I’m not familiar with quadratic voting. The best systems are generally considered to be the Condorcet systems (which vary slightly in some of the details). And you’re right that such more complicated systems can be useful with a more technically-minded electorate: For instance, the Hugos (science fiction awards) use a Condorcet voting system.
@UltraVires , a better voting system could certainly increase overall turnout. But that’s generally regarded as a positive, not a negative. And it would make runs more viable, for candidates other than the top two, so you probably would see more candidates, with different areas of focus, but the presence of large numbers of subtypes of Democrats won’t particularly help the top-line Democrat (beyond the effect of increased turnout), and might end up getting you a sort of Democrat that the people like better than the “mainstream” one (for instance, in an area where both guns and the environment are popular, you might get a pro-gun environmentalist (of whichever party) winning, rather than having to choose between an anti-gun environmentalist Democrat or a pro-gun polluting Republican).
The election won’t come down to the performance of the Buchanan clone vs the Nader clone, since those two candidates will presumably be eliminated in your scenario. The election will come down to how the second choice votes on the ballots that marked them first are split - it won’t matter how many people prefer Nader to Buchanan or why they have a preference. The only thing that will matter is who those voters chose second.
As far as this goes :
A Republican candidate would encourage a large number of right learning parties to run, tapping into each individual constituency knowing that they would win the second (or third or the last meaningful vote)? IOW, recruit an anti-abortion party candidate, a pro-gun candidate, a tax cut candidate, etc.
How different is this from a candidate appearing on multiple ballot lines - for example the Republican candidate also showing up on the Conservative or Right to Life* ballot line ?
* Which is/was an actual party in NY. I don’t know if it’s defunct or if it simply hasn’t met the threshold for a ballot line in years.
Thanks Chronos. I looked up the Condorcet method and uh, yeah, it may even be too abstruse for my social circles. Not to mention it becomes unwieldy and time-protracted when there are many candidates. The search continues …
Turnout is a positive, but that assumes a turnout for people who will vote for the candidate they choose. Many people don’t vote because they feel that the major party candidates don’t speak for them, largely because they are broad based and consensus building because they need moderates to win. This would change that.
Imagine the Republicans, secretly of course, recruiting a “Shoot Mexicans at the Border” Party candidate. Let’s say you get 2% of the electorate in Arizona who never voted but voted in that election because they liked that candidate. Those voters would pick the “real” Republican over the “real” Democrat, boosting the Republican numbers after the ridiculous candidate was eliminated.
Then the Dems would respond with the same, say a BLM “Kill White People” Party candidate that gets the same 2%.
It would be a jockeying back and forth as to which party could get the most radicals out to vote. And these radicals would not be voting for Cruz or Harris, but their unofficial proxies who are spreading dangerous policies that have no chance of being implemented. And in a tight election, whether Cruz or Harris wins depends on how many “candidates” they can put out there with no chance of winning, pushing dangerous ideologies, and pretending they had nothing to do with it.
I don’t think that is a benefit. The reason third parties don’t win is not because of a flaw in our voting system. It is because that most people are not that fringe and prefer one of the two major parties who are in the Overton’s window of what is acceptable to most in society.
Sure, you’ll increase turnout among crazy extremists who want to shoot people. But you’ll also increase turnout among moderates who think that both of the mainstream candidates are too extreme. And you’ll increase turnout on both ends of the spectrum. It’s hard to see how this results in any greater harm.
Agreeing, and in addition: turnout would very likely increase among the many people who’d like to pick some positions from list A and some from list B; because, as Chronos also says:
And those people are the reverse of the extremists, and might well more than cancel them out.
That’s increasingly what we’re seeing now, with FPTP; especially with the Republican party, which now seems to be terrified of ticking off its extremists, with the result that even officeholders who might otherwise be more moderate don’t want to be seen doing anything that might lose them those votes from the extreme right.
So I don’t see how sticking with FPTP solves the radicalization problem.
Really fringe voters are most likely to be single candidate voters, meaning that most of them won’t offer up a second choice. In many elections now we have crazy voters voting for crazy candidates.
This is a very poor argument against RCV. UV, you may think you’ve discovered a heretofore undiscovered scenario that is a valid argument against RCV but to accept that, we have to believe that you alone have outthought election scholars from around the world. I hesitate to make that leap.
Voters being “too stupid” to understand election procedures and/or resist manipulation by professional politicians, or too intransigent to accept a fair and square result, seems more like an inherent problem with democracy than with any particular realization of electoral mechanics.
As for stuff like deciding whether the winner of your ranked-choice vote is going to be decided using the Schulze method, ranked pairs, a Smith-set instant runoff, or any other possibility, on one hand, there are only so many criteria, and not all of them are compatible with each other, and on the other hand it may boil down to who on the electoral committee is silver-tongued enough to persuade all the factions to agree on whatever specific procedure.
@UltraVires 's specific scenario is the tactical voting strategy of “burying”.
“I can read that ballot and know that numbers 3 through 6 are going to be fighting for scraps”
You’d also then realise that your second preference will never be counted as Joe will be one of the last two. Whereas voting for Sue lets her know she’s on the right track, and when she’s eliminated, your preference will go to Joe.
Wasn’t there also a party called The Rent is Too Damn High with a ballot line?
I remember the Right to Life party, the gym teacher at a local Catholic school ran for mayor under that party during a couple of election cycles, at least.
The BOE has indeed made a hash of this election but another problem is the generous time allotted for absentee ballots to drift in. You have to have all the ballots in hand before you finalize the count with RCV and that drives political reporters mad with impatience.
Approval voting may be better for primaries with big fields. But RCV certainly has its place and NY voters reportedly liked the process. Like a lot of other traditional ideas it’s starting to dawn on people that maybe the old ways aren’t the best ways.
Yes. Jimmy McMillan’s group. They weren’t so much a political party as Jimmy McMillan managing to get enough signatures to get on the ballot a couple of times.
McMillan is a lot of fun. I wish he’d run this time, but he seems to have retired.
New York goes in for odd parties on the ballot. I originally got a computer and got online in significant part because I was tired of seeing parties on the ballot who I couldn’t find out anything about. (Some of them I couldn’t find out much about on the net, either, but it did and does help.)
One year while on my way to the polls but still just outside the no-politicking-closer-to-the-polls line I asked somebody ‘Who’s the [can’t remember the name of it] Party?’ and they said ‘No idea. But I’m voting for them.’
I don’t think the notion you have about how it works is how it works.
Round One: Joe either wins > 50% of the total votes case, or Joe does not. Your Joe vote continues to be a Joe vote while other people, whose first vote was for Dave, Steve, Sally, or Sue get their votes redistributed to their second choice — not all four of those but which ever one of those four was in last place. That person’s voters who chosen them as their first pick are the only people whose 2nd picks come into play so far.
Round Two: Let’s say Dave was dead last. All the people whose first pick was Dave are now being treated according to their second pick; everyone else is still on their first pick. You’re still voting for Joe. We tally things up and Steve is now dead last. All the people who picked Steve as their first pick get switched to their second choice. None of these turn out to be people who picked Dave as their first choice and Steve as their second choice, although theoretically that could happen — someone could be down to their third choice. You’re still on Joe though.
Round Three: Sally is now dead last. Some of the Sally voters are actually at this point people who picked Sally as their second choice, having picked Steve as their first pick. Neither their first nor their second picks are in the running so they get switched to their third. Other Sally voters had Sally in the top slot; they get bumped to their second pick. You’re still on Joe, your first pick, because Joe is still in the running.
Round Four: Astonishingly, Joe is in dead last place. Lot of right-wingers really like Sue. Your Joe vote gets converted to your second choice, Steve, except Steve is out of the runnign, so Dave, except Dave is also out of the runnign, so Bill. You’re now voting for Bill. Sue, your first real in-your-heart choice, is still in the running. The rest of Joe’s voters also get their voted distributed to their next choice (skipping past any person who has already been eliminated).
Final Round: Bill beats Sue by one percent, exceeding the 50% threshold and becoming the winner.