You might want to be more specific lest your wish come true in a way you don’t want.
These are all false claims.
But I did vote for candidates on the ballot. The problem is my vote wasn’t counted. That’s the point. It is circular logic for you to try and use this as an argument for throwing out people’s votes. My vote ought to count the way I cast it. You’re the one saying to arbitrarily throw it out because you don’t like it. Stop being such a control freak and let people vote how they want.
How so?
You can’t just claim they’re false, you’re going to have to actually refute them with viable arguments.
You knowingly voted for more candidates than you knew you were allowed to, knowing full well that in doing so you would render your ballot null and void.
By making the choice to cast a ballot that you knew wouldn’t be accepted, you chose to prioritize ‘making a statement’.
That is the point.
Where is my ‘circular logic’?
How is my logic more flawed than yours?
It’s not ‘arbitrary’ when there is a very specific set of rules that everyone is familiar with.
When the rule is “You may only vote for X candidates” and you vote for more than X candidates, it is not ‘arbitrary’ for your ballot to then be tossed.
By that logic, if a person wants to vote using Ranked Choice Voting - which you have classified as 'top tier trash…
…then that person should be free to vote using the Ranked Choice Voting method if they want.
After all, who are we to be ‘control freaks’ denying them the freedom to vote with the RCV method?
- You have no evidence for this. This is all speculation and assumptions on your part.
- My decision to support multiple candidates can be an affirmative, non-passive choice. Whether it is a “passive opinion” is not for you to decide.
- Actually, the current system feeds the toxic, false idea of “having it all”. It promotes the idea that all that matters is what you personally want most. That when we vote we are making a decision based on factional division, where one faction gets it all, rather than attempting to promote the general welfare.
- The current system dumbs down voting. Voters understand they’re throwing their vote away if they don’t jump on the bandwagon with one of the two largest groups, so most don’t consider options other than those.
“The rule exists, therefore it is not arbitrary” is a pretty strong indication the rule is arbitrary. It’s circular reasoning. You should be able to derive a justification for a rule independent of it existing.
RCV imposes administrative costs because it requires a totally new ballot format and a tabulation method that is not batch summable.
There is no administrative cost to counting my vote as cast on an existing ballot format, and the tabulation method is batch summable, just like the existing system.
I’ve already provided my reasoning, and if you’re going to claim that there is nothing but ‘speculation and assumptions’, then you can’t claim that it’s false, you can only offer your own ‘speculation and assumptions’.
So by your argument we’re both arguing based on opinion here.
You’re voting for more candidates than there are positions.
It is not possible to choose more people than there are positions for. You are trying to have your cake and eat it too.
I don’t follow your logic.
Nor do I understand how you are able to dismiss the idea that by trying to support more than candidates than there are positions for that you’re not trying to ‘have it all’.
If you were responsible for hiring someone to fill a job, and you had to choose between multiple candidates to fill a single position - and you are not allowed to created additional positions - how would you choose between the candidates?
It dumbs it down more than “I don’t have to actually research the candidates because I can just for as many people as I want”?
You’re complaining about circular logic by using circular logic and your own personal preferences.
That, and you’ve primarily emphasized that your core reason for wanting approval voting is based on your own personal arbitrary desires.
“Why are you being a control freak who isn’t allowing voters to vote how they want?”
You are you using “I want to vote this way so I shouldn’t be denied the right to vote how I want”.
Your entire basis for calling for Approval Voting comes down to what you personally want.
The core of why you are calling for Approval Voting is because of your own personal desire for it.
Everything else is justification for getting your way.
You do not get to then dismiss other people saying “I want to vote this way so if you don’t let me vote this way you’re a control freak”.
What, do you not think it would be possible to develop a voting and ballot system that would allow RCV and Approval Voting side by side?
Why not have a version of RCV where you can use the same number for multiple candidates? Rank two candidates with a ‘1’, rank one candidate with a ‘2’, etc.
If you’re going to complain about ‘control freaks’ preventing people from voting ‘how they want’ as justification for why you should be allowed to have your way and be allowed to vote using the Approval Voting system, then you need to think about ways for everyone to vote by whatever way they want.
That’s no problem, because Approval voting only selects as many people as there are positions. How many candidates a voter likes can obviously differ from the number of seats to be filled.
The question assumes I am one person making the decision. But in an election I’m not the only person. It is a group decision.
A better analogy would be a board of directors choosing a CEO. In such a scenario, Approval voting is an excellent option because it allows each board member to designate which candidates they consider most qualified of the available options. The result is the candidate the most board members consider qualified wins.
You have to at least research the candidates to know if you like them.
It’s almost like you didn’t actually read what I said. In the current system, most people aren’t even doing research. They just pick their preference of (R) or (D) because they know those are the two candidates basically everyone else will be voting for. Who cares what the Libertarian, Independent, or Constitution candidate have to say. It’s irrelevant. You want your vote to matter? Then don’t consider them. Be a lemming. Vote with the crowd. Don’t think too hard. That’s the system you are defending.
As the one in favor of a limiting rule, you are the one who has to justify it. Otherwise, my own desires, and the desires of other voters (even if they are “arbitrary”) are reason enough to allow it. The default position should be the free system. Not the coerced system.
Ah, you are finally thinking! This is great!
I’ve discussed this exact system before with RCV advocates. I’m not opposed to it as an experiment. One of the main conflicts between RCV and Approval is the debate between two voting method criteria: “later-no-harm” or “favorite betrayal”. RCV, and the choose-one status quo, fail favorite betrayal. Approval fails later-no-harm.
What the hypothetical system you are considering does is give the voter a choice which criteria their vote fails, and potentially to what extent. The goal of such an experiment would be to determine which criteria the voters value more.
My point is Approval voting does not involve forcing everyone else to submit to my preferred system. Your ballot will still look the same. I’m not imposing on you by filling in an extra bubble and having my vote still counted.
However, RCV advocates are asking administrators and other voters to sacrifice ballot complexity, tabulation time, money, etc. It is not trivial to allow them to vote how they want. It is a whole lot of extra costs that have to be imposed on other people. That’s the difference.
As does a simple majority.
The difference is that you are insisting on being allowed to personally select more options than there are positions for in a system that has a record where in more than 1-in-4 elections, the person chosen wins with minority support.
You’re also not picking the person you consider the best option. You are saying “I would be OK with this person in the position”.
Why should we have a system that runs on “We’ll put someone in the position that we don’t object to” over “We think this person is the best option”?
Approval voting encourages mediocre candidates who don’t rock the boat and focus on personal popularity over actual leadership.
No, they’re not picking who they consider most qualified, they’re picking who they consider acceptable.
Depending on the criteria, there can only be a single most qualified candidate.
Candidates are not interchangeable.
Using approval voting, the board of directors are saying “I would be OK with this candidate”, but I question how many stockholders would approve of a board taking the passive approach of “We’re OK with this candidate” rather than “We think that this candidate is the single most qualified person to run this company”.
And, in over 25% of cases, approval voting won’t work because they’ll need to have a runoff to pick someone that an actual majority of the board approves of.
Except you don’t.
If you’re free to vote for as many candidates as you want, you have even less reason to research than you do now.
A voter could see as little as a single advertisement or a single comment from a friend and go “Sure, that person sounds fine” and cast an approval vote for that person alongside any other options.
You have done nothing to demonstrate that approval voting would change that.
To the contrary, when you’re given as many options as you want and don’t have to chose, the voters have even less reason to research their candidates.
You are complaining about people not doing research and insisting on a so-called “solution” that makes the problem worse.
Furthermore, you presenting a system that, as I have previously explained, gives candidates less reason to give voters solid information to research because the voters don’t have to chose, so why not focus on a message of likability that discourages taking positions on topics that would alienate potential voters?
How many people do you expect that, when free to vote for as many candidates as they want, will go “I was going to vote Republican, but now that I’m free to vote for as many candidates as I want I’m going to not vote Republican”?
On what basis do you come to the conclusion that approval voting will result in a sudden shift to third parties having major, meaningful representation instead of just “It’s still Republican and Democrats winning but the third parties get a slightly higher vote percentage”?
You’re the one proposing the change, so you have at least as much responsibility to justify the change.
You are complaining about an “arbitrary standard” while saying you should be allowed something based on an arbitrary standard.
“There are only X positions available, therefore you are limited to voting for X candidates” is not an ‘arbitrary standard’.
You can insist it’s an “arbitrary standard” all you want, but that doesn’t make it so.
Which requires a choice, while you have already made abundantly clear you are opposed to being required to make a choice.
Which brings us back to the issue that you are complaining about something that you have both demonstrated you are capable of doing and would be required in order to advance an idea you think might have potential.
You are complaining about having to make choices while demonstrating how life itself requires that we actually have to make choices.
Basically, you’re asking for special favoritism for an unspecified number of people who insist on being wishy-washy when it comes to one of the core elements of our political system.
Which comes down to forcing the system to submit to your preferred system.
Just as you said that nobody is imposing on you to fill in an extra bubble, nobody is imposing on you to vote for more than one candidate.
The current system is not called “simple majority”. It is called “plurality”. If you get the most votes you win, even if that is 20% or less. That’s a minority. Not a majority. That said, the concept of majority is incredibly flawed to begin with. I don’t support systems on the basis of their conformity to the idea of a majority.
This is not a problem.
Under those same circumstances (municipal, many candidates), the system you are defending consistently performs worse. If anything, you should be lauding Approval for being an improvement.
That’s not for you to determine. If I mark two candidates because I think they’re the best two options, that is my own determination.
And the concept of “being OK” is not bad. The Declaration of Independence says governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”. Rule by consent is a good thing. Better to maximize consent among the whole of the people than maximize partisan loyalties.
There is no “we”. When you vote, it is an individual judgement. The “we” comes when you tabulate the votes. And what one individual thinks is best is not the same as what the combined mind of the voters thinks is best.
Voting methods are inherently popularity contests. It is incorrect to attribute to your preferred method some innate ability to identify qualities it does not directly see. It is up to the voters to discern these qualities.
Define “qualified”.
In a public election, the criteria is up to the voter.
Individual board members are not the board, and characterizing Approval as “passive” is your own personal framing. It is not reality. The act of establishing criteria and applying it is an active choice. If an individual board member thinks multiple candidates would do an excellent job based on the stated criteria, it actually increases the chance of a highly qualified candidate winning.
Using Approval voting, the board absolutely can come to a single decision, who they believe is the single most qualified person. This is obvious. I don’t see how you are reaching the conclusion this is not the result.
Approval followed by a runoff is a good system. It’s actually what St. Louis uses, and if you take that into account, the 75% figure I gave you comfortably rises above 90%. I’d say 95%, but I haven’t calculated it.
Edit: I calculated it. It is 93.5%. 29 out of 31 seats filled with Approval voting in the US ultimately reached a majority result. The only two cases that failed to reach a majority result were out of Fargo, North Dakota. One reached 42.7% with 15 candidates, and the other reached 46.3% with 7 candidates. I challenge you to find a single example where the status quo has seen such a competitive field and managed to break 40%.
approval.vote: Fargo, ND / City Commissioner / 2022
approval.vote: Fargo, ND / June 11, 2024 Commissioner Fargo / 2024
For a board specifically, this is a non-issue. They’re a small enough group that holding a runoff just means taking a few extra minutes to hold another round of voting. The reason this is even a debate in public elections is you have to administer a whole other election, which costs money and can be exhausting for the voters.
The opposite is true. There is no point in researching candidates you have a negative incentive to support. The vast, vast majority of the time the only two candidates you have a reason to research are the Republican and the Democrat… if you are an independent voter.
If you’re free to vote for as many candidates as you want, that creates a legitimate question “should I show support” for every candidate.
Political advertisements already exist. This is a non-issue.
If it doesn’t, we’re no worse off.
Actually, you were the one who first asserted people won’t do their research. And it just so happens the system you are defending is part of the problem, because the current system requires so little thought on the part of the voter. It turns well-meaning people into lemmings.
You assume it does that. But there is no basis for it. If being charismatic and not taking positions attracted voters, candidates would already be doing it. But we don’t see that, so we have no reason to assume they would do that. In fact, voters are more alienated by candidates who refuse to talk about the issues they care about.
The first question misses the point. The second question is better.
If current Republican voters were to vote for the person they honestly think is best (something you’ve consistently said should be the reason to vote for a candidate) many wouldn’t be voting for a Republican. They would vote for Libertarians, Independents, Constitutionalists, etc. And as a consequence, they would allow Democrats to clobber them in virtually every state, giving Democrats total control. So their vote for Republicans is strategic not honest.
What Approval voting does is allow them to vote for who they think is best (which you claim to value) without surrendering their strategic “I guess the Republican is OK” position (which you claim is bad).
People are hungry for other ideas. It won’t be slight:
“I want to be able to show support to as many candidates as I like.” Is justification enough.
Liberty is not an arbitrary standard.
It is, because I can have a positive opinion of more or less candidates than there are seats.
What do you say: Shouldn’t we be throwing out the votes of people who only choose one, when there are three seats up for election? I mean, if you are going to place an upper limit, why not a lower limit? Let me guess: You think that is arbitrary. Oh dear, that’s a problem for your position.
That’s a strawman. You’re the one asserting I’m not requiring people to make a choice. But everything is a choice. Should I support one candidate or two candidates? Choice. Should I abstain from the judicial retention elections? Choice. Should I go to vote? Choice.
My argument is you are limiting voter choice by restricting their possible range of choices to sets of candidates that are only of size = 1. That should be pretty obvious.
Blah, blah, blah. More of the same.
“Don’t throw out my vote, bro” is not favoritism. And I’m not being “wishy-washy” by supporting the candidates I research and explicitly chose. This is you framing again.
Which core element? Vote splitting? Coercing the voters to abandon who they think is best? Gatekeeping that prevents accurate representation?
Counting my vote as cast is not “forcing the system to submit”. Stop being melodramatic.
The difference with RCV is it requires changing the ballot format and making massive changes to tabulation. This is why bringing in RCV and acting like “but you oppose this, you’re a hypocrite, hard-ee-har-har” is laughably wrong.
In advocating Approval voting, I am suggesting a simple rule change in the current system that leads to not throwing existing ballots out. I am not asking to print ballots that look like spreadsheets. I am not asking election administrators to give up local tabulation. I am not asking for results to be reported in a convoluted, confusing way.
In fact, calling Approval voting a whole new system might be giving it too much credit. It is really just a tweak to improve, and in some ways simplify, the existing system. The ballots will be the same. Election administrators’ jobs will look the same. And results will continue to be reported as a single set of totals.
Whether it’s ‘simple majority’ or ‘plurality’ depends on the voting system.
The system I am arguing for is majority.
Your logic doesn’t compute.
In your opinion, which is the basis for our debate.
My preferred system is a basic runoff system - Up to two rounds, where if in the first round no candidates secures a majority (which would render a second round unnecessary if it happend), there is a second round where the top two candidates compete against each other.
It offers everyone the freedom to vote for whoever they want in the first round, then puts the top two candidates against each other in a race that ensures one had majority support.
First, you can only speak for yourself.
Second, it is impossible to select more than one person as the best possible option.
You can not possibly vote for more than one person on the basis of “I think both of these candidates would be the single best person for the job”. At least one of them comes with an * that says “I would be OK with this person if my first pick doesn’t win”.
That depends on the context.
In other words, the system operates on the basis of “We - the collective voters - are selecting our candidates based on who we don’t object to over who we think is the best option”.
The election of Trump alone says otherwise. There are no shortage of people who voted for Trump in spite of not liking him because they thought he was better suited for the job.
I’m not even sure what this bundle of word salad is supposed to actually mean.
qualified | ˈkwäləˌfīd |
adjective
1 officially recognized as being trained to perform a particular job; certified: newly qualified nurses.
• [with infinitive] competent or knowledgeable to do something; capable: I was less well qualified than almost anyone present to recollect the olden days.
This doesn’t really align with your past arguments in favor of approval voting.
The ultimate result is representative of the entire board.
By insisting on picking multiple candidates rather than picking the singular candidate you want to fill the position, you have made clear that you yourself refuse to establish such a criteria or apply it as an active choice, except in the name of choosing to knowingly render your ballot null and void with a protest vote.
There is nothing ‘obvious’ about voting for multiple candidates to reach a singular conclusion.
If you can make a singular choice in a runoff, why are you so insistent on not making a singular choice in the first round?
What is it about the runoff that magically enables you to give up your inability to make a choice?
So you have a problem with runoffs, except when you don’t have a problem with runoffs.
Your argument here makes so little sense I don’t even know how to respond to it.
I’m not even sure what you’re getting at.
A major basis for your argument is that approval voting would somehow give people incentive to do more research.
If you can’t demonstrate that approval voting would actually give people reason to do more research, it renders that part of your argument null and void.
And here you’re just trying to flip my argument around on me as if the arguments I made against approval voting were somehow being made against my own preferred system.
As already explained, Barack Obama alone provides a real-world basis for it.
That individuals are more popular options for office before taking solid positions provides a real-world basis for it.
That approval voting would allow people to vote for as many candidates as they like - so they can toss a free vote on a third-party candidate because they think the charismatic guy in addition to whoever they really want because “He seems like a nice guy, I’m sure he’d do fine” provides a basis for it.
How so?
So where are the runoff elections where third parties are being voted into office because people are free to vote for whoever they want without being worried that it’ll give the election to the other guy?
What I’m seeing here is:
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A lack of information about how this poll was assembled.
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An end result where Obama wins by a landslide no matter what - approval voting doesn’t change the outcome.
And how does that work out when someone uses “I want X” as justification for something you don’t want?
Our society is full of “arbitrary standards” known as “laws” that ensure that society is allowed to function.
Many of those “arbitrary standards” are in fact bad, some are good, and some are debatable.
Which requires you cast your vote based on a passive opinion on who you like rather than who you actually think is the single most qualified person (based on your personal criteria for who you think is the most qualified person).
You’re trying to have it both ways.
You’re trying to insist that you are somehow picking multiple people for a single position based on unspecified research, while also claiming that it’s an ‘arbitrary standard’ to limit the number of people you vote for based entirely on a desire to express a ‘positive opinion’ for multiple candidates.
Well, which candidate do you have a more positive opinion for and why is it so important that you also express your opinion for the candidate for which you have a less positive opinion?
Would you also argue for mandatory voting, that everyone be legally required to vote?
You’re arguing for everything being a choice while insisting that people shouldn’t have to choose who they think is the single best candidate.
You’re arguing out of both sides of your mouth.
Why not go a step further?
Run every election based entirely on write-in. A ballot with no names, just a bunch of lines, and each voter can just write as many names as they want to indicate who they want to vote for.
Because you keep demonstrating the same flaws that undermine your own argument.
It is if you’re not following the rules.
You are if you can’t decide who you think is the best candidate.
Voting itself.
It is if you knowingly vote in a way you know will nullify your ballot and insist that “I want X” is all the justification you need.
Your core justification you continue to fall back on is “I want X, and that’s all the justification I need”.
You can not argue that “I want X” is the only justification you need, then try to argue why someone else’s “I want X” isn’t all the justification they need.
If “I want X” is all the justification you need for approval voting, then “I want X” is all the justification that RCV needs.
Instead, when RCV comes up, you suddenly insist that “I want X” doesn’t cut it when it comes to justification.
That is what makes you hypocrite.