

the_snooze 3y ago

RCV advocates miss the point entirely. It's not that people want to vote for third parties but can't. It's that the candidates that survive the major parties' primary elections have only to pander to their insane bases. In California where no-party-indicateds outnumber Republicans, the top-2 system is effectivley a Democratic primary. Alaska has the right idea: a jungle primary where the top-4 advance, followed by an RCV general. RCV by itself doesn't do much. You have to weaken the primary electorate, as Alaska does.

roenxi 3y ago

If you're going to lay responsibility at the feet of the voters it isn't fair to throw out a "It is how it’s supposed to work.". The voters decide how it is supposed to work by making arguments and talking to each other and expressing opinions. If voters have power then expressing what qualities a politician should have helps the process. And while ranked choice voting is probably superior, it'd be a lot easier for one of the parties to implement RCV internally then call it a day. The major problem is that the primary system is too incumbent-friendly, making it hard for challengers to grow organically. And I don't buy the argument that the US Congress Regulars have done a good job. They look like they've mucked a lot of stuff up, badly, and left a series of ruins behind them. Literally in many cases.