In a different voting system that would be true, and if you don’t have the somewhat obscure and technical piece of voting knowledge that this video explains really well, there’s no reason not to think that:
Once you understand that the dumb is baked into the voting math itself, “too dumb to vote third party” clarifies into “first past the post is shit”, and the solution becomes pushing like hell for ranked choice voting, single transferable vote, alternative vote, etc. Stopping the fourth reich is an implied portion of that process, as a way of preserving voting itself.
Make sure to watch that video because you’re thinking correctly, just without factoring in one key game piece that there’s no reason for you to have heard of, one that kind of flips the while thing around.
I will say, the voting system that we advocate for is important.
There are three common choices. RCV, Approval, and STAR.
RCV has some momentum, but is just a bad voting system. It’s arguably worse than Fist Past the Post, because in a way, it is FPtP. Or rather, it’s several FPtP elections in a row, dropping the lowest each time.
Which is where a problem creeps in. See, it’s drop lowest, and then never hear from that person again. So if they are the literal second choice of 99% of voters, they’re dropped in the first round and never seen again.
This leads to ballots that look like this;
1 - dropped in 4th round
2- dropped in 1st round
3- dropped in 2nd round
4- dropped in 3rd round
5- Guy you kind of hate and only listed because the rules said you had to list 5. He’s the one who got your vote.
If you had dropped your first choice, Your second through third might have won.
There’s also a version of the above ballot that doesn’t have a number 5, in that case your ballot is just thrown out as exhausted. Up to 18% of ballots get thrown out as exhausted. At least that’s what the data from California and Maine has said.
Most countries that use IRV (RCV’s real name) don’t publish any election data, so we use what we’ve got.
Anyway, Approval and STAR are both immune to shit like the above, because how you rate one candidate has zero bearing on how you rate another. Woo for cardinal voting systems.
This is the state of modern American politics. Republicans are told that they need to vote for the most reactionary, fascist, fringe candidate or they’ll be murdered by migrants. Democrats are told that they need to vote for the most centrist corporate shill in the Senate or they’ll be invaded by Russia.
Everything is fearmongering all the time. Nobody even talks about policy anymore.
Every 4 years, hundreds of millions of people set their conscience to the side and continue to vote for the thing they’ll complain about until the next time, when they do it all again.
Voting/Electoral Fetishism replaces actual political action:
Issues, policies, and outcomes are all carefully manufactured and managed by a small number of power elites. The media, political parties, security forces (psych-ops), even the mafia and intellectual and artistic elites all work together to shape a political simulacrum within which our limited discourses and actions circulate.source
Removed by mod
In a different voting system that would be true, and if you don’t have the somewhat obscure and technical piece of voting knowledge that this video explains really well, there’s no reason not to think that:
Https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
Once you understand that the dumb is baked into the voting math itself, “too dumb to vote third party” clarifies into “first past the post is shit”, and the solution becomes pushing like hell for ranked choice voting, single transferable vote, alternative vote, etc. Stopping the fourth reich is an implied portion of that process, as a way of preserving voting itself.
Make sure to watch that video because you’re thinking correctly, just without factoring in one key game piece that there’s no reason for you to have heard of, one that kind of flips the while thing around.
I will say, the voting system that we advocate for is important.
There are three common choices. RCV, Approval, and STAR.
RCV has some momentum, but is just a bad voting system. It’s arguably worse than Fist Past the Post, because in a way, it is FPtP. Or rather, it’s several FPtP elections in a row, dropping the lowest each time.
Which is where a problem creeps in. See, it’s drop lowest, and then never hear from that person again. So if they are the literal second choice of 99% of voters, they’re dropped in the first round and never seen again.
This leads to ballots that look like this;
1 - dropped in 4th round 2- dropped in 1st round 3- dropped in 2nd round 4- dropped in 3rd round 5- Guy you kind of hate and only listed because the rules said you had to list 5. He’s the one who got your vote.
If you had dropped your first choice, Your second through third might have won.
There’s also a version of the above ballot that doesn’t have a number 5, in that case your ballot is just thrown out as exhausted. Up to 18% of ballots get thrown out as exhausted. At least that’s what the data from California and Maine has said.
Most countries that use IRV (RCV’s real name) don’t publish any election data, so we use what we’ve got.
Anyway, Approval and STAR are both immune to shit like the above, because how you rate one candidate has zero bearing on how you rate another. Woo for cardinal voting systems.
This article helped me understand the advantages of STAR. Hope it helps someone else.
That and the fact that it’s legally impossible for one to win the presidency, yeah.
I love the “You should just vote in the primaries” Democrats, who didn’t even blink back in 2020 when Chris Matthews was on national television screaming that Bernie Sanders supporters were going to drag him into Central Park and shoot him.
This is the state of modern American politics. Republicans are told that they need to vote for the most reactionary, fascist, fringe candidate or they’ll be murdered by migrants. Democrats are told that they need to vote for the most centrist corporate shill in the Senate or they’ll be invaded by Russia.
Everything is fearmongering all the time. Nobody even talks about policy anymore.
Every 4 years, hundreds of millions of people set their conscience to the side and continue to vote for the thing they’ll complain about until the next time, when they do it all again.
Voting/Electoral Fetishism replaces actual political action: