From someone arguing that approval voting is better than RCV because... centrists would win more.
I'd dunk on this if I had any idea what he's talking about
The dumb idea is to have voters rank all candidates, tally all the rankings, and then do full comparisons on who is ranked over the others the most. Nearly incomprehensible to most voters and the actual calculation method is essentially arbitrary, it just makes you feel like it's more fair via some statistics that don't really map onto anything like, "this is actually the candidate the public would prefer".
So it's a way to make US elections even less democratic? Electorism is a hell of a drug
Yeah it's very silly. In theory it's supposed to undermine, for example, the two-party system, but it also has a high likelihood of favoring "centrists". The fact that very few people in the public understand it would mean they also wouldn't understand how to strategically vote, and therefore not know how to accurately express their preferences.
In terms of idealist voting reform I prefer single transferable vote. You just rank a set of candidates and if your first choice is eliminated (is least voted candidate) your second becomes your vote and so on until all seats are filled. It's different from instant runoff because it's for multi-representative districts, increasing the chance that your preferred candidates actually get elected. You can also just not rank candidates that you don't want.
STV is simple enough for anyone to understand and gives voters good ways to express their positive and negative preferences. It would be cool to live in a world where voting mechanisms we the thing I really cared about, lol.
In terms of idealist voting reform I prefer single transferable vote. You just rank a set of candidates and if your first choice is eliminated (is least voted candidate) your second becomes your vote and so on until all seats are filled. It’s different from instant runoff because it’s for multi-representative districts, increasing the chance that your preferred candidates actually get elected.
Ireland does this. The results are that:
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70% of the voters get at least one of their candidates into parliament
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their kids draw things like this :i-voted:
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STV works just fine here (though till recently ranking 120+ choices in the senate paper could be annoying). I mildly prefer MMP, but only mildly.
In terms of idealist voting reform I prefer single transferable vote.
And this is exactly what the person I posted is arguing against. One of his arguments was it causes a "centrist squeeze" where centrists will be more likely to lose in the first round even though they'd beat other candidates head-to-head ("condorcet winner"). Of course that's actually good, because centrists only win head-to-head by being the least hated candidate, so no one would be happy with the outcome.
Though what he's arguing for is actually approval voting, which is literally just you can vote for as many people as you want and whoever gets the most wins. Pretty easy to understand, but overall a worse system that like you said favors centrists.
One of his arguments was it causes a “centrist squeeze” where centrists will be more likely to lose in the first round
It’s almost like… it’s almost like that’s the whole point.
Approval voting is great when you’re with a group of people trying to decide where to eat (60% are okay with MeatBurgers 40% are okay with SaladsOnly, 100% are okay with MeatOrVeggieSandwichCo) but fucking terrible for government.
Yes, exactly. Approval voting basically has a centrist spoiler effect. What, you want the right of to win? You'd better include the shit lib on your ballot!
