And the fact that you don’t know who it is that’s running in the runoff it’s chaos voting. I would rather go all the way back to the poles to vote in a runoff election where I know the candidates running the two candidates running instead of guessing
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RCV doesn’t elect moderates, though. That’s a false claim the top pro-RCV organizations have pushed to try and get support from moderates. Opponents of RCV need to stop taking them at their word.
What actually happens to moderates in RCV is they don’t get enough first place rankings to proceed to later rounds. They tend to get eliminated early. So the last round ends up being between the right and left candidates who happened to be positioned favorably, relative to the other candidates on their side.
This is something people need to understand about RCV, and frankly our traditional system: The winner is largely a function of how the candidates are positioned relative to each other. But this shouldn’t be a consideration. The goal of a single winner election is to find someone to represent the district as a whole. We should be attempting to measure how candidates are positioned relative to the voters.
This is precisely the position John Adams took when he wrote his Thoughts on Government :
The principal difficulty lies, and the greatest care should be employed in constituting this Representative Assembly. It should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them. That it may be the interest of this Assembly to do strict justice at all times, it should be an equal representation, or in other words equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it. Great care should be taken to effect this, and to prevent unfair, partial, and corrupt elections.
Majoritarian systems of elections don’t meet this standard, because they prioritize the largest group at the expense of all else. There is no equal representation for equal interests - only domination by the largest, most organized interest. That is how a direct democracy operates, not a republic.
Our founders wanted us to be a republic to the fullest extent. They did not write “ensure the will of the majority is followed”; they wrote “promote the general welfare”. Neither RCV nor our traditional system satisfy this noble vision.
I disagree with so many fundamental things you and the pro-RCV OP state, it’s hard to know where to start.
Fundamentally, I still maintain that RCV is a solution to an imaginary problem. And we know from real life (e.g. Alaska) that the winner of these elections are RINOs at best, which undermines your claim about RCV not electing “moderates.”
At base, though, is the fact that there is no “moderate” in a constitutional republic. The ideological spectrum from pure communism to pure anarchy is irrelevant to our constitutional republic; claiming to be “moderate” between the two poles has no bearing on questions of constitutional legitimacy of policies being championed.
One either honors one’s oath of office to ‘support and defend’ the Constitution or the office holder perjured himself when taking it. Incidentally, the entire DNC platform is unconstitutional. Democrats absolutely do not represent the interest of non-leftists in their districts, and they haven’t in a century or more. So it is completely unsurprising to me that they are the primary drivers of radical change to election processes.
No thanks. I’ll pass in favor of simple constitutional governance conducted by the winner of traditional & clean elections.
Roamer, I’d appreciate a response that doesn’t just lump me with the RCV lobby I oppose, and at least acknowledges what John Adams said.
My paragraph stating that “Democrats absolutely do not represent the interest of non-leftists in their districts” directly responded to and refuted your claim that " The goal of a single winner election is to find someone to represent the district as a whole ." Democrats objectively only represent the anti-constitution, anti-republican left. Whether or not you are a Democrat, I don’t know. But I do know that I have never met a fan of RCV who wasn’t a Dem or a fan of what they’re doing to undermine constitutional governance.
Adams’ letter, read in its entirety, doesn’t support RCV at all. He rejects direct democracy and advocates for Congress choosing the president, an idea the people ultimately rejected. This letter also precedes the Constitution by more than a decade, so it’s hardly relevant to how elected officials are expected to behave under the oath of office during the constitutional era.
Setting those points aside, and read in proper historical context, the political choices Adams described would have been made by white, free, mostly Christian men who owned property, and the pool of candidates they were choosing from were similarly situated. It’s much easier to select what Adams described as “a few of the most wise and good” from such a pool with a relatively high bar for entry. The relative homogeneity Adams was living in would naturally provide a degree of homogeneity in politics, as well, making it even easier to conclude who is ‘wise and good.’ We simply don’t have that any more, which is partly why I maintain many of the positions stated in the letter aren’t relevant today.
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I oppose RCV. Please stop saying I support it. Because I don’t, and I’m getting annoyed at you suggesting I do.
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When I said “The goal of a single winner election is to find someone to represent the district as a whole”, my point was that RCV fails at that. We are in agreement here. I don’t know why you are reading in disagreement, but this is definitely a point we agree on.
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Per my first point, I wasn’t using Adams’ letter to argue in favor of RCV. His statement “it should be an equal representation, or in other words equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it” is naturally in opposition to any majoritarian system of elections. That clearly includes RCV; it doesn’t meet the standard Adams expects.
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The proper historical context of Adams’ letters is delegates from other states (specifically North Carolina, Virginia, and New Jersey) were asking him for advice how to structure their state constitution. Adams, being a student of history and philosophy, gave a response as to what general principles they ought to follow. His description of a republic, though not precisely what we have adopted nation-wide, is absolutely relevant to anyone who cares about republican principles.
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I support republicanism. Furthermore, I assert that RCV runs contrary to republican principles. It is much more in line with democratic principles. Likewise, I assert our traditional system also runs contrary to republican principles. As a supporter of republicanism, I oppose both systems.
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Systems which do support republican principles include Approval voting and STAR voting. One of my reasons for opposing RCV (and our traditional system) is it places extreme importance on majority rule. RCV explicitly values majority rule (our traditional system values it implicitly). However, systems like Approval or STAR encapsulate the Constitutional goal to “promote the general welfare”. They inherently value the people as a whole, naturally including interests a majoritarian system would exclude. They are more likely to protect Constitutionally enshrined rights, because they don’t simply enact the will of a democratic majority.
I thought the first essay I wrote in my first college English class was absolutely perfect when I turned it in. The prof gave me an F. I went to see him after class to ask why. Once we established that I really cared about the class and subject, he explained that readers of text are not mind-readers, and that if I wanted to tell a story people could understand I had to get out of my own head and keep their POV in mind. I ended up acing the course.
You might consider prefacing serious commentary on important topics with something like “I agree” or “I disagree.” You may not have realized it, but you were coming across (to me anyway) as someone who had technical quibbles with the OP while agreeing on the need for something radical and new (you indicated you don’t like traditional elections either).
Now, with your position clearly stated, I get it. But I still disagree that traditional elections are flawed. Corruption taints traditional elections, but the solution to that is weeding out the corruption, not throwing it all out and trying something radical and new (which would suffer from the same process corruption we have now, BTW), which is what I got from your OP and from #6 in your last response.
A majority elects the official, but the official is still theoretically bound by the oath of office to obey the Constitution. So your assertion of democratic tyranny in that situation is simply wrong. What we get through the corrupted system, as I said previously, is corrupt liars who have no intention of supporting or defending the Constitution from the start. Corruption begets corruption.
Absolutely unsurprisingly, leftists favor your Approval and STAR approaches, which are simply variations on the RCV theme. I maintain that all three are solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist (except to the extent that leftists think every time a non-leftist wins an election it’s a problem). None of these would guarantee that elected officials keep their oaths of office, as you seem to suggest in #6.
Noted.
I understand it is natural to connect Approval and STAR to RCV when you are coming from a choose-one perspective. They’re all alternatives to what you are accustomed to, which allow voters to give their opinion of more than one candidate.
Something else that tends to happen in these conversations is people assume electoral systems favor one ideology or another, then form an opinion of the system based on said assumption. The reality is electoral systems are naturally blind. They are merely a process for taking a set of numbers and obtaining a result. They care only about the shape of the distribution of voters and candidates, not about rotations, reflections, or inversions.
Example: The Filibuster
In the US Senate, we currently have a set of rules that effectively requires bills to get 60% to pass. What has happened historically is the party with a majority will rail against the filibuster, because it limits their power. However, judging the filibuster simply based on the partisan makeup of the Senate is short-sighted. Control of the Senate can be reversed. So we have to have more objective measures of the quality of a system than some assertion about which side it helps more.
I mostly agree with this. I support efforts to weed out corruption, but I am not under the impression the systems I promote will do that; as you have correctly implied, the way we vote has little to do with corruption. My goal in promoting these systems is to accurately represent the people.
Where I have to disagree is with the “radical and new” statement, particularly when it comes to Approval voting. Approval voting uses the exact same ballot format as our traditional system. The only difference is it removes an arbitrary restriction on the voter. It is also not new: it has seen limited use throughout history - most notably, it was used by the Cardinals to choose the Pope for a period of about 300 years. This is partly why I like to call it a conservative voting method.
STAR voting is actually new, though. It was only invented in 2014.
Politicians who don’t believe in God (and that is, disproportionately, Democrats) are not bound by any oath of office. They’ll lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, and whatever else they can do for their own gain, even if it violates the Constitution. And they’ll cover for each other, if necessary.
I’m going to break my own rule about saying systems don’t have bias, and argue the following: Conservative values are actually in danger with the current system. However, Approval voting is a rational defense mechanism.
We have a set of laws and cultural values currently in place which the radical left is gradually destroying, and there is actually a bias in their favor, because Republicans are spineless and refuse to change anything back. Our traditional system is weak to this kind of attack, because the left only has to wait for noise in the system (or cheat) to gain a narrow majority. They then use said majority to push through every change they possibly can, and the damage is done; going back is nigh impossible.
What Approval voting will do is prevent radical leftists from getting a majority. This is because Approval voting severely limits the ideological noise they need for their one term to get in and destroy everything.
How does it do this? Simple: To win an Approval election, a candidate needs to have a fairly broad appeal among the voting public - more than what our current system requires. And the things that tend to have broad appeal tend to be non-disruptive at the individual level. Think of it like a voter-level filibuster: You no longer need a majority to stop radical change. You just need to be large enough to be relevant.
The only way radical change happens under Approval is if there’s a general consensus in favor of it. As long as there’s significant division on the issue, politicians have little incentive to alter the status quo. So Approval voting provides stable government, and will protect traditional values. It is exactly what we need to fight against communists.
I again find myself unconvinced by anything you’ve said, and dismayed by the naivete in other things. It’s getting tedious having to repeat points I’ve already clearly stated that don’t seem to have sunk in. So this is my final post here.
We live in a post-constitutional, anarcho-tyrannical era. We were driven to this point by domestic enemies of the republic and the Constitution on which it stands. There is no opposition party, since the GOP has for more than a century acted as a placeholder to freeze radical leftist advances made when they were in power. This pattern of radical leftist advances away from the Constitution, followed by leftists losing power, GOP maintains status quo, and then leftists return to power and begin the next advance has been happening since the early 20th Century. Since the Marxists were allowed into the US and accomplished their ‘march through the institutions,’ we now live in a society that’s well on its way to Idiocracy.
As ignorance and stupidity are fomented, there are fewer and fewer people for whom constitutional governance is not just a priority but a solution to practically every problem the anarcho-tyrants have created. The idiots have been indoctrinated to believe that bloody democracy is what they want, and they accept that position unquestioningly. Unfortunately, as many of the Founding generation noted, the American system is only possible with learned, moral people.
During my life, there have always been candidates for the presidency who demonstrated constitutional literacy AND acted like their oath of office was sacred (Ron Paul being perhaps the best example). ‘The system,’ including both parties, has rejected all of them as ‘radical extremists.’ That’s how far along the Marxist bloodless coup has progressed, when men who promise a return to constitutional governance are called radicals in a nation where the Constitution is literally the only officially ratified social contract.
In a primary-less field of candidates ranging from Ron Paul on the far right to Obama or Harris on the far left, there is only one vote to cast for people like me: Ron Paul. In a constitutional republic, the only person qualified to execute constitutionally legitimate laws faithfully is the one who, all evidence suggests, will do just that. There has never been more than one of these candidates in any cycle I’m aware of, so your various ranked choice options are, as I’ve said repeatedly, a solution to an imaginary problem.
All the rest of the field are anti-constitutional, un-American domestic enemies of the republic to varying degrees. For the masses, they have a range of choices to carry out their thoroughly unconstitutional democratic wishes, from the most radical Marxists to the buffoon politicians who think a little communism is OK because they’re arrogant enough to think they can control it. For the Idiocracy, any of the ranked choice systems are fine: they’ve been trained to want pure democracy and Marxism, and they’ll get both in spades.
What can never happen under such a system is for the ‘radical constitutionalist’ to win. Contrary to your claim, all of these ranked systems favor “democracy,” and history shows where that particular road to hell takes us.
I’m out.
Rank choice voting should never be allowed. It only benefits mediocre candidates.
Are you kidding me. Everybody needs to look at what is occurring in Australia. We have a government with a massive majority that only achieved 34% of the first choice vote. Rank choice is a way where the state gets you to vote for people you hate so they can claim a fake legitimacy. In Australia we have to rank every candidate or your vote gets cancelled. If you live is a socialist area and you are a conservative your vote ends up with a socialist candidate who then claims to have more than 50% of the vote.
Alaska and Senator Murkowski being the American example. A woman claiming to be a republican elected by democrats. We all know who supports this system…the deep state.
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