This is part of what both Blinking_spirit and I meant when we said when each of the voting methods has there own issues.
Agreed. I'm just saying I don't see this preferential voting system as being obviously superior to the US.
Again it is because both our Countries are happy with the Status quo where you can have a majority of the district vote against a candidate yet they still have win the seat just because they got more votes than any other candidate.
Though in the UK if we get a couple more cases where the winning party only got ~35% of the total vote yet still gain a majority of the seats and then proceed to cause carnage that may change over here.
If you really want to benifet the smaller parties like DJK seems to want to mixed member system is probably the way to go.
In that you still only make 1 vote but it counts twice. Once directly for the member you are voting for which works the same as normal in FPTP voting. The other way it counts is there are a number of 'top up' members these are allocated purely on the percentage of votes each party gets. So even if they didn't manage to win any individual seats in the House of representatives a party like the Greens or Liberatians could still get some representation depending on the percentage of the popular vote there candidates received.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
That would be because it isn't. In fact it is almost expressly designed to be the opposite.
You're saying the preferential voting system is almost expressly designed to be the opposite, or the US/UK voting system is expressly designed to be the opposite? I'm talking about the preferential voting.
That would be because it isn't. In fact it is almost expressly designed to be the opposite.
You're saying the preferential voting system is almost expressly designed to be the opposite, or the US/UK voting system is expressly designed to be the opposite? I'm talking about the preferential voting.
That was in relation to instant run off helping the third parties. Instant run off pretty much does the opposite of help them out by design, by ensuring that if they are knocked out early votes for them will get moved elsewhere until a party has that 51% of the vote.
It does not completely hid the vote for them as each round of counts I recorded and reported separately.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
That was in relation to instant run off helping the third parties. Instant run off pretty much does the opposite of help them out by design, by ensuring that if they are knocked out early votes for them will get moved elsewhere until a party has that 51% of the vote.
Ok that's what I thought. I'm glad I'm not wrong in thinking this.
That would be because it isn't. In fact it is almost expressly designed to be the opposite.
You're saying the preferential voting system is almost expressly designed to be the opposite, or the US/UK voting system is expressly designed to be the opposite? I'm talking about the preferential voting.
That was in relation to instant run off helping the third parties. Instant run off pretty much does the opposite of help them out by design, by ensuring that if they are knocked out early votes for them will get moved elsewhere until a party has that 51% of the vote.
It does not completely hid the vote for them as each round of counts I recorded and reported separately.
Ranked choice voting helps 3rd Parties in other ways. It would help 3rd Parties expand membership, and that's probably more important to 3rd Parties than winning elections. For example, there are Greens in the Democrat Party (as in I've talked with people who have described themselves as such), and that hurts the Green Party. For one, it means the people who have earned the Green Party their reputation go unchallenged. Another, it hurts candidate recruitment (at the end of the day, Jill Stein is pretty much just "some lady" because fewer politically experienced people enter a 3rd Party and instead wrap around main party for support.) Third, in the United States, political parties have to reach certain voting percent thresholds to be continue qualifying as official parties. No 3rd Party currently meets the US threshold of 5% of the vote for presidential candidates. If ranked choice voting counted first line voting, and people did not have to just strategically vote, there's a chance that multiple 3rd Political Parties could get more votes and qualify as official parties to get the benefits without "spoiling elections" for ideological opposition (main benefit: automatic ballot access because petitioning for access every cycle is expensive).
Ranked choice voting helps 3rd Parties in other ways. It would help 3rd Parties expand membership, and that's probably more important to 3rd Parties than winning elections. For example, there are Greens in the Democrat Party (as in I've talked with people who have described themselves as such), and that hurts the Green Party.
But, big picture, do we care whether something hurts the Green Party? If there are Greens in the Democratic Party (and we assume for the sake of argument that the Green platform is good), doesn't that make the Democratic Party better? And might that be a better outcome than segregating the Greens into their own little pigeonhole?
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If ranked choice voting counted first line voting, and people did not have to just strategically vote, there's a chance that multiple 3rd Political Parties could get more votes and qualify as official parties to get the benefits without "spoiling elections" for ideological opposition (main benefit: automatic ballot access because petitioning for access every cycle is expensive).
This sentiment confuses the hell out of me. You're saying that removing the third party ability to be a spoiler vote as something that actually benefits a third party in an election where they don't have a substantial following. It doesn't. It accomplishes the exact freaking opposite of that. It makes the third party completely irrelevant.
Moreover, as I said before, if we have Kang and Kodos running for election, and they're the two dominant candidates, and I completely object to either of them getting the position in question, under preferential voting, I have no recourse. I cannot vote a third party or independent candidate, because eventually the third party or independent candidate will be eliminated, and under preferential voting, I will have to switch my vote to Kang or Kodos. If I adamantly choose not to support Kang or Kodos - which should be my right under any fair and representative voting system - the vote will be thrown out. So, we have a situation in which I am disenfranchised unless I vote for Kang or Kodos.
So with all of that in mind, explain to me how, exactly, a system that mandates that third party votes have no actual consequence and will be ignored, and anyone who votes against the two major candidates will be told to change their vote for them or be disenfranchised, benefits third parties. Answer: it doesn't.
In fact, I don't see how anyone can argue this is a fair election. If I legally mandate that anyone who doesn't vote Democrat or Republican will have their votes ignored, is that a fair election? This system is essentially just that except with more steps involved.
The only way this can be considered a fair election is if I have a means of having my vote count towards the vote total, but not be made to count for either Kang or Kodos. We have this in America. I am capable of voting for anyone, and that vote stays, and still continues to be part of the total, even if it's not for a candidate that has any chance of getting the majority vote. TL;DR: the spoiler effect isn't something we should seek to avoid, because it is necessary for a fair election.
Highroller you only have the option of voting for other parties in Instant roll off voting. If you only want to vote for a single party you can mark them down to have your first preference then leave the rest of the ballot blank.
If your party is then knocked out in one of the early rounds your vote is then just discarded then total pool of votes and therefore the target number of votes needed to win goes down.
Right, which is why I don't think this is preferable to our current system. In our current system, third party votes do not get bumped out, they still continue to remain relevant because their votes are still counted in the total votes, and there is the possibility of the spoiler effect. Whereas the preferential vote system removes this.
It's been suggested that this system might be better for third parties, or more representative. It seems neither is true.
This makes literally no sense.
Lets say you have 1000 votes for trump, 975 votes for clinton, and 50 votes for Jill Stein.
In the American system, Trump wins, and the result would have been the same if the Jill Stein voters just didn't turn up. Their votes have absolutely no impact on their candidate winning, AND they don't influence who wins out of the other two.
Voting for a third party here is 100% identical to eating your ballot paper.
In a typical IRV system, the Jill Stein votes get to decide if they would rather have trump win, have clinton win, or they don't care. If say 35 of these voters vote for clinton, 8 vote for trump and 7 exahust their ballots, clinto is the winner instead.
Their votes in every rational sense count, and in some senses count more.
I don't understand why you think their votes get 'bumped out' or why you would *want* the spoiler effect.
Honestly, I think the spoiler effect is more of a myth than anything. An election that appears to be spoiled is usually the result of a major party running a very awful candidate. This doesn't just result in a notable third party turnout, but it also causes just enough people in one major party to vote for the other candidate.
Let's look at the 2000 election, since Ralph Nader is the universal pariah of the left for being a "spoiler". To a common observer, it looks like Nader cost Gore Florida. Nader got about 95,000 votes and Bush won by only a few hundred. But did you know that roughly 308,000 Democrats in Florida voted for Bush? That number of voters completely dwarfs Nader's entire vote count. If Gore had just won 1% of those voters, he wins Florida.
This is also ignoring the fact that Gore failed to win his home state of Tennessee (won both times by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996) and failed to win West Virginia (also won both times by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996). Had Gore won either of those states, he would have won even if he lost Florida. People like to blame Nader but few want to admit that Gore was a bad candidate. Gore was a wealthy, out of touch cosmopolitan that was greatly at odds with the working class that Democrats usually win over.
If ranked choice voting counted first line voting, and people did not have to just strategically vote, there's a chance that multiple 3rd Political Parties could get more votes and qualify as official parties to get the benefits without "spoiling elections" for ideological opposition (main benefit: automatic ballot access because petitioning for access every cycle is expensive).
This sentiment confuses the hell out of me. You're saying that removing the third party ability to be a spoiler vote as something that actually benefits a third party in an election where they don't have a substantial following. It doesn't. It accomplishes the exact freaking opposite of that. It makes the third party completely irrelevant.
1. Let's say this is true, which I don't believe to be but let's follow this line, I would argue a rational third party would rather be irrelevant than a liability. There's two clear cut examples in recent history: Ralph Nader and Ross Perot. The allegation that the Green Party or the future Reform Party spoiled the election did not open up a policy discussion. Ross Perot is why the Republican Party eliminated 3rd Parties from televised debates (with Democrat approval) culminated in a 15% poll popularity threshold to appear on TV. To know how much damage that causes to any presidential candidate, Ross Perot jumped from 10% in the polls in 1992 to 22% vote finish, but in 1996, his voter turnout was only 8% after being pushed out of the televised debates. Ralph Nader's allegations that he spoiled the 2000 election resulted in the Green Party and Ralph Nader (note, they ran separate candidacies in 2004) being sued all over the country to kick them off the ballot and being demonized as running against their ideology.
In both cases, historically what followed the spoiler effect was not a political discussion or a realignment to be more accommodating to 3rd Parties or their issues, but rather attempts suppress their presences, platforms, and voice.
2. This line of thinking only assumes people vote for a third party to stick it to the two major parties. They don't. There's other reasons to vote for a 3rd party. 3rd Parties exist because the people in those parties have their own agenda that they feel does not fit into any other political party (either major, minor, or 3rd Party).
3. Going back to 3rd Party "relevance," a third party does not gain relevance by endangering a major party's ability to win elections. A third party gains relevance by demonstrating their speaking to relevant issues that voters agree with. Easiest demonstration of this: in Europe, the Green Party is a political force because most European elections run under a Parliamentary system and/or runoff elections rather than our first past the post. In the United States, the Green Party struggles on all fronts in the ways I spelled out in my previous post.
Moreover, as I said before, if we have Kang and Kodos running for election, and they're the two dominant candidates, and I completely object to either of them getting the position in question, under preferential voting, I have no recourse. I cannot vote a third party or independent candidate, because eventually the third party or independent candidate will be eliminated, and under preferential voting, I will have to switch my vote to Kang or Kodos. If I adamantly choose not to support Kang or Kodos - which should be my right under any fair and representative voting system - the vote will be thrown out. So, we have a situation in which I am disenfranchised unless I vote for Kang or Kodos.
So with all of that in mind, explain to me how, exactly, a system that mandates that third party votes have no actual consequence and will be ignored, and anyone who votes against the two major candidates will be told to change their vote for them or be disenfranchised, benefits third parties. Answer: it doesn't.
I already addressed this in a post on Page 5 where I ran an entire hypothetical ranked choice election using the 2016 election. Point 3 at the end of the post is worth block quoting but I recommend going through the whole thing:
3.) Post election, there's the possibility of the parties bleeding support. We'll stick with Democrats bleeding to Greens for this. If the Democrats start bleeding support to the Greens in a first past the post election, Democrats get weaker to the Republicans benefit until either the Green defectors retreat back to the Democrats or the Greens overtake the Republicans. In a ranked choice voting system, Democrats bleed support Greens, but neither party cedes power to the Republicans so long as those new Greens continue to include Democrats on their ballots and in a higher position than Republicans. Democrats still have to worry because now if they don't shore up their base, they risk being overtaken by the Green Party, and since the spoiler effect has been eliminated, Democrats can't say that voting for Greens will put Republicans in power as a reason to come back to the party. The focus remains on swaying on policy rather than a hang up in the voting system.
In fact, I don't see how anyone can argue this is a fair election. If I legally mandate that anyone who doesn't vote Democrat or Republican will have their votes ignored, is that a fair election? This system is essentially just that except with more steps involved.
The only way this can be considered a fair election is if I have a means of having my vote count towards the vote total, but not be made to count for either Kang or Kodos. We have this in America. I am capable of voting for anyone, and that vote stays, and still continues to be part of the total, even if it's not for a candidate that has any chance of getting the majority vote. TL;DR: the spoiler effect isn't something we should seek to avoid, because it is necessary for a fair election.
To be honest, all votes for the every candidate that loses the election are ignored already, even the losing major party candidate. There is no consolation prize for second place in an American election. In ranked choice voting, the difference is a person can't win until they have passed the threshold of majority support. That doesn't happen in our current voting system.
Also, this completely ignores all the other reasons I mentioned in the post you are quoting (membership, ballot access, candidate recruitment.) Your hyperfocus on election outcomes on election nights is too narrow for why 3rd Parties want this change.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
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~~~~~
The benefit to the spoiler effect in elections is that it shows the majority party that they need to do better if they want to be able to draw in those voters the next election, thus causing that majority party to have to take those concerns of that third party into consideration else they risk the same thing happening again by those who are voting based on their ideology and are unhappy with the majority party that they are being ignored. One could argue that such voters do more harm than good to their cause by allowing the opposite majority party to potentially win as a result, however at the same time I still strongly believe that the spoiler effect does in fact give more power overall to those third party candidates and their message as even though they may never get a significant percentage of the overall vote, it can force, especially in such a significantly evenly split voter base (as exists now) the major parties to pay attention or risk losing out in the end. This can be as simple as running better candidates in general, or it can be as significant as having to change their platform in some ways in order to give those third parties what they want in order to get them to bring in their votes to the major party as they work to defeat the other majority party. It forces the majority parties to compromise with the other groups on their side of the ideological voting line.
Those who support the "beat the other major party at all costs" viewpoint of course are going to be opposed to the ability for those third parties to be a spoiler as from the majority parties viewpoint, it should be the third party that should have to compromise in order to accomplish the greater good of defeating the other major party. It is complicated to be sure, and there are obviously benefits to both the current system and the proposed (or similar) systems that essentially remove the spoiler effect.
I wonder if a compromise that would encompass both the existing system within the US as well as the proposed system could potentially work. Basically a system that would give the option of the ranked voting system, while at the same time not removing the ability to only vote for one candidate but not have that vote lose its power as the minority party candidates are removed one by one to eventually get to the final two majority parties. The goal with that not being to try to get one final candidate above 50% of all votes cast, but rather ending up with the final two candidates and then looking at the majority of votes accordingly. So the people who want their vote to go to that third party candidate only and the votes effect not to be lost as the candidates get whittled down under a pseudo-ranked system will have the option of doing just that. But at the same time giving those people who aren't as concerned with the spoiler effect or pure ideology can vote for their 2nd or 3rd ranked candidates if they so choose to allow those votes to go where they want in the end. Just throwing out some thoughts on the subject anyway.
Highroller you only have the option of voting for other parties in Instant roll off voting. If you only want to vote for a single party you can mark them down to have your first preference then leave the rest of the ballot blank.
If your party is then knocked out in one of the early rounds your vote is then just discarded then total pool of votes and therefore the target number of votes needed to win goes down.
Right, which is why I don't think this is preferable to our current system. In our current system, third party votes do not get bumped out, they still continue to remain relevant because their votes are still counted in the total votes, and there is the possibility of the spoiler effect. Whereas the preferential vote system removes this.
It's been suggested that this system might be better for third parties, or more representative. It seems neither is true.
This makes literally no sense.
Lets say you have 1000 votes for trump, 975 votes for clinton, and 50 votes for Jill Stein.
In the American system, Trump wins, and the result would have been the same if the Jill Stein voters just didn't turn up. Their votes have absolutely no impact on their candidate winning, AND they don't influence who wins out of the other two.
Voting for a third party here is 100% identical to eating your ballot paper.
Hey Verbal! How's it been with you?
No it's not, because the Jill Stein voters STILL COUNT in the American system.
In a typical IRV system, the Jill Stein votes get to decide if they would rather have trump win, have clinton win, or they don't care. If say 35 of these voters vote for clinton, 8 vote for trump and 7 exahust their ballots, clinto is the winner instead.
Whereas in the Australian system, if you do not vote for Trump or Clinton, your votes will not count.
Imagine if I created a system in which it is legal writ that you can only vote for Democrat or Republican, and any other vote will be thrown out. Is this a fair election? Absolutely not!
So, let's go back to the Australian system, which functions in the exact same way. See what I'm talking about?
Their votes in every rational sense count
I'm pretty sure "exhaust their ballots" means they do not, in ANY rational sense, count.
I don't understand why you think their votes get 'bumped out' or why you would *want* the spoiler effect.
The spoiler effect is mandatory for a fair election.
Once again, if I declared a law be passed in the United States, or any state or district, that only the Republican and Democratic parties can have their votes count, and all votes for third parties and independents will no longer count, I am tampering with the process of free elections. Fact.
So, Australia's system is likewise not free, because it's the same damn thing, just with some additional steps involved. I do not have the option of not voting for one of the two dominant candidates in any given election and still have my vote count.
Honestly, I think the spoiler effect is more of a myth than anything. An election that appears to be spoiled is usually the result of a major party running a very awful candidate. This doesn't just result in a notable third party turnout, but it also causes just enough people in one major party to vote for the other candidate.
Let's look at the 2000 election, since Ralph Nader is the universal pariah of the left for being a "spoiler". To a common observer, it looks like Nader cost Gore Florida. Nader got about 95,000 votes and Bush won by only a few hundred. But did you know that roughly 308,000 Democrats in Florida voted for Bush? That number of voters completely dwarfs Nader's entire vote count. If Gore had just won 1% of those voters, he wins Florida.
You say you think the spoiler effect is a myth, and then you describe the spoiler effect.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. The spoiler effect doesn't exist because it only happens in close races? Well, yeah, it's obviously not going to happen when one party has a landslide victory.
1. Let's say this is true, which I don't believe to be but let's follow this line, I would argue a rational third party would rather be irrelevant than a liability.
Ok, so you believe that a third party would rather be irrelevant than take votes away from one of the major parties/candidates?
So... Why are they running in the first place then? See how that doesn't make any sense?
In both cases, historically what followed the spoiler effect was not a political discussion or a realignment to be more accommodating to 3rd Parties or their issues, but rather attempts suppress their presences, platforms, and voice.
I'm not sure what your point is here. I don't think the fact that people have reacted with the attempt of suppressing their voices means third parties do not want influence. I think what they want is for people to not react to them by suppressing them.
2. This line of thinking only assumes people vote for a third party to stick it to the two major parties.
No, it doesn't. It assumes that people vote a third party because they don't want to vote for the candidate from either of the main parties, because that's a correct assumption.
Second, it doesn't matter if the people who want to stick it to a major parties don't make up all people who are third party voters. The fact remains, they exist, and it doesn't make sense to disenfranchise such people for the crime of not agreeing with other people, which is what preferential voting does.
3. Going back to 3rd Party "relevance," a third party does not gain relevance by endangering a major party's ability to win elections. A third party gains relevance by demonstrating their speaking to relevant issues that voters agree with.
I'm not talking about relevance in the sense of getting more people voting for you. I'm talking about consequence, as in you can vote a third party and your vote actually counts. Any time there is a third option other than voting a major party, this opens up the possibility of the spoiler effect. Therefore, the only way to avoid the spoiler effect is to have the votes to third options not count. When you're saying, "Oh it's so great Australia doesn't have the spoiler effect," what you are really saying is, "Oh it's so great that Australia outright tells people that their votes for various parties don't count, and that they have to do it over or be disenfranchised." It doesn't sound so great now, does it?
3.) Post election, there's the possibility of the parties bleeding support. We'll stick with Democrats bleeding to Greens for this. If the Democrats start bleeding support to the Greens in a first past the post election, Democrats get weaker to the Republicans benefit until either the Green defectors retreat back to the Democrats or the Greens overtake the Republicans.
And how will the Democrats get the Greens back?
Oh by giving the Greens what they want? Oh ok. So explain to me how this doesn't make things better for everyone?
Meanwhile, in the Australian voting system, there's no incentive to giving the Greens what they want. The Green Party people are mostly going to vote Democrat, right? They're not going to vote for the party further away ideologically from them, the Republicans. So the Democrats have no incentive to change. They can just keep doing what they're doing, because they're just going to get the Green Party votes anyway, because the Green Party votes do not constitute votes forever lost to them, they just constitute votes that will eventually come back to them.
To be honest, all votes for the every candidate that loses the election are ignored already
NO THEY ARE NOT.
Once again, there is a complete and total difference between the way the US is run right now, and an alternate version of the US in which everyone is legally mandated to vote Republican or Democrat or face being disenfranchised. The difference is the former is actually a free election, and the latter is not.
The people who vote for a third party or independent candidate in our elections are not ignored.
Once again, there is a complete and total difference between the way the US is run right now, and an alternate version of the US in which everyone is legally mandated to vote Republican or Democrat or face being disenfranchised. The difference is the former is actually a free election, and the latter is not.
The people who vote for a third party or independent candidate in our elections are not ignored.
I'm going to grab Verbal's example here and call it Scenario A: FPTP, so we're all working from a common scenario:
Lets say you have 1000 votes for trump, 975 votes for clinton, and 50 votes for Jill Stein.
In Scenario B, we have ranked voting. Everyone's rank 1 vote is as in Scenario A. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to say that Trump-first voters left their other votes blank, and 475 Clinton-first voters went for Stein second, but otherwise blank. However, all the Stein-first voters voted Clinton second.
So we have:
Scenario A:
Trump: 1,000
Clinton: 975
Stein: 50
Trump wins with a plurality. In your interpretation, the Stein votes count here.
In Scenario B, the Stein/Clinton votes (as Stein doesn't win) shift to Clinton; Clinton then wins with a majority. I would argue that the Stein/Clinton votes actually do count in this scenario. Their vote said: "I want Stein, but I would rather Clinton win than Trump." The system said "Stein has insufficient votes for victory, but you can use your vote to sway the Trump/Clinton decision." And that's what happened. They might not have gotten Stein, but their vote was Stein/Clinton, and not just Stein (if those 50 had voted Stein/-, rather than Stein/Clinton, Trump would have won). Why do their votes count any less than under Scenario A?
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I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
In Scenario B, the Stein/Clinton votes (as Stein doesn't win) shift to Clinton; Clinton then wins with a majority. I would argue that the Stein/Clinton votes actually do count in this scenario. Their vote said: "I want Stein, but I would rather Clinton win than Trump." The system said "Stein has insufficient votes for victory, but you can use your vote to sway the Trump/Clinton decision." And that's what happened. They might not have gotten Stein, but their vote was Stein/Clinton, and not just Stein (if those 50 had voted Stein/-, rather than Stein/Clinton, Trump would have won). Why do their votes count any less than under Scenario A?
I've explained that in the very quote that you quoted.
Quote from Highroller »
Once again, there is a complete and total difference between the way the US is run right now, and an alternate version of the US in which everyone is legally mandated to vote Republican or Democrat or face being disenfranchised. The difference is the former is actually a free election, and the latter is not.
In Scenario B, the Stein/Clinton votes (as Stein doesn't win) shift to Clinton; Clinton then wins with a majority. I would argue that the Stein/Clinton votes actually do count in this scenario. Their vote said: "I want Stein, but I would rather Clinton win than Trump." The system said "Stein has insufficient votes for victory, but you can use your vote to sway the Trump/Clinton decision." And that's what happened. They might not have gotten Stein, but their vote was Stein/Clinton, and not just Stein (if those 50 had voted Stein/-, rather than Stein/Clinton, Trump would have won). Why do their votes count any less than under Scenario A?
I've explained that in the very quote that you quoted.
Quote from Highroller »
Once again, there is a complete and total difference between the way the US is run right now, and an alternate version of the US in which everyone is legally mandated to vote Republican or Democrat or face being disenfranchised. The difference is the former is actually a free election, and the latter is not.
You'll need to unpack that a little for me, because I'm not seeing it. What do you define as 'disenfranchised' in this circumstance?
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Quote from MD »
I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
You'll need to unpack that a little for me, because I'm not seeing it. What do you define as 'disenfranchised' in this circumstance?
If we passed a law that said that you could only vote Republican or Democrat in an election, and anyone who didn't want to vote Republican or Democrat would be deprived of their vote, would you regard this election as fair?
Because that is precisely what this is. You are legally mandating that someone vote between one of two dominant parties, which is government interference in an election, and you're saying that anyone who doesn't want either of those two does not get a vote, which is disenfranchisement.
There is no way one can argue that preferential voting creates a fair election.
You'll need to unpack that a little for me, because I'm not seeing it. What do you define as 'disenfranchised' in this circumstance?
If we passed a law that said that you could only vote Republican or Democrat in an election, and anyone who didn't want to vote Republican or Democrat would be deprived of their vote, would you regard this election as fair?
Because that is precisely what this is. You are legally mandating that someone vote between one of two dominant parties, which is government interference in an election, and you're saying that anyone who doesn't want either of those two does not get a vote, which is disenfranchisement.
There is no way one can argue that preferential voting creates a fair election.
This must be some new definition of 'precisely what this is', because 'mandating voting for Republican or Democrat' is not what this is.
To start with, you have the same voting options as you do in the current FPTP system (Trump/-, Clinton/-, Stein/-), but you also have the option of expressing a second preference (Trump/Clinton/-, Trump/Stein/-, Clinton/Trump/-, Clinton/Stein/-, Stein/Clinton/-, Stein/Trump/-) or a third preference (though I think the third preference isn't strictly relevant in an election with three candidates).
Preferential voting just means that - if your preferred candidate doesn't win - you can effectively vote in a run-off between the remaining candidates. If you choose to do so! You don't have to! You're not saying anyone who doesn't want either of the two main parties doesn't get a vote, because you can vote third party (in our example, Stein/- is still an option).
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I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
This must be some new definition of 'precisely what this is', because 'mandating voting for Republican or Democrat' is not what this is.
Of course it is.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the candidates get whittled away after the first round of voting. Eventually any candidate that is not one of the dominant candidates will be eliminated, during which a person must either switch their votes to a new candidate or have that vote be thrown out. Thus, one faces a choice of either having to vote one of the dominant candidates or have one's vote be thrown away, which is not only government infringement on a free election, but also anyone who does not want either of the dominant candidates to win is incapable of protest voting and must vote for one of the dominant parties, making it disenfranchisement of anyone who does not support a dominant party.
Preferential voting just means that - if your preferred candidate doesn't win - you can effectively vote in a run-off between the remaining candidates. If you choose to do so! You don't have to!
Oh, so I can choose to have my vote thrown away? How thoughtful of you!
You're not saying anyone who doesn't want either of the two main parties doesn't get a vote, because you can vote third party (in our example, Stein/- is still an option).
Until the option gets taken away, which it inevitably will, and then I am forced to vote for other candidates or forfeit my vote.
I'm still not seeing how that aspect is different to FPTP.
FPTP:
Trump: 1,000
Clinton: 975
Stein: 50
Are Stein and Clinton voters forfeiting their vote?
Preferential (amended to include Stein/- voters):
Trump/- : 1,000
Clinton/- : 500
Clinton/Stein: 475
Stein/Clinton: 40
Stein/- : 10
Round 1: Trump 1,000; Clinton 975; Stein 50
Stein/Clinton voters switch to Clinton
Round 2: Trump 1,000; Clinton 1,015
Are Stein/- voters throwing away their vote any more than FPTP-Stein voters?
I guess where I'm having the disconnect is where you talk about votes being thrown away after each round of voting. To me, it appears that in FPTP, there's one round of voting and ALL the non-winning-candidate votes are thrown away. Anyone who doesn't want one of the major candidates to win has exactly the option they have under FPTP, which is Candidate/-. Or even ranking all the non-dominant candidates, and not the dominant candidates, so they have a _better_ chance of preventing one of the dominant candidates from winning.
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Quote from MD »
I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
You'll need to unpack that a little for me, because I'm not seeing it. What do you define as 'disenfranchised' in this circumstance?
If we passed a law that said that you could only vote Republican or Democrat in an election, and anyone who didn't want to vote Republican or Democrat would be deprived of their vote, would you regard this election as fair?
Because that is precisely what this is. You are legally mandating that someone vote between one of two dominant parties, which is government interference in an election, and you're saying that anyone who doesn't want either of those two does not get a vote, which is disenfranchisement.
There is no way one can argue that preferential voting creates a fair election.
There is no rational way in which this is occurring. EVERYONES VOTE STILL COUNTS.
in a FPTP election, it is *more* true that the stein voters votes don't count because they have *literal zero* impact on determining the winner. Their votes are 100% identical to not turning up to vote.
In a preferential system, once you've knocked out the lowest voted person - be they democrat, republican, green or zoolanderologist, all those people's votes get counted *again*.
The point Highroller is making about votes being thrown out is different form 'not being for the winning candidate'. The purpose of preferential voting is so that the winner has 50%+1 votes. So in the scenario described
Trump/- : 1,000
Clinton/- : 500
Clinton/Stein: 475
Stein/Clinton: 40
Stein/- : 10
Round 1: Trump 1,000; Clinton 975; Stein 50
Stein/Clinton voters switch to Clinton
Round 2: Trump 1,000; Clinton 1,015
There is a total of 2,025 votes so to win a candidate needs 1,013 votes. However in the second round you have here we are throwing out the 10 Stein so there is only vote a total of 2,015 meaning a candidate only needs 1,008 votes to win. So the 10 Stein only votes literally aren't being counted any more. This is the problem Highroller was talking about. In an actually free election with the same rules if the margins had been a little different and neither Clinton nor Trump got the needed 1,013 votes(because 10 people didn't vote for either) then neither should have won and a new election would need to be done. However because no one wants that they simply don't count the 10 Stein votes so that someone is guaranteed to get 50%+1.
The point Highroller is making about votes being thrown out is different form 'not being for the winning candidate'. The purpose of preferential voting is so that the winner has 50%+1 votes. So in the scenario described
Trump/- : 1,000
Clinton/- : 500
Clinton/Stein: 475
Stein/Clinton: 40
Stein/- : 10
Round 1: Trump 1,000; Clinton 975; Stein 50
Stein/Clinton voters switch to Clinton
Round 2: Trump 1,000; Clinton 1,015
There is a total of 2,025 votes so to win a candidate needs 1,013 votes. However in the second round you have here we are throwing out the 10 Stein so there is only vote a total of 2,015 meaning a candidate only needs 1,008 votes to win. So the 10 Stein only votes literally aren't being counted any more. This is the problem Highroller was talking about. In an actually free election with the same rules if the margins had been a little different and neither Clinton nor Trump got the needed 1,013 votes(because 10 people didn't vote for either) then neither should have won and a new election would need to be done. However because no one wants that they simply don't count the 10 Stein votes so that someone is guaranteed to get 50%+1.
I do not see why you would classify that as a "free election" and not the preferential voting one.
Assuming the voters all still have the same preferences, your proposed runoff election would have the same result as round 2 of preferential voting. 10 former Stein voters would stay home and the rest would vote for their second choice. The voter total would drop to 2015 and 1008 votes would be needed for a win.
Highroller, let's clear the air on one thing before continuing: Ranked Choice Voting is the Green Party's idea. They've been running with it since before 2002 (I've looked through their old bylaws and platforms since I joined their party), and from what I've heard through the grapevine, it's not just being pushed by the Green Party in the United States. It's considered a core of their international movement. So while I can't speak for all 3rd Parties, Greens (whether they're major like in Europe, minor like in UK or Canada, or 3rd like in the US), there's one political movement that is pushing all in on this voting reform.
Jill Stein even made it a core tenant of her campaign. While I can't peg exactly what isn't connecting with you accepting this, I feel like you should know US 3rd Parties as a whole settled this issue over a decade ago, and they settled on supporting the issue. I recommend doing more research to see if you can find where the missing piece is.
Quote from Highroller »
To be honest, all votes for the every candidate that loses the election are ignored already
NO THEY ARE NOT.
Once again, there is a complete and total difference between the way the US is run right now, and an alternate version of the US in which everyone is legally mandated to vote Republican or Democrat or face being disenfranchised. The difference is the former is actually a free election, and the latter is not.
The people who vote for a third party or independent candidate in our elections are not ignored.
I feel this is the core of our disagreement. Quick note, I'm not just talking about 3rd Party candidates. I'm talking about ALL other candidates. Right now the Executive Branch of our government is under Republican Control. It is under Republican control through 46% of the vote... or 24% if we count the people who did not or could not vote. Donald Trump is attempting to barrel ahead as though he won 1000% of the vote and claiming that the only reason he did not win the popular vote was because rampant in person voter fraud that gave the opposition three million votes. While Congress may be hung up, the parts of the agenda that Donald Trump has unilateral control over has been making decisions that represents less than half of the people who voted in the last election (and possibly a third of all Americans). So yes, I believe our votes are being ignored and furthermore that voter fraud claim is an attempt to suppress us from expressing them in the future.
Our broken electoral system put us in this position, and the drawbacks of first past the post voting positioned Donald Trump to win through that broken electoral process. Only 45% of Republican Primary voters voted for Donald Trump to be the nominee of the Republican Party. The other 55% split the vote between sixteen other competitors. However, all those competitors lost because they ran against each other, and instead of that 55% settling on a candidate a large minority (still a minority) gamed the Party and put the least qualified man in charge of their movement because he was the loudest.
So while I appreciate that you have all-caps passion defending our current system, the voting system you are defending as necessary has put a fringe candidate with no qualifications into the White House. I despise the outcome First Past the Post has given us, the majority of Americans are not happy with what first past the post voting spat out of the Republican Primary, and while some others may think we should just put better people into that system, I feel that's a good reason to examine a new system.
[quote from="Kahedron »" url="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/community-forums/debate/772502-voting-system-in-the-us?comment=123"]Highroller you only have the option of voting for other parties in Instant roll off voting. If you only want to vote for a single party you can mark them down to have your first preference then leave the rest of the ballot blank.
If your party is then knocked out in one of the early rounds your vote is then just discarded then total pool of votes and therefore the target number of votes needed to win goes down.
Right, which is why I don't think this is preferable to our current system. In our current system, third party votes do not get bumped out, they still continue to remain relevant because their votes are still counted in the total votes, and there is the possibility of the spoiler effect. Whereas the preferential vote system removes this.
It's been suggested that this system might be better for third parties, or more representative. It seems neither is true.
This makes literally no sense.
Lets say you have 1000 votes for trump, 975 votes for clinton, and 50 votes for Jill Stein.
In the American system, Trump wins, and the result would have been the same if the Jill Stein voters just didn't turn up. Their votes have absolutely no impact on their candidate winning, AND they don't influence who wins out of the other two.
Voting for a third party here is 100% identical to eating your ballot paper.
I feel like this indicates you don't know what a runoff is, how it applies in an election, or how common it is in the world even beyond politics.
An election should be declared inconclusive if no one candidate wins a majority of the vote and runoffs ensue where people may or may not choose from candidates who performed th closest to best. The fact we don't have runoffs opens us up to Donald Trump being a feature, not an anomaly of our elections. Even political party internal voting (IE the DNC chair race) works off runoffs until a majority consensus can be reached.
1. Let's say this is true, which I don't believe to be but let's follow this line, I would argue a rational third party would rather be irrelevant than a liability.
Ok, so you believe that a third party would rather be irrelevant than take votes away from one of the major parties/candidates?
So... Why are they running in the first place then? See how that doesn't make any sense?
Before we get into relevance vs. liability: Why run? Good question, let's go through a few reasons.
1. Because they want to. This is the most basic reason. It doesn't matter why or how rational, if someone wants to run for president and can get the money to they can.
2. Ballot access. This gets into probably the biggest reason 3rd Parties run for president. In the United States, any political party that earns 5% of the popular vote gets automatic ballot access in the next federal election and qualifies for matching funds. That would be a huge relief to those parties if they got money from the government and didn't have to spend between $15,000 to $50,000 dollars per state each election cycle just for ballot access.
3. Visibility to push different points of view. Just because "relevance" is not an issue in ballot results under RCV does not mean that having a national platform to try to push reforms is gone.
Now then, let's circle back around to liability. Being a liability costs 3rd Parties more relevance than being irrelevant. It even shows in 3rd Party candidates. Ralph Nader in 2000 was polling around 5%. However, when it became clear that Al Gore was going to lose if Ralph Nader held those numbers, suddenly Ralph Nader's support collapsed by half. That was especially painful for the Green Party because had Ranked Choice voting been in place, instead of Ralph Nader losing support, more people could have written in Al Gore as a second choice. When Nader was eliminated for the instant runoff election, the Green Party no longer cares about relevance anymore: Ralph Nader finished with 5% of the vote, they have ballot access in all 50 states and matching funds, and they can keep trying in future elections.
Instead, Greens have to spend close to a million dollars each cycle for ballot access and even then haven't reached complete access yet. What do you think is more disenfrachising: being eliminated from the run offs with ballot access in all fifty states and having matching funds the next election, or having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to maybe have adequate ballot access when those funds could have gone to campaigns themselves?
I take it back, I think the point you're missing is that Ranked Choice voting is seen as a money saver for third parties. They care about relevance, but being a liability is vastly more expensive than runoff elections existing to 3rd Parties.
Quote from Highroller »
3. Going back to 3rd Party "relevance," a third party does not gain relevance by endangering a major party's ability to win elections. A third party gains relevance by demonstrating their speaking to relevant issues that voters agree with.
I'm not talking about relevance in the sense of getting more people voting for you. I'm talking about consequence, as in you can vote a third party and your vote actually counts. Any time there is a third option other than voting a major party, this opens up the possibility of the spoiler effect. Therefore, the only way to avoid the spoiler effect is to have the votes to third options not count. When you're saying, "Oh it's so great Australia doesn't have the spoiler effect," what you are really saying is, "Oh it's so great that Australia outright tells people that their votes for various parties don't count, and that they have to do it over or be disenfranchised." It doesn't sound so great now, does it?
Two things:
1. Are you suggesting that getting more people to vote for a third party is irrelevant to a 3rd Party?
2. How does their vote not count as opposed to it not counting in the United States? Whether someone finishes with 2% of the vote in the US or someone finishes with 2% of the vote in a RCV system, the result is the same: that person is eliminated from the election. That isn't disenfranchisement; that's math.
3.) Post election, there's the possibility of the parties bleeding support. We'll stick with Democrats bleeding to Greens for this. If the Democrats start bleeding support to the Greens in a first past the post election, Democrats get weaker to the Republicans benefit until either the Green defectors retreat back to the Democrats or the Greens overtake the Republicans.
And how will the Democrats get the Greens back?
Oh by giving the Greens what they want? Oh ok. So explain to me how this doesn't make things better for everyone?
Meanwhile, in the Australian voting system, there's no incentive to giving the Greens what they want. The Green Party people are mostly going to vote Democrat, right? They're not going to vote for the party further away ideologically from them, the Republicans. So the Democrats have no incentive to change. They can just keep doing what they're doing, because they're just going to get the Green Party votes anyway, because the Green Party votes do not constitute votes forever lost to them, they just constitute votes that will eventually come back to them.
The Republican Party's House of Representatives just imploded last Friday (3/24/17) because they tried to give everyone in their party what they wanted on Healthcare repeal and replace. The GOP as a whole now is pointing fingers, and their prospects in 2018 elections have already become more grim because they were already looking bad with Donald Trump at their helm. Trying to make things better for such a broad coalition gave no one what they wanted and instead the opposition (ME :D) won this round. That's what's wrong.
About the Australian Greens, while the Democrats (are there Democrats in Australia?) are not trying for Green votes, there are Greens definitely trying for Democrats' (or their equivalent voters. In fact, if what you say is true, the Greens are going to enjoy being ignored because they can focus on convincing people to put their party at the top of the ballot without being yelled at for putting George W. Bush into power even though they didn't. Even if they aren't winning elections, their presence is not a threat to their ballot status, and if the Greens are successful, the tables flip. Now Greens have to watch their back so they aren't ousted by the Democrats trying to woo voters to put them back at the top of the ballot.
Sorry for the double post. I'm on my phone typing this one out, and I'm having problems copying the quote text into my above post. I will combine the posts late tonight or tomorrow unless someone tells me they don't mind that I did this.
Ranked choice voting helps 3rd Parties in other ways. It would help 3rd Parties expand membership, and that's probably more important to 3rd Parties than winning elections. For example, there are Greens in the Democrat Party (as in I've talked with people who have described themselves as such), and that hurts the Green Party.
But, big picture, do we care whether something hurts the Green Party? If there are Greens in the Democratic Party (and we assume for the sake of argument that the Green platform is good), doesn't that make the Democratic Party better? And might that be a better outcome than segregating the Greens into their own little pigeonhole?
No. It makes the Democrats, and society as a whole, worse.
This is actually a little off topic from ranked choice voting, but funneling Greens (and other left political positions) into the Democrat Party while the Republicans funnel Libertarians, Constitution Party, and other definitely at best adjacent right wing issues (and at worst extremist) is it amplifies societal echo chambers/political polarization/split.
It also, as I mentioned in my response to Highroller, crippled the Republican House functionality, bred problems in the Democrat Party to move as a whole unified Party, and sent both parties to consider the other's agenda the devil, driving up partisanship. I will say that Greens (and other left leaders) in the Democrats has done significantly less damage than whoever the Republicans picked up because that's not just picking up 3rd Parties who are tangential to their platform that cause their problems.
It's taken a lot longer for this sort of politics to seep into Europe, in part because their political scene is much more flexible to where a multi-party system thrives. Multi-party generally makes it a requirement for political parties to cooperate in order to operate the government, which requires politicans to run on willingness to cross party lines before entering office. The thought of doing that in the United States right now is a liability for being kicked out of office by a primary challenger.
I think a multi-party scene might help the American political process.
Our broken electoral system put us in this position, and the drawbacks of first past the post voting positioned Donald Trump to win through that broken electoral process. Only 45% of Republican Primary voters voted for Donald Trump to be the nominee of the Republican Party. The other 55% split the vote between sixteen other competitors. However, all those competitors lost because they ran against each other, and instead of that 55% settling on a candidate a large minority (still a minority) gamed the Party and put the least qualified man in charge of their movement because he was the loudest.
So while I appreciate that you have all-caps passion defending our current system, the voting system you are defending as necessary has put a fringe candidate with no qualifications into the White House. I despise the outcome First Past the Post has given us, the majority of Americans are not happy with what first past the post voting spat out of the Republican Primary, and while some others may think we should just put better people into that system, I feel that's a good reason to examine a new system.
I'm confused as to why you're condemning our system for this result and advocating a multiparty system instead when it is routine for presidents/prime ministers in multiparty systems to enter office with much smaller percentages of the vote than that. Yes, first-past-the-post elected a demagogue this time around, but there is nothing in first-past-the-post that makes it more vulnerable to demagogues and nothing in a multiparty system that insulates it from them. A multiparty system elected Hitler, after all, and with just 33% of the vote. If you had been a German in 1934, would you be condemning the multiparty system for the result and advocating for a switch to first-past-the-post? But fast-forward to today: the Federal Republic of Germany still uses a multiparty system, but instead of Hitler they've got the humane and highly competent Angela Merkel (who took office with 35% of the vote, by the way). And looking back at our own system, out of forty-five presidents, we've only elected one Trump. Empirically, both systems seem to have pretty good track records, but nevertheless are still capable of occasionally failing in the face of demagoguery and a populace willing to fall for it.
So maybe take a step back and take an examination of your own reasoning here. Because, bluntly, all I see is sour grapes.
This is actually a little off topic from ranked choice voting, but funneling Greens (and other left political positions) into the Democrat Party while the Republicans funnel Libertarians, Constitution Party, and other definitely at best adjacent right wing issues (and at worst extremist) is it amplifies societal echo chambers/political polarization/split.
Walk me through the logic behind saying that big tent parties are worse echo chambers than small special-interest parties. Certainly the Communists I know who are willing to work with the Democrats are not nearly as batty as the Communists who only hang out with other Communists. Ditto Libertarians et al.
Multi-party generally makes it a requirement for political parties to cooperate in order to operate the government, which requires politicans to run on willingness to cross party lines before entering office. The thought of doing that in the United States right now is a liability for being kicked out of office by a primary challenger.
Yes, small parties have to form coalitions. Big parties are coalitions. And lest you complain that the coalitions are calcified by the two-party system, remember that Trump won by flipping traditionally Democratic states and demographics. It is as if, in a multiparty system, the Blue Collar White Guy Party defected from their traditional left-leaning coalition to form a government with the rightists. Only the decision was made at the individual level rather than the party level. Which actually seems more democratic to me.
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Again it is because both our Countries are happy with the Status quo where you can have a majority of the district vote against a candidate yet they still have win the seat just because they got more votes than any other candidate.
Though in the UK if we get a couple more cases where the winning party only got ~35% of the total vote yet still gain a majority of the seats and then proceed to cause carnage that may change over here.
If you really want to benifet the smaller parties like DJK seems to want to mixed member system is probably the way to go.
In that you still only make 1 vote but it counts twice. Once directly for the member you are voting for which works the same as normal in FPTP voting. The other way it counts is there are a number of 'top up' members these are allocated purely on the percentage of votes each party gets. So even if they didn't manage to win any individual seats in the House of representatives a party like the Greens or Liberatians could still get some representation depending on the percentage of the popular vote there candidates received.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
The Crafters' Rules Guru
That was in relation to instant run off helping the third parties. Instant run off pretty much does the opposite of help them out by design, by ensuring that if they are knocked out early votes for them will get moved elsewhere until a party has that 51% of the vote.
It does not completely hid the vote for them as each round of counts I recorded and reported separately.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
The Crafters' Rules Guru
Ranked choice voting helps 3rd Parties in other ways. It would help 3rd Parties expand membership, and that's probably more important to 3rd Parties than winning elections. For example, there are Greens in the Democrat Party (as in I've talked with people who have described themselves as such), and that hurts the Green Party. For one, it means the people who have earned the Green Party their reputation go unchallenged. Another, it hurts candidate recruitment (at the end of the day, Jill Stein is pretty much just "some lady" because fewer politically experienced people enter a 3rd Party and instead wrap around main party for support.) Third, in the United States, political parties have to reach certain voting percent thresholds to be continue qualifying as official parties. No 3rd Party currently meets the US threshold of 5% of the vote for presidential candidates. If ranked choice voting counted first line voting, and people did not have to just strategically vote, there's a chance that multiple 3rd Political Parties could get more votes and qualify as official parties to get the benefits without "spoiling elections" for ideological opposition (main benefit: automatic ballot access because petitioning for access every cycle is expensive).
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Moreover, as I said before, if we have Kang and Kodos running for election, and they're the two dominant candidates, and I completely object to either of them getting the position in question, under preferential voting, I have no recourse. I cannot vote a third party or independent candidate, because eventually the third party or independent candidate will be eliminated, and under preferential voting, I will have to switch my vote to Kang or Kodos. If I adamantly choose not to support Kang or Kodos - which should be my right under any fair and representative voting system - the vote will be thrown out. So, we have a situation in which I am disenfranchised unless I vote for Kang or Kodos.
So with all of that in mind, explain to me how, exactly, a system that mandates that third party votes have no actual consequence and will be ignored, and anyone who votes against the two major candidates will be told to change their vote for them or be disenfranchised, benefits third parties. Answer: it doesn't.
In fact, I don't see how anyone can argue this is a fair election. If I legally mandate that anyone who doesn't vote Democrat or Republican will have their votes ignored, is that a fair election? This system is essentially just that except with more steps involved.
The only way this can be considered a fair election is if I have a means of having my vote count towards the vote total, but not be made to count for either Kang or Kodos. We have this in America. I am capable of voting for anyone, and that vote stays, and still continues to be part of the total, even if it's not for a candidate that has any chance of getting the majority vote. TL;DR: the spoiler effect isn't something we should seek to avoid, because it is necessary for a fair election.
This makes literally no sense.
Lets say you have 1000 votes for trump, 975 votes for clinton, and 50 votes for Jill Stein.
In the American system, Trump wins, and the result would have been the same if the Jill Stein voters just didn't turn up. Their votes have absolutely no impact on their candidate winning, AND they don't influence who wins out of the other two.
Voting for a third party here is 100% identical to eating your ballot paper.
In a typical IRV system, the Jill Stein votes get to decide if they would rather have trump win, have clinton win, or they don't care. If say 35 of these voters vote for clinton, 8 vote for trump and 7 exahust their ballots, clinto is the winner instead.
Their votes in every rational sense count, and in some senses count more.
I don't understand why you think their votes get 'bumped out' or why you would *want* the spoiler effect.
Let's look at the 2000 election, since Ralph Nader is the universal pariah of the left for being a "spoiler". To a common observer, it looks like Nader cost Gore Florida. Nader got about 95,000 votes and Bush won by only a few hundred. But did you know that roughly 308,000 Democrats in Florida voted for Bush? That number of voters completely dwarfs Nader's entire vote count. If Gore had just won 1% of those voters, he wins Florida.
This is also ignoring the fact that Gore failed to win his home state of Tennessee (won both times by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996) and failed to win West Virginia (also won both times by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996). Had Gore won either of those states, he would have won even if he lost Florida. People like to blame Nader but few want to admit that Gore was a bad candidate. Gore was a wealthy, out of touch cosmopolitan that was greatly at odds with the working class that Democrats usually win over.
1. Let's say this is true, which I don't believe to be but let's follow this line, I would argue a rational third party would rather be irrelevant than a liability. There's two clear cut examples in recent history: Ralph Nader and Ross Perot. The allegation that the Green Party or the future Reform Party spoiled the election did not open up a policy discussion. Ross Perot is why the Republican Party eliminated 3rd Parties from televised debates (with Democrat approval) culminated in a 15% poll popularity threshold to appear on TV. To know how much damage that causes to any presidential candidate, Ross Perot jumped from 10% in the polls in 1992 to 22% vote finish, but in 1996, his voter turnout was only 8% after being pushed out of the televised debates. Ralph Nader's allegations that he spoiled the 2000 election resulted in the Green Party and Ralph Nader (note, they ran separate candidacies in 2004) being sued all over the country to kick them off the ballot and being demonized as running against their ideology.
In both cases, historically what followed the spoiler effect was not a political discussion or a realignment to be more accommodating to 3rd Parties or their issues, but rather attempts suppress their presences, platforms, and voice.
2. This line of thinking only assumes people vote for a third party to stick it to the two major parties. They don't. There's other reasons to vote for a 3rd party. 3rd Parties exist because the people in those parties have their own agenda that they feel does not fit into any other political party (either major, minor, or 3rd Party).
3. Going back to 3rd Party "relevance," a third party does not gain relevance by endangering a major party's ability to win elections. A third party gains relevance by demonstrating their speaking to relevant issues that voters agree with. Easiest demonstration of this: in Europe, the Green Party is a political force because most European elections run under a Parliamentary system and/or runoff elections rather than our first past the post. In the United States, the Green Party struggles on all fronts in the ways I spelled out in my previous post.
I already addressed this in a post on Page 5 where I ran an entire hypothetical ranked choice election using the 2016 election. Point 3 at the end of the post is worth block quoting but I recommend going through the whole thing:
To be honest, all votes for the every candidate that loses the election are ignored already, even the losing major party candidate. There is no consolation prize for second place in an American election. In ranked choice voting, the difference is a person can't win until they have passed the threshold of majority support. That doesn't happen in our current voting system.
Also, this completely ignores all the other reasons I mentioned in the post you are quoting (membership, ballot access, candidate recruitment.) Your hyperfocus on election outcomes on election nights is too narrow for why 3rd Parties want this change.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Those who support the "beat the other major party at all costs" viewpoint of course are going to be opposed to the ability for those third parties to be a spoiler as from the majority parties viewpoint, it should be the third party that should have to compromise in order to accomplish the greater good of defeating the other major party. It is complicated to be sure, and there are obviously benefits to both the current system and the proposed (or similar) systems that essentially remove the spoiler effect.
I wonder if a compromise that would encompass both the existing system within the US as well as the proposed system could potentially work. Basically a system that would give the option of the ranked voting system, while at the same time not removing the ability to only vote for one candidate but not have that vote lose its power as the minority party candidates are removed one by one to eventually get to the final two majority parties. The goal with that not being to try to get one final candidate above 50% of all votes cast, but rather ending up with the final two candidates and then looking at the majority of votes accordingly. So the people who want their vote to go to that third party candidate only and the votes effect not to be lost as the candidates get whittled down under a pseudo-ranked system will have the option of doing just that. But at the same time giving those people who aren't as concerned with the spoiler effect or pure ideology can vote for their 2nd or 3rd ranked candidates if they so choose to allow those votes to go where they want in the end. Just throwing out some thoughts on the subject anyway.
No it's not, because the Jill Stein voters STILL COUNT in the American system.
Whereas in the Australian system, if you do not vote for Trump or Clinton, your votes will not count.
Imagine if I created a system in which it is legal writ that you can only vote for Democrat or Republican, and any other vote will be thrown out. Is this a fair election? Absolutely not!
So, let's go back to the Australian system, which functions in the exact same way. See what I'm talking about?
I'm pretty sure "exhaust their ballots" means they do not, in ANY rational sense, count.
The spoiler effect is mandatory for a fair election.
Once again, if I declared a law be passed in the United States, or any state or district, that only the Republican and Democratic parties can have their votes count, and all votes for third parties and independents will no longer count, I am tampering with the process of free elections. Fact.
So, Australia's system is likewise not free, because it's the same damn thing, just with some additional steps involved. I do not have the option of not voting for one of the two dominant candidates in any given election and still have my vote count.
You say you think the spoiler effect is a myth, and then you describe the spoiler effect.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. The spoiler effect doesn't exist because it only happens in close races? Well, yeah, it's obviously not going to happen when one party has a landslide victory.
So... Why are they running in the first place then? See how that doesn't make any sense?
I'm not sure what your point is here. I don't think the fact that people have reacted with the attempt of suppressing their voices means third parties do not want influence. I think what they want is for people to not react to them by suppressing them.
No, it doesn't. It assumes that people vote a third party because they don't want to vote for the candidate from either of the main parties, because that's a correct assumption.
Second, it doesn't matter if the people who want to stick it to a major parties don't make up all people who are third party voters. The fact remains, they exist, and it doesn't make sense to disenfranchise such people for the crime of not agreeing with other people, which is what preferential voting does.
I'm not talking about relevance in the sense of getting more people voting for you. I'm talking about consequence, as in you can vote a third party and your vote actually counts. Any time there is a third option other than voting a major party, this opens up the possibility of the spoiler effect. Therefore, the only way to avoid the spoiler effect is to have the votes to third options not count. When you're saying, "Oh it's so great Australia doesn't have the spoiler effect," what you are really saying is, "Oh it's so great that Australia outright tells people that their votes for various parties don't count, and that they have to do it over or be disenfranchised." It doesn't sound so great now, does it?
And how will the Democrats get the Greens back?
Oh by giving the Greens what they want? Oh ok. So explain to me how this doesn't make things better for everyone?
Meanwhile, in the Australian voting system, there's no incentive to giving the Greens what they want. The Green Party people are mostly going to vote Democrat, right? They're not going to vote for the party further away ideologically from them, the Republicans. So the Democrats have no incentive to change. They can just keep doing what they're doing, because they're just going to get the Green Party votes anyway, because the Green Party votes do not constitute votes forever lost to them, they just constitute votes that will eventually come back to them.
NO THEY ARE NOT.
Once again, there is a complete and total difference between the way the US is run right now, and an alternate version of the US in which everyone is legally mandated to vote Republican or Democrat or face being disenfranchised. The difference is the former is actually a free election, and the latter is not.
The people who vote for a third party or independent candidate in our elections are not ignored.
So we have:
Scenario A:
Trump: 1,000
Clinton: 975
Stein: 50
Trump wins with a plurality. In your interpretation, the Stein votes count here.
Scenario B:
Trump/- : 1,000
Clinton/- : 500
Clinton/Stein: 475
Stein/Clinton: 50
In Scenario B, the Stein/Clinton votes (as Stein doesn't win) shift to Clinton; Clinton then wins with a majority. I would argue that the Stein/Clinton votes actually do count in this scenario. Their vote said: "I want Stein, but I would rather Clinton win than Trump." The system said "Stein has insufficient votes for victory, but you can use your vote to sway the Trump/Clinton decision." And that's what happened. They might not have gotten Stein, but their vote was Stein/Clinton, and not just Stein (if those 50 had voted Stein/-, rather than Stein/Clinton, Trump would have won). Why do their votes count any less than under Scenario A?
Because that is precisely what this is. You are legally mandating that someone vote between one of two dominant parties, which is government interference in an election, and you're saying that anyone who doesn't want either of those two does not get a vote, which is disenfranchisement.
There is no way one can argue that preferential voting creates a fair election.
To start with, you have the same voting options as you do in the current FPTP system (Trump/-, Clinton/-, Stein/-), but you also have the option of expressing a second preference (Trump/Clinton/-, Trump/Stein/-, Clinton/Trump/-, Clinton/Stein/-, Stein/Clinton/-, Stein/Trump/-) or a third preference (though I think the third preference isn't strictly relevant in an election with three candidates).
Preferential voting just means that - if your preferred candidate doesn't win - you can effectively vote in a run-off between the remaining candidates. If you choose to do so! You don't have to! You're not saying anyone who doesn't want either of the two main parties doesn't get a vote, because you can vote third party (in our example, Stein/- is still an option).
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the candidates get whittled away after the first round of voting. Eventually any candidate that is not one of the dominant candidates will be eliminated, during which a person must either switch their votes to a new candidate or have that vote be thrown out. Thus, one faces a choice of either having to vote one of the dominant candidates or have one's vote be thrown away, which is not only government infringement on a free election, but also anyone who does not want either of the dominant candidates to win is incapable of protest voting and must vote for one of the dominant parties, making it disenfranchisement of anyone who does not support a dominant party.
Oh, so I can choose to have my vote thrown away? How thoughtful of you!
Until the option gets taken away, which it inevitably will, and then I am forced to vote for other candidates or forfeit my vote.
FPTP:
Trump: 1,000
Clinton: 975
Stein: 50
Are Stein and Clinton voters forfeiting their vote?
Preferential (amended to include Stein/- voters):
Trump/- : 1,000
Clinton/- : 500
Clinton/Stein: 475
Stein/Clinton: 40
Stein/- : 10
Round 1: Trump 1,000; Clinton 975; Stein 50
Stein/Clinton voters switch to Clinton
Round 2: Trump 1,000; Clinton 1,015
Are Stein/- voters throwing away their vote any more than FPTP-Stein voters?
I guess where I'm having the disconnect is where you talk about votes being thrown away after each round of voting. To me, it appears that in FPTP, there's one round of voting and ALL the non-winning-candidate votes are thrown away. Anyone who doesn't want one of the major candidates to win has exactly the option they have under FPTP, which is Candidate/-. Or even ranking all the non-dominant candidates, and not the dominant candidates, so they have a _better_ chance of preventing one of the dominant candidates from winning.
There is no rational way in which this is occurring. EVERYONES VOTE STILL COUNTS.
in a FPTP election, it is *more* true that the stein voters votes don't count because they have *literal zero* impact on determining the winner. Their votes are 100% identical to not turning up to vote.
In a preferential system, once you've knocked out the lowest voted person - be they democrat, republican, green or zoolanderologist, all those people's votes get counted *again*.
Trump/- : 1,000
Clinton/- : 500
Clinton/Stein: 475
Stein/Clinton: 40
Stein/- : 10
Round 1: Trump 1,000; Clinton 975; Stein 50
Stein/Clinton voters switch to Clinton
Round 2: Trump 1,000; Clinton 1,015
There is a total of 2,025 votes so to win a candidate needs 1,013 votes. However in the second round you have here we are throwing out the 10 Stein so there is only vote a total of 2,015 meaning a candidate only needs 1,008 votes to win. So the 10 Stein only votes literally aren't being counted any more. This is the problem Highroller was talking about. In an actually free election with the same rules if the margins had been a little different and neither Clinton nor Trump got the needed 1,013 votes(because 10 people didn't vote for either) then neither should have won and a new election would need to be done. However because no one wants that they simply don't count the 10 Stein votes so that someone is guaranteed to get 50%+1.
I do not see why you would classify that as a "free election" and not the preferential voting one.
Assuming the voters all still have the same preferences, your proposed runoff election would have the same result as round 2 of preferential voting. 10 former Stein voters would stay home and the rest would vote for their second choice. The voter total would drop to 2015 and 1008 votes would be needed for a win.
Jill Stein even made it a core tenant of her campaign. While I can't peg exactly what isn't connecting with you accepting this, I feel like you should know US 3rd Parties as a whole settled this issue over a decade ago, and they settled on supporting the issue. I recommend doing more research to see if you can find where the missing piece is.
I feel this is the core of our disagreement. Quick note, I'm not just talking about 3rd Party candidates. I'm talking about ALL other candidates. Right now the Executive Branch of our government is under Republican Control. It is under Republican control through 46% of the vote... or 24% if we count the people who did not or could not vote. Donald Trump is attempting to barrel ahead as though he won 1000% of the vote and claiming that the only reason he did not win the popular vote was because rampant in person voter fraud that gave the opposition three million votes. While Congress may be hung up, the parts of the agenda that Donald Trump has unilateral control over has been making decisions that represents less than half of the people who voted in the last election (and possibly a third of all Americans). So yes, I believe our votes are being ignored and furthermore that voter fraud claim is an attempt to suppress us from expressing them in the future.
Our broken electoral system put us in this position, and the drawbacks of first past the post voting positioned Donald Trump to win through that broken electoral process. Only 45% of Republican Primary voters voted for Donald Trump to be the nominee of the Republican Party. The other 55% split the vote between sixteen other competitors. However, all those competitors lost because they ran against each other, and instead of that 55% settling on a candidate a large minority (still a minority) gamed the Party and put the least qualified man in charge of their movement because he was the loudest.
So while I appreciate that you have all-caps passion defending our current system, the voting system you are defending as necessary has put a fringe candidate with no qualifications into the White House. I despise the outcome First Past the Post has given us, the majority of Americans are not happy with what first past the post voting spat out of the Republican Primary, and while some others may think we should just put better people into that system, I feel that's a good reason to examine a new system.
I feel like this indicates you don't know what a runoff is, how it applies in an election, or how common it is in the world even beyond politics.
An election should be declared inconclusive if no one candidate wins a majority of the vote and runoffs ensue where people may or may not choose from candidates who performed th closest to best. The fact we don't have runoffs opens us up to Donald Trump being a feature, not an anomaly of our elections. Even political party internal voting (IE the DNC chair race) works off runoffs until a majority consensus can be reached.
Before we get into relevance vs. liability: Why run? Good question, let's go through a few reasons.
1. Because they want to. This is the most basic reason. It doesn't matter why or how rational, if someone wants to run for president and can get the money to they can.
2. Ballot access. This gets into probably the biggest reason 3rd Parties run for president. In the United States, any political party that earns 5% of the popular vote gets automatic ballot access in the next federal election and qualifies for matching funds. That would be a huge relief to those parties if they got money from the government and didn't have to spend between $15,000 to $50,000 dollars per state each election cycle just for ballot access.
3. Visibility to push different points of view. Just because "relevance" is not an issue in ballot results under RCV does not mean that having a national platform to try to push reforms is gone.
Now then, let's circle back around to liability. Being a liability costs 3rd Parties more relevance than being irrelevant. It even shows in 3rd Party candidates. Ralph Nader in 2000 was polling around 5%. However, when it became clear that Al Gore was going to lose if Ralph Nader held those numbers, suddenly Ralph Nader's support collapsed by half. That was especially painful for the Green Party because had Ranked Choice voting been in place, instead of Ralph Nader losing support, more people could have written in Al Gore as a second choice. When Nader was eliminated for the instant runoff election, the Green Party no longer cares about relevance anymore: Ralph Nader finished with 5% of the vote, they have ballot access in all 50 states and matching funds, and they can keep trying in future elections.
Instead, Greens have to spend close to a million dollars each cycle for ballot access and even then haven't reached complete access yet. What do you think is more disenfrachising: being eliminated from the run offs with ballot access in all fifty states and having matching funds the next election, or having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to maybe have adequate ballot access when those funds could have gone to campaigns themselves?
I take it back, I think the point you're missing is that Ranked Choice voting is seen as a money saver for third parties. They care about relevance, but being a liability is vastly more expensive than runoff elections existing to 3rd Parties.
Two things:
1. Are you suggesting that getting more people to vote for a third party is irrelevant to a 3rd Party?
2. How does their vote not count as opposed to it not counting in the United States? Whether someone finishes with 2% of the vote in the US or someone finishes with 2% of the vote in a RCV system, the result is the same: that person is eliminated from the election. That isn't disenfranchisement; that's math.
The Republican Party's House of Representatives just imploded last Friday (3/24/17) because they tried to give everyone in their party what they wanted on Healthcare repeal and replace. The GOP as a whole now is pointing fingers, and their prospects in 2018 elections have already become more grim because they were already looking bad with Donald Trump at their helm. Trying to make things better for such a broad coalition gave no one what they wanted and instead the opposition (ME :D) won this round. That's what's wrong.
About the Australian Greens, while the Democrats (are there Democrats in Australia?) are not trying for Green votes, there are Greens definitely trying for Democrats' (or their equivalent voters. In fact, if what you say is true, the Greens are going to enjoy being ignored because they can focus on convincing people to put their party at the top of the ballot without being yelled at for putting George W. Bush into power even though they didn't. Even if they aren't winning elections, their presence is not a threat to their ballot status, and if the Greens are successful, the tables flip. Now Greens have to watch their back so they aren't ousted by the Democrats trying to woo voters to put them back at the top of the ballot.
I fail to see the problem in Australia.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
No. It makes the Democrats, and society as a whole, worse.
This is actually a little off topic from ranked choice voting, but funneling Greens (and other left political positions) into the Democrat Party while the Republicans funnel Libertarians, Constitution Party, and other definitely at best adjacent right wing issues (and at worst extremist) is it amplifies societal echo chambers/political polarization/split.
It also, as I mentioned in my response to Highroller, crippled the Republican House functionality, bred problems in the Democrat Party to move as a whole unified Party, and sent both parties to consider the other's agenda the devil, driving up partisanship. I will say that Greens (and other left leaders) in the Democrats has done significantly less damage than whoever the Republicans picked up because that's not just picking up 3rd Parties who are tangential to their platform that cause their problems.
It's taken a lot longer for this sort of politics to seep into Europe, in part because their political scene is much more flexible to where a multi-party system thrives. Multi-party generally makes it a requirement for political parties to cooperate in order to operate the government, which requires politicans to run on willingness to cross party lines before entering office. The thought of doing that in the United States right now is a liability for being kicked out of office by a primary challenger.
I think a multi-party scene might help the American political process.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
So maybe take a step back and take an examination of your own reasoning here. Because, bluntly, all I see is sour grapes.
Walk me through the logic behind saying that big tent parties are worse echo chambers than small special-interest parties. Certainly the Communists I know who are willing to work with the Democrats are not nearly as batty as the Communists who only hang out with other Communists. Ditto Libertarians et al.
Yes, small parties have to form coalitions. Big parties are coalitions. And lest you complain that the coalitions are calcified by the two-party system, remember that Trump won by flipping traditionally Democratic states and demographics. It is as if, in a multiparty system, the Blue Collar White Guy Party defected from their traditional left-leaning coalition to form a government with the rightists. Only the decision was made at the individual level rather than the party level. Which actually seems more democratic to me.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.