this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Personally I prefer the idea of ranking each candidate in order of preference, ie "this is my favorite candidate, this is my second-favorite, and so on for all the candidates with enough support to be on the ballot". I feel like it has more granularity than an upvote downvote system would have.
It's certainly still better than the US's current first-past-the-post system, but it has a critical flaw where a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which could be abused by people trying to "game" the voting system. In reality, something like approval or score voting would be more representative of voter's desires.
See Nicky Case's excellent write-up on how that can happen: https://ncase.me/ballot/
That's interesting, I hadn't heard that before, though the one that has that flaw you mentioned looks to be instant runoff voting, which is not quite what I was suggesting (what I was thinking of looks to be called "borda count" here, though the write up has a criticism of that as well)
EDIT: though upon giving this a half hour or so to contemplate, I think I'd still favor that method (borda) best, out of everything mentioned in that write up. If I'm understanding their criticism of it correctly, it seems that in a case where you have a candidate who is the preferred choice for a majority of voters, and another candidate who is the preferred choice for a sizable minority of voters, and a third candidate who is almost nobody's preferred choice, but is somewhere in between them, it's sometimes possible for that third candidate to win even though the first candidate seems like they ought to, being the top choice for a bit more than half the voters. That situation feels like it ought to help dampen against polarization and cults of personality, because a candidate that is loved by a slim majority, but hated by everyone else, won't do as well as a candidate that manages to be everyone's second choice, that almost everyone can at least begrudgingly accept. It's not perfect obviously, I can imagine that it would tend to promote boring moderates that would make major changes and progress slow, which would frustrate me personally, not being a moderate myself- but I think it would result in a system that is reasonably stable and which should still generally trend towards the will of the majority, which sounds a lot better than what the US currently has. The non-ranked options presented sound intriguing, but I do think that people would just turn them into first past the post again by only marking their favorite as acceptable or giving their favorite the highest score and everyone else the lowest, because in addition to that being "strategic", it's also easier, and the cynic in me says that people are often lazy about these things.
Yeah but there needs to be an "explicitly not this one"-rank, and if you have to also rank republicans in the US, a whole lot of those.
Afaik, you don't have to rank every candidate in most RCV systems. So If you don't like someone, you can just leave them unranked.
This predictably would just lead to a two party system where you upvote your guy and downvote theirs.
I want the US to be able to vote a third candidate and have it not be an utter throwaway.