Pence lawyered up just as hard as the rest of them when Mueller got started. Maybe he thought he had a reason. So we’ll have to see.
Voters who prefer simplicity have the option to do that, but it’s not in their best interest (except for the simple case of a two-candidate race). The idea is that you throw maximum support behind the candidate you sincerely hope wins and then you ask yourself, “What if that candidate gets very few votes? Who would be my second choice, or third?” then distribute points accordingly.
Consider a simple scenario where nine people are voting on what to have for lunch. Four of them love tacos and hate hamburgers while four of them love hamburgers and hate tacos, and the remaining one person loves pizza. The taco crowd and the hamburger crowd both try to convince the pizza lover to switch to their side. No matter which way it falls, you end up with four happy people and five unhappy people. But suppose it turns out that pizza is nearly everyone’s second choice. Ask all nine people to rate the options on a scale of 0 to 9 and suppose you get this result:
Tacos 9, Pizza 7, Hamburgers 0
Tacos 9, Pizza 8, Hamburgers 0
Tacos 9, Pizza 7, Hamburgers 0
Tacos 9, Pizza 6, Hamburgers 0
Tacos 0, Pizza 7, Hamburgers 9
Tacos 0, Pizza 6, Hamburgers 9
Tacos 0, Pizza 7, Hamburgers 9
Tacos 0, Pizza 8, Hamburgers 9
Tacos 2, Pizza 9, Hamburgers 0
The facts are that Tacos would make four people very happy and five people miserable, while Hamburgers would make four people happy and five people miserable, yet Pizza makes every single person pretty happy. Isn’t Pizza the best choice, if your goal is to make as many people happy as possible? Tacos have an average score of 4.2, Hamburgers have an average score of 4.0, and Pizza has a whopping 7.2 average, blowing away the other choices.
Look at it from another angle. Ask everyone if they like Pizza better than Tacos, yes/no. The answer will be 5 yeses and 4 nos. Then ask if they like Pizza better than Hamburgers, yes/no. The answer will be 5 yeses and 4 nos. Pizza wins head-to-head against all the other candidates. This is called a Condorcet Winner. In a good voting system, the Condorcet winner (if there is one) should win the election.
But look what happens when we call for a vote using “caveman” pick-just-one voting. Five people pick Tacos (enthusiastically), five people pick Hamburgers (enthusiastically) and one wants to pick Pizza but they get bullied into picking their second favorite choice, Tacos. So Tacos wins 5-4 and more than half the office is unhappy. The Condorcet winner loses.
As I said above, being everyone’s second choice is a good thing (assuming everyone is being honest about what they really want). The system we have now only gives us “51% hate me less than they hate the other person” which is way worse than “I’m everyone’s second choice”. As for the primary system, all it does is push back the same problems into two layers. It still encourages strategic voting, with a second layer of abstraction on top. You hit the nail on the head when you said it weeds out the non-viable candidates. It doesn’t weed out the candidates based on who likes them and how much. It weeds them out base on who they think has a chance to succeed in the general. And you still end up with scenarios where the Condorcet winner loses.
BTW, blank and zero are not the same thing in Range Voting. Zero means you have the lowest possible opinion for that candidate; blank means you have no opinion for that candidate. Put another way, zero is like leaving a bad Yelp review and blank is like not leaving a review at all.
Why would Pelosi resign?
If Democrats control Congress, Republican outrage would be just as impotent as Hillary’s political resurrection.
I agree. The GOP isnt all that happy with Trump. He has shown his support doesnt do much, outside of his small but loyal core.
They could happily throw Trump under the buss to make room for a stauch party loyalist like Pence.
It depends on the mid terms and what Mueller finds.If the GOP thinks that Trump lost them the mid terms, and Mueller comes up with solid stuff, the GOP could join with the Dems.
Of course that just leavesus with Pence and Ryan in charge. Hardly a big win for the Dems.
I don’t remember any Kerry diehards in 2006. Weird stuff. If you’re going to do a fancy coup, why not someone cool, like Nina Turner.
I actually pictured a hybrid of Nina Simone and Tina Turner.
I’d so vote for her.
Just throwing this out there. While the theoretical scenario of the OP is far-fetched, it’s certainly possible to have both the President and Vice President resign, as when Agnew resigned the VP in 1973, and Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment in 1974. I realize that’s not what the OP was suggesting, but since impeachment would NOT remove Trump from office and the Senate is unlikely to reach the 2/3 majority needed to do so, a double resignation is arguably more likely than a double impeachment and removal. In that case, though, we’d most likely have either Trump’s pick (if Pence resigned first) or Pence’s pick (if Trump resigned first) in the White House, and that scenario certainly gives me pause.
Range voting is optimal if everyone votes honestly, but (like every voting system), doesn’t actually provide an incentive for everyone to vote honestly. Optimal voting (i.e., the voting strategy each person would use on their own, without collusion) in a range voting system is to give the maximum score to some set of candidates, and the minimum score to everyone else. At which point you just have approval voting, and so why not use approval voting? Which, incidentally, would also lead to pizza, in the burger-taco-pizza hypothetical.
Right. If something truly appalling and inexcusable comes up AND they feel this cost them the majority, I can picture quite a few Senate R’s saying “if I’m going down, *you *are going down, Combover Boy.”
But they would not move to take out Pence, absent some sort of dead girl/live boy situation.
Let’s be frank, President Grab-‘Em-by-There does not even have the modicum of sense of public propriety that the Trickster did. Ol’ Dick was able to see “resign in disgrace, but be pardoned and be allowed to live on in peace, and the country can move ahead” as a fair deal. The Orange Dumpsterfire doing that? Laughable.
Approval voting is very good, a vast improvement over our current just-pick-one voting system. But Range Voting improves on Approval Voting by allowing you to specify which of the candidates you approve of is your first choice and which ones are your second, third, etc. choices, AND by what ratio you feel strongly about it. This becomes more apparent in the more realistic case where there are more than three candidates. Let’s replace “Pizza” with two choices, “PP” for pepperoni pizza" and “CP” for cheese pizza. Instead of just saying “I approve of T and PP and CP but I don’t approve of H”, you can say “I approve of T and PP and CP but T is my first choice and PP is a very close second but CP is a distant third” by voting T=9 PP=8 CP=4 H=0, which is very different from saying “I approve of T and PP and CP but T is my first choice and I really don’t like PP very much but it’s still better than H, whereas CP is my second favorite” by voting T=9 PP=2 CP=7 H=0.
Consider the fact that there are actually a huge number of choices for what to have for lunch. A logical way to proceed is to invite everyone in the office to submit a review for as many restaurants as they want, and pick the restaurant that gets the highest average rating. There’s just one hitch though; you need a mechanism for weeding out the options that have high ratings from just a small minority of the voters and no reviews at all from the majority. An easy way to do this is by defining a quorum. You count the largest number of reviews received by any single candidate and then disqualify the candidates that don’t get at least some fraction of that number, such as half. Now let’s imagine that the results come back like this…
McDonald’s 9 reviews, average rating 4.1
Burger King 9 reviews, average rating 3.2
Taco Bell 8 reviews, average rating 4.3
Wendy’s 7 reviews, average rating 4.4
Papa John’s Pizza, 5 reviews, average rating 7.4
Domino’s Pizza, 5 reviews, average rating 6.8
Juanita’s Taco Shack, 2 reviews, average rating 8.5
Bubba’s Rib Joint, 1 review, average rating 9.0
… In that situation, Juanita’s and Bubba’s would be disqualified because they didn’t get a quorum. Of the remaining choices, Papa John’s has the highest rating, so that’s the winner.
If you think about it, this is essentially how high schools and colleges pick Valedictorian. The professors are the voters and the students are the candidates. Each professor may or may not get a chance to rate a particular student, depending on which classes the student takes. Students who take only a few classes are disqualified. There’s a minimum number of classes you have to take in order to be eligible to graduate and only graduates can be Valedictorian. Among the qualified candidates, the winner is the one who has the highest average rating. You won’t convince me that this process would work better if all the classes were pass/fail, which is the equivalent of Approval Voting. I’ll admit it would be better than the way they pick Homecoming Queen (vote for just one), but neither of those is as good as Range Voting.
Getting back to the OP, this whole mess could have been avoided if the 2016 ballots had said “Rate each of the following candidates on a scale of 0-9, leave blank if you have no opinion”. Polls taken back during the primaries showed that, when asked head-to-head which Democrat they preferred over which Republican, Bernie Sanders consistently beat every single Republican. That seems to imply that he’d be the Condorcet Winner. In Range Voting, a Condorcet Winner always wins the election. Bernie would be President right now. But this overlooks the simple fact that very little polling was done on third party candidates and yet there were millions of people who voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson despite being told “You are wasting your vote!”. We can only imagine how many more millions would have given Jill or Gary high ratings if they had known that doing so would, in no way, “waste” their ratings of the other candidates. We very well might have ended up with something like this…
Donald Trump 170 million reviews, average rating 3.2
Hilliary Clinton 170 million reviews, average rating 3.3
Bernie Sanders 163 million reviews, average rating 5.1
Jill Stein 102 million reviews, average rating 6.2
Gary Johnson 63 million reviews, average rating 6.3
Evan McMullin 18 million reviews, average rating 4.4
Darrell Castle 7 million reviews, average rating 5.9
… And right now we’d be arguing about whether there’s any way that President Jill Stein might be impeached and replaced by Gary Johnson (who didn’t get a quorum). But it would be an academic exercise motivated by curiosity instead of motivated by widespread frustration at having a President with an extremely low popularity rating.
Yes, you can express more information using range voting, but it is never to your advantage to do so. Rank voting, where you have to assign all of the numbers from 1 to n, is a different thing, and there are also multiple different ways to interpret the result of rank voting. The simple is IRV, but there are other methods which are mathematically superior to it (though not necessarily real-world superior: One essential real-world characteristic of a voting system is that it be understood by the voters).
The likelihood of this happening is about zero, but I’d love to see that sanctimonious prat Pence found diddling a boy. Not something that would qualify removal from office, but maybe enough that the Senate would remove him using something not-really-all-that-serious as an excuse. Or maybe he’d resign to undergo conversion therapy.
But let’s take the premise of the OP that both Trump and Pence are removed from office. Assuming this doesn’t happen concurrently, whoever is POTUS after the first ouster would nominate a VP. This nomination would have to be approved by congress, no?
I could look up the rules for approval, but really it’s not necessary to answer this question: In a congressional environment where the HOR votes to impeach and the Senate convicts, who could be nominated that would be approved?
And here’s your average Republican’s vote, assuming they included all the candidates:
Trump 9
Hillary 0
Bernie 0
Jill Stein 0
Gary Johnson 1
Evan McMullin 1
Darrell Castle 1
Or, the RNC runs a commercial and it’s Trump 9 and all others 0.
(Caveat: Bernie didn’t actually run in the Presidential election. Nor was he exposed to the Trumpian/Republican Dehumorizer.)
That sounds like a very bold statement. I’m curious as to how you could back up such a claim. All I have to do is come up with a single counterexample to prove your statement wrong. Challenge accepted.
Let’s look at three voters with four choices A, B, C, and D. Suppose their true feelings are as follows:
- A9 B8 C0 D3
- A9 B8 C0 D2
- A0 B3 C9 D8
Now suppose that Voter 1 and Voter 2 follow my advice, which is to tell truth about what they want, but Voter 3 follows your advice which is to put a 9 on their favorite and 0 on everyone else. We end up with three ballots: - A9 B8 C0 D3
- A9 B8 C0 D2
- A0 B0 C9 D0
Which means the averages scores are A=6, B=5.3, C=3, D=2.7, hence A wins. However, if Voter 3 had told told the truth about their feelings and given choice B a rating of 8, then B would have won the election with a score of 6.3. This makes Voter 3 happier because they truly prefer B over A. So here’s an example where it is to a particular voter’s advantage to provide more information than simply who is their first choice. QED.
Perhaps you meant to say it isn’t in your interest to provide more information unless your favorite is going to lose. But you never know that your favorite is going to lose until after the election is over. It’s in your best interest to provide more information if you think your favorite might lose. But that’s precisely the situation that every voter finds themselves in, in every election that has more than one candidate. You always always always know that your favorite candidate might lose. If someone gives you the opportunity to hedge your bets, it’s in your best interest to take that opportunity. In any election where there are three or more candidates, why would you pass up the opportunity to specify your second choice?
My advice isn’t to put a 9 on your favorite and a 0 on everyone else. My advice is to put a 9 on everyone you find favorable and a 0 on everyone else.
In my example, Voter #3 doesn’t find candidate B favorable. V3 dislikes B almost as much as A. So, following your advice, V3 should fill out their ballot as A0 B0 C9 D9, and then A wins, which makes V3 less happy than if they’d been honest.