Both sides are a march to capitalism. Support Ranked Choice Voting.
Find your states organization for such, or start one.
I live in California so the organization I volunteer for is https://www.calrcv.org/
Pretend each ballot is a ranked choice ballot and list your top 3 candidates in order.
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the voting system alone won’t break the two party system.
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Approval Voting is a better voting method anyway.
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We’re going to need to move to some kind of proportional system in order to get more parties, and sequential proportional approval is better suited for that task as well.
I’m only coming at you so strong because it’s important that we get this right the first time. Approval is the way to go, both in the short term and the long term.
For those that don’t know, approval works like this: vote for any number of candidates, most votes wins. That’s it. It’s dead simple while being one of the more accurate systems by multiple measures.
Link 1 Simulating Elections with Spatial Voter Models
Link 2 Simplified Spacial Model Example
Link 3 2012 OWS Polling
Link 4 Democratic Primary Polling
Link 5 2024 Republican primary
RCV has problems with spoilers, vote-splitting, and non-monotonicity. RCV is so messy we’re not exactly sure how often an RCV election was influenced by a spoiler, but it could be as high as 14%, which would put around 75 people into Congress thanks to a spoiler. We know our happened in the Alaska special election, for example.
Anyway, if you want to help switch your local or state elections to approval (and you absolutely should) volunteer here!
So unfortunately I didn’t bookmark that particular source, but the estimates can range fairly significantly. They’re sensitive to your technique and your definition of a spoiler. For example, this article calculates both higher and lower probabilities of a spoiler. I don’t think it’s good for much more than saying that, all else being equal, RCV has fewer spoilers than FPTP (choose one). Contrast that with approval, where spoilers simply don’t exist, and approval clearly takes the cake in that category.
This sounds too good to be true. What are the downsides they aren’t mentioning?
Also, how would this system handle write ins? Could your ballot potentially be 1000 pages long?
Great question! I tried to keep it short, but yes of course there are down sides. In fact, mathematically speaking, there literally can’t be a perfect voting system. Check out the massive tables in this article for which voting method satisfies which criteria.
The down sides people usually complain about when it comes to approval voting all stem from the same feature, you only get to vote yes or no on any given candidate. If you like both Trump and DeSantis, but it’s very important to you that you give more support to Trump, sorry this voting system doesn’t have that feature. Similarly, if you don’t like Ted Cruz so much that you want literally anyone else to beat him, you can express that opinion by voting for everyone else, but you can’t differentiate between all those other candidates.
Every voting system has trade-offs, in this case that troublesome feature (simplicity) is also a bonus. You can’t invalidate your approval voting ballot. Any combination of votes is valid. RCV has to either invalidate ballots that don’t follow the instructions, or come up with a list of interpretation rules to try and make sense of ballots that don’t list the candidates in a neat order. By some estimates the invalid rate for RCV is seven times higher than FPTP. Approval is, again, bullet proof in this regard.
Approval is also extremely easy to understand. RCV seems simple enough, but then it can end up doing very strange things and elect nonsensical winners. The frequency of strange things happening under RCV is debated, but the more competitive the race, the more likely confusing results will follow.
I said I’d keep it short, which is why the first comment didn’t have too many details. You can talk election systems for days (notice I didn’t talk at all about how these systems translate to proportional methods). In a practical sense, RCV and approval agree on the results the great majority of the time, all the way from winner to loser. In those scenarios, well, why go through all that extra trouble? Keep it simple!
Ranked choice won’t fundamentally change much. The parties allowed will still be within the capitalist window of allowed positions.
What is really needed is a democratic centralist system, but that can only happen after revolution.
Fwiw you should support IRV if you have to (if it’s on a ballot against FPTP and is the only option), but it’s basically the bare minimum acceptable voting system. FPTP is simply not democracy, but IRV is barely okay. Any single-winner system is inherently worse than a proportional system, because it can be subject to gerrymandering, and it’s majoritarian. IRV might allow minor parties to exist without hurting their more-closely-aligned major party, but it won’t do a great job of letting them actually get representation.
Take Australia for example. Our House of Representatives uses IRV, and our Senate uses the proportional system of STV. Our major parties are Labor (centre-left) and Liberal/National coalition (right). Our most noteworthy minor party are the Greens (left). The Greens consistently get about 10%. In the House of Representatives, at the last election they achieved a record 2.7% of the seats in the Reps (their previous best was 0.7% despite over 10% of voters putting them first), and they currently have 14.5% of Senate seats, on the back of a 12.3% and 12.7% first-preference vote, respectively.
IRV helps, because it removes the spoiler effect in real-world scenarios. You should support it as better than FPTP if you have to, and not let the perfect by the enemy of the good. But it shouldn’t be what you aim for in an ideal scenario.
It’s the wealthy that have nothing to worry about, as Joe nothing will fundamentally change Biden has said.
He wasn’t lying, he knew he wasn’t gonna get much shit through Congress when he had a 50/50 split with two of those on his side being Sinema and Manchin and the other side having folks who possibly schemed in having his entire administration cancelled before it ever began
Manchin and Sinema played their assigned roles as rotating villains. And if a rotating villain can’t be summoned, there’s always the Senate parliamentarian. And if not that, then there’s always splitting the bill, as was done for the impending rail strike last year.
The Democrats punk us over & over. Both parties work for the capitalist class and against the working class.
The rotating villain thing gets way too much credit. When the Republicans have control, it’s something like 56/44. When the Dems have “control”, it requires the vice president to break the tie.
Manchin is the best thing you’re going to get out of fucking West Virginia any time soon. It’s time to stop counting on him as the 50th vote.
Sinema is different, and should absolutely go fuck herself. But she’s just a regular, actual villain, not some rotating conspiracy.
You think they get together and decide who pretends to have beliefs that happen to fuck the whole party? This sounds like absolute bullshit from a BoTh SiDeS-er.
Americans are too busy trying to decide if they want to elect an orange king or keep the democratic experiment going a little longer to worry about small things like wealth distribution.
People are easily manipulated. A smart electorate is a very hard thing to sustain.
The sky was the colour of a TV tuned to a dead channel.
In the more recent publications, he talks at length about that opening line in the introduction.
Even in the 90s it was common for my TV to be blue when there was no input to display.
Is it weird that my first thought was “because it’s asbestos and you’re not going to live much longer anyway?”
I thought dry asbestos was harmless? Watch out for trying to remove it, though. The powder is terrible for you.
If anything, lower and middle class have been paying more under the Trump tax plan for years. They should be worried about that.
