Both sides are a march to capitalism. Support Ranked Choice Voting.
How?
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.
wow do people really need to see /s to know this is a joke
This invalidates the ballot thus making you abstain from voting. I guess if you’re stupid enough to do so, it might be beneficial to society overall, but still.
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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!
Where did you get the 14% figure?
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!
Love the enthusiasm and clarity of your writing. I’m convinced.
I don’t really see an issue with the particular election you linked to. It tries to argue that because the Republican was in the lead most of the time that it made sense for him to win. However, in the first vote ~67% of people didn’t want him elected. And as each candidate was removed from the ballot more and more of them wanted still wanted someone other than the republican, hence the Progressive winning.
Seems to be a pretty effective system to me. Very surprised IRV got repealed because of that election. Were both Democrats and Republicans just upset their candidate didn’t win?
If you only think of the election in the terms that RCV brings forward, then by definition all RCV elections find the correct winner. The Burlington RCV election essentially disagrees with two other ways of determining the winner of an election, and likely it would have disagreed with two other methods. If you look at this website, which compares voting methods using the same election, you’ll find that RCV (listed as IRV) is usually in the dissenting opinion as to who should be the winner. If you play around with this spacial simulator you’ll find that, not only can you generate nonsensical graphs with RCV (showing win scenarios had just plain shouldn’t happen) but they take longer to calculate, too.
score approval voting (multiple points for each candidate allowed)
Nothing will break the system because the only acceptable method of change according to everyone in the US is begging.
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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.
Yes, it will. First Past the Post is why we’re locked into 2 parties.
It’s not about the number of parties, but which interests they represent. You can have ten parties and they’ll all be on the capitalist spectrum. See the parliamentary democracies in Europe for example.
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.
This won’t solve the problem, the root problem is you cannot have both democracy and capitalism.
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.Ok cool I’m still voting for Democrats down the ballot in November
So you like bootlicking and when people spit in your mouth. Because that’s what the dems basically do when you ask for anything meaningful. Don’t reward shitty politicians and parties with your vote.
Does the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” mean anything to you?
I hate the Dems and Biden not being progressive enough, but I’m not going to vote for Hitler/Nazis reincarnated just to “spite biden” like you seem to want to do.
And TBH the current administration has spent the last four years dealing with a half a Congress and over half a SCOTUS, that only had one goal, stop anything Biden/Dems tried to actually do. So it isn’t surprising they haven’t done much.
I’m not voting for trump either. That’s the beauty of American democracy I can vote for whoever I want. Be it Jill Stein, RFK JR, or Cornell west. You don’t just get a vote by saying look I’m not that guy. That’s fucking pathetic and makes a joke of our democracy anyway.
So you think voting for dead in the water candidates is more effective than going for the most likely to win. Congrats removed youre playing into the fascists hands, youll be the smuggest asshole in the concentration camp.
And before you go on about morals and voting your conscience, I dont care. Victory isnt claimed by the most moral side, victory is claimed by the asshole who has tge most men, the most guns, and cares not for honor. And in this current scenario where we stand apon the prescipes leading to fascism our victory can only be won through pragmatism.
And to reinforce my point, how well did moralistic bullshit work out for the german socdems, socialists, and communists when the nazis came to power? Fun fact to of the largest parties in Weimar Germany were communists who refused to coalition with eachother.
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.
Meeting a democrat in West Virginia is like finding a dodo bird in the wild.
Well, more accurately, it’s like finding a truffle.
I mean, they’re there. They defiantly don’t take their politics out to town with them though. In some places it can even be dangerous. No way I’d put a sticker on my car that’s for sure.
Had a dude put a Trump sticker on my bumper once though. I was surprised when I kept suddenly getting “hell yeah buddy” everywhere I went haha. Peeled that off real quick.
West Virginia used to be blue back when the democrats would give a fig leaf to organized labor
Even my gen-x peers who lived through that shift don’t understand that it’s not the W. Virginians who abandoned the Democrats, but the Democrats who abandoned the W. Virginians. Instead my peers label them ungrateful deplorables.
The rotating villain thing gets way too much credit. When the Republicans have control, it’s something like 56/44.
Why do you think the Democrats and Republicans keep the Senate 60% supermajority filibuster rule in place, when usually neither party has a supermajority of seats? It’s because both parties intentionally hamstring themselves. It’s Long Past Time to Abolish the Filibuster
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.
People are easily manipulated.
People are not easy to manipulate. The amount of ads required for political work are immense, what are you talking about? It would be easy enough to prevent manipulation of the public if the US wasn’t so dogmatically free speech when it comes to right wing speech.
Owning 10% of Charlie Brown is like owning 10% of nothing
The sky was the colour of a TV tuned to a dead channel.
War of the ants, we used to call it.
In the more recent publications, he talks at length about that opening line in the introduction.
It’s a great opening line.
One that makes no sense to younger kids, so he explained TVs, broadcasting, analog, the whole nine yards. It’s pretty kewl.
Even in the 90s it was common for my TV to be blue when there was no input to display.
Theyre talking about a empty channel that is showing static, AV signals are different.
Is it weird that my first thought was “because it’s asbestos and you’re not going to live much longer anyway?”
TBF I don’t when it started, but it was in use long after asbestos was outlawed.
I thought dry asbestos was harmless? Watch out for trying to remove it, though. The powder is terrible for you.
Undisturbed asbestos is safe-ish… BIG emphasis on the “ish”.
You’re not alone
If anything, lower and middle class have been paying more under the Trump tax plan for years. They should be worried about that.
I’m middle class and I ended up paying 600 dollars more the year Orange Boys “Tax Reform” took effect.
my dad taught me how to do a lot of home renovation: installing new flooring, removing carpeting, painting interior and exterior walls, building screened in back porches, et cetera. one thing we did together was scraping the popcorn ceiling with a paint scraper, then tidying it up with the mud/putty/whatever it’s called and painting it. I just wish i could buy my own place so i could renovate it.
Be careful handling asbestos. Damn stuff was in everything.
I think we wore masks. But hey, it was the 90s, we played fast and loose with the safety guidelines back then.
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My ceiling looks like this
butand I live in a trailerdeleted by creator
The joke of the screenshat xeet was that if your ceilings look like that, you are too poor to be affected by Biden’s tax increases on the rich.
If you are living in a trailer, you are also too poor to be affected by Biden’s tax increases on the rich.
So, the change from “but” to “and” wasn’t to disparage you or your home; It was to clarify that you have two indicators that both point to you not needing to worry about Biden’s tax plan, and given that context “and” is more appropriate than “but”.
An example sentence where “but” would have made sense would be:
My apartment ceilings look like that, but it’s the tenants that I’m gouging that live there. The ceilings of my three mansions don’t look like that, and so I DO need to “worry” about my taxes increasing.
I think that was the point
