Elections are supposed to be ONE VOTE for a candidate for office - not ok - I’ll vote once for this guy - but if he doesn’t win then I’ll vote for this guy and that girl and so on until someone wins.
Additionally:
One day - in person - With ID - on paper - with blue ball point pen - in your small precinct - mandatory hand counts - mail in only for disabled/military/working out of town (VERIFIED) - Must have chain of custody of all election items - all ballots printed must be kept and accounted for (including returned send to wrong address etc - DUNs mailed ballots) for audit by the people - ALL election data belongs to the people and is public record. Post it online (ballots DO NOT have your name/identity on them) so the people can do a recount if they wish.
Disagree. Rank choice is one vote that applies to the first applicable winner.
One of the major benefits of this system is that it allows for third party candidates to have a chance. Our current system disincentivizes supporting anyone other than the designated representatives of the two major parties.
Example: Personally, I would prefer Vivek to be president. But everyone knows that’s not going to happen, so they don’t waste their vote on him, especially when it’s more important to boost Trump. With ranked choice, I could vote for Vivek, and have Trump as my second choice. When Vivek doesn’t win, my vote instead goes to Trump, so there’s no risk in supporting an underdog.
Disagree: Ranked Choice Voting is essential to opening up the current duopoly/uniparty to competition from third party and independent candidates without people having to worry about their vote becoming a spoiler or protest vote. This opens up the national dialog to positions outside the uniparty box and gives unconventional candidates a real chance to be heard and elected.
One person, one vote. The person with the most votes wins. KISS.
There are third parties already, but they haven’t won anything substantial. The majority of the US are not interested and/or engaged with the current third parties. I think that taking the money out of political campaigns and having a maximum pool of money divided among candidates would readily provide more options, and not mess with the very simple one person, one vote.
“One person, one vote” is a nice slogan, but it isn’t an argument.
Rank choice voting still gives everyone the same voting power it just gives more detail to how each person would like to vote and de-risks voting for candidates with less institutional support.
RCV doesn’t help third parties. It retains the spoiler problem and would maintain the control of the duopoly. It is a fake proposal.
Legitimate solutions that would do what you want include consensus systems like Approval voting or STAR voting, and various proportional systems.
Red pen would be better, IYKYK
It’s not a slogan. It’s the reality that our founders envisioned.
You are not looking at the long term consequences of ranked choice voting. As a result of ranked choice voting, Alaska, a RED state, is represented by RINOs and Democrats. If Vivek doesn’t have a chance, why should you vote for him? Your vote won’t cause him to have a chance. And this is not about a vote of confidence, but rather a vote for a candidate who can win, whom you prefer. Elections are not about anything but electing candidates. Period. Use some other means to promote your views.
Keep it simple. Ban Rank Choice Voting. Period.
One day, in person, wouldn’t work for me. I missed voting in my first presidential election because I went into the hospital the night before. Had I not been able to vote early a few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to vote at all. On election day, I was unable to drive. I am not disabled per se, but I am 80 years old, and I have no guarantee that I will be well enough to vote on election day. So I get an early ballot and hand-deliver it to a polling place before election day. Failure to vote early is what ALLOWED the election fraud in Arizona. Republicans went to their precinct on election day, only to find the machines not working. They were prevented from voting. Had they voted early, they would have had time to correct the problem and make sure they got to vote.
Paper ballots, black ball point pen, yes. ID. Yes. Arizona has allowed people to vote early for many years. It has not been a problem. Nowadays, too many people vote early who don’t need to. Arizona only distributes the ballots three weeks before election day, so it’s not like people are voting before they have all the information made available to them by election day.
Keep it simple. I could have voted for your proposal had you done so. As things stand, I cannot vote for it.
Being in the hospital is an unforeseen event that would be expected to stop someone from voting. Events sometimes happen. Our main problem is opening up the system to so many situations that it becomes more likely that fraud will be used, in which case your vote from the hospital would be instantly canceled out by a fraudulent vote added in by others claiming to be unable to have voted after the fact, etc.
The reason it MUST be one day has to do with those planning the fraud needing to have a sense of exactly how many fake ballots they need to create to win with a very small but insurmountable margin. When the election happens in a single day, that’s much much harder to accomplish.
Failure to vote early did not cause the election fraud in AZ - it was planned in advance to sabotage and with a decent court system in place, would have led to the REDO or nullification of the entire election. Because AZ is such a corrupt state, voting early allows the planners to print just the right number of fake ballots - they can see them each day of early voting. Who can see them? Not just AZ fraudsters, but also the FEDS because of the Albert Sensors installed in most states that allow the corrupt FEDS access to all the data AS IT COMES IN.
When fraudsters have to rig the ONE DAY, it is OUT IN THE OPEN meaning that a decent court could easily see how targeted the “mistakes” were and all the other evidence like the maps they made ahead of time to stop Conservatives, etc.
When frausters have weeks of early voting to rig it, it is all BEHIND THE CURTAIN via the machines, and MUCH MUCH HARDER to adjudicate in a court.
Please show me where in the constitution this is stated or other founding documents that this is stated.
The answer is that it isn’t. The constitution leaves the voting process up to the states. Most states originally only allowed property-owning or tax-paying white men to vote. Overtime this has changed into everyone having the right to vote through new state and federal legislation including amendments to the constitution which otherwise didn’t specify much about voting.
You are simply wrong that “one person, one vote” is the reality the founders envisioned. If anything it is clear that they envisioned states would be able to come up with their methods of voting different from each other that would be open to change overtime.
No reason states couldn’t decide to implement rank choice voting. It isn’t contrary to the constitution or founding principles even a little bit.
People need to wake up and understand that ranked choice voting is a product of special interest groups on the left. They dress it up as being an immediate runoff, but what it actually does is cause votes not to count. It can and has resulted in the candidate in the lowest levels who could not get their voters out to win. There is a difference between my last choice and that person being someone I will absolutely not vote for, period and it is my right not to be forced to vote for that person. It’s like having the police show up at my door and drag me to the polls to make me vote for Putin because he is the only candidate on any ballot and he has to have votes to prove he was chosen for the job. Absolutely the worst idea in all of politics.
If I wasn’t out of votes I would give you a vote on this I hate ranked choice voting. I will be voting to repeal rank choice voting in Alaska on the 5th of November was probably 90% of the rest of alaskans we all hate that shit
Failure to vote early wasn’t the cause of the fraud, but voting early would have prevented it. When only one side votes early, that is when there is maximum chance for fraud.
My responsibility is to vote. I am doing what I need to do to be able to vote. I am not directly in charge of any program to prevent voter fraud. My responsibility is ONLY to vote. Putting roadblocks in the way of honest voters in the name of preventing election fraud shows a basic misunderstanding of how to deal with bad actors. A blanket rule that also interferes with honest people is not useful. I say it is evil. Like forcing registration of guns because some people use guns to kill innocent people.
We should do everything we can to discourage early voting, and look for a way to limit it to realistic cases where it is needed. But forcing even people like me to vote on election day is not the answer. If something goes wrong with my voting, I want to know before election day so I can correct it and have my vote count. My receiving my ballot early will make it possible for me to take action if I just happen to be among the 200,000 who “can’t” prove citizenship. IL have voted in Arizona for nearly 50 years, so the risk is real. There was no issue of voter fraud when I registered 60 years ago.
Yes, AND RCV is still one person one vote in the final analysis.
RCV does, in fact, help third parties and it ends the problem of spoilers.
STAR voting is a divide-and-conquer distraction.
No, RCV does not help third parties, and I have the receipts:
1. Australia’s 100-Year Experiment with RCV
The most conclusive proof of RCV’s impotence in the face of a two-party system is clear to see in the one country which has used it for the longest. For a little over a century, Australia’s House of Representatives has used single-winner RCV, and their Senate has used a proportional system.
I should stress is it is well established that proportional systems do help third parties; and the Australian Senate (being proportionally elected) has enjoyed a decent amount of third party participation throughout its existence.
Contrast this with the Australian House. As shown below, there is almost a 50-year span during which the Austrailian House used RCV and had ZERO third party membership. Surely if RCV helped third parties, this would not have happened - especially while third parties were doing absolutely fine in the Senate.
Furthermore, let’s compare this with the performance of third parties in US Congress:
It is a very similar picture. In both US Congress and the Australian House of Representatives, third parties have had stints of shallow activity, and long spells of absence.
The rational conclusion here is RCV has a track record of not helping third parties whatsoever. Additionally, it demonstrates any theories that RCV just needs several elections to work don’t hold water.
2. Other Correlations Between RCV and FPTP
Additional observations suggest RCV is just an iteration of FPTP. A 2.0 version of the current system, that comes with extra baggage. That’s not to say there aren’t differences - but the differences are too small to matter.
For instance, let’s look at how RCV results are reported, compared with other election methods. Here are the results of an exit poll from the 2012 election, in New York City:
Obviously this particular district is biased heavily left, in favor of Obama. However, what we’re interested in is how third parties performed, compared to FPTP results.
On the top panel, FPTP results (blue) are compared with Approval results (orange) and Score results (green). Note that Stein, Johnson, and other third parties all perform quite well - in fact, they all surpass Romeny’s measured support. This is to be expected, given the left-bias of the district. These are clearly the kinds of results we should want to see from our elections.
Moving on to the lower panel, we see FPTP compared with RCV (red). There is no apparent difference in the reported results. Third party support remains hidden, and Romney is still measured to be a “better” choice for the district than any of the third party candidates, in spite of our knowledge this is most assuredly not true.
Another indication of RCV’s similarities with FPTP comes from FairVote, the largest pro-RCV advocacy organization in the US.
Here, FairVote describes data they have regarding “come-from-behind winners” in all RCV elections that have happened so far in the US:
Summary: In 93% of RCV elections, the candidate with the most first-choice votes won.
This again suggests an incredible amount of agreement between RCV results and FPTP results. Even if you say “well, that’s still a difference of 7%”, that’s not exactly true; 7% is the maximum possible difference. This is because in real FPTP elections, voters are strategic. They anticipate the results, and shift their support the same way RCV would. It is not unrealistic to think the actual figure is 5% or lower.
Again, I must stress how voter behavior in FPTP already follows the RCV algorithm. Voters withdraw support from their true favorites, and move it to more “viable” candidates. This is literally all RCV is automating behind the scenes, with the ranks: “non-viable” candidates are eliminated from consideration, and support ultimately goes where a viability-aware voter would have put it in FPTP.
If you oppose FPTP on the basis that it hurts third parties, this degree of agreement between FPTP and RCV should be a serious red flag.
3. The Spoiler Threat as a Negotiation Tactic
This last point relates to a point of power FPTP actually gives to third parties, which RCV takes away. Even if you view the above data with skepticism, or reason that there are still minor benefits RCV affords third parties, I encourage you to also consider there are definite negatives.
In this case, I’m talking about the consequences major parties suffer in FPTP when they don’t broaden their base to include adjacent third-party voters.
In our current system, third parties actually have some leverage on policy and which issues receive the most air time. When a major party ignores them, or refuses to make concessions, they lose votes to them. So major parties try to appease them.
Indeed, consider the current presidential election: Donald Trump attended the Libertarian party convention in an attempt to broaden his coalition; and the Green party is trying to extract concessions related to Gaza from the Democrats.
RCV advocates claim their system also encourages this. But unfortunately it doesn’t. Consider: The effort required to persuade voters to rank you 2nd is inherently less than the effort require to persuade them to withdraw support from their 1st choice and give it to you. So it follows that FPTP demands more serious concessions to would-be third party voters than RCV.
Conclusion
It makes no sense for third parties to support RCV. It has a history of perpetuating two-party systems, gives no indication of meaningful change, and in fact compromises the one bargaining chip third parties do have.
What you accuse STAR of, I accuse RCV of: It is a divide-and-conquer distraction. An illegitimate reform, sold on puffed-up, and often outright false claims.
If you want to help third parties, do not, under any circumstances, support RCV. Instead, you should support STAR, Approval, or proportional systems.