Re:Harmful 5G Fast Lanes Are Coming; the FCC Needs to Stop Them
by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @03:38PM
(#40069214)
> But I want to stress rather that it is a pressure rather than the only contributing variable. That there are more variables with similarly strong pressures, such that by fixing voting we shouldn't expect to have a stable system with multiple parties overnight.
I'm not sure that's the case, at least if you're willing to extend "overnight" to something like "over two or three election cycles."
If we were to adopt e.g. approval voting, the immediate effect would be that existing third party candidates who currently get ~1.2% of the vote would be able to get 20-30%, because voters would no longer have to be concerned about "wasting" their vote on a non-major party candidate they might actually prefer. In a small number of districts, like Libertarians in parts of New Hampshire or Greens in parts of California, the third party candidate might even immediately win.
Which in turn would change the nature of the very next election, because the media would have no excuse to dismiss a candidate who got 30% approval in the previous election when the losing major party candidate only got 32% -- or 29%. Then third party candidates get into the debates and have the opportunity to turn their 30% into 55%.
Moreover, it doesn't take a lot of seats to make a difference. Suppose the Republicans have 48 seats, the Democrats have 49 and a third party has 3. Those 3 seats are all either of the major parties need for a majority, so the third party will have a significant amount of influence.
> You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue
Isn't this exactly the thing which is solved by cardinal systems? If you put candidate A, B and C or policy A, B and C all on the ballot together and have people rate them, there is no longer an ordering problem because you're not holding separate votes for A vs. B and, B vs. C and C vs. A. If Policy A gets a higher average rating than Policies B or C then it will always win when they're all on the ballot until voter preferences change.
The people choosing which candidates or policies make it onto the ballot have a lot of power, but that's always the case. Even if 100% of voters agree that Policy A is the best policy, if the only policies on the ballot are B and C then nobody can vote for Policy A. Obvious solution is to allow any policy or candidate onto the ballot that can gather a threshold number of signatures, instead of giving control over this to some manipulative autocrats.
I'm not sure that's the case, at least if you're willing to extend "overnight" to something like "over two or three election cycles."
If we were to adopt e.g. approval voting, the immediate effect would be that existing third party candidates who currently get ~1.2% of the vote would be able to get 20-30%, because voters would no longer have to be concerned about "wasting" their vote on a non-major party candidate they might actually prefer. In a small number of districts, like Libertarians in parts of New Hampshire or Greens in parts of California, the third party candidate might even immediately win.
Which in turn would change the nature of the very next election, because the media would have no excuse to dismiss a candidate who got 30% approval in the previous election when the losing major party candidate only got 32% -- or 29%. Then third party candidates get into the debates and have the opportunity to turn their 30% into 55%.
Moreover, it doesn't take a lot of seats to make a difference. Suppose the Republicans have 48 seats, the Democrats have 49 and a third party has 3. Those 3 seats are all either of the major parties need for a majority, so the third party will have a significant amount of influence.
> You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue
Isn't this exactly the thing which is solved by cardinal systems? If you put candidate A, B and C or policy A, B and C all on the ballot together and have people rate them, there is no longer an ordering problem because you're not holding separate votes for A vs. B and, B vs. C and C vs. A. If Policy A gets a higher average rating than Policies B or C then it will always win when they're all on the ballot until voter preferences change.
The people choosing which candidates or policies make it onto the ballot have a lot of power, but that's always the case. Even if 100% of voters agree that Policy A is the best policy, if the only policies on the ballot are B and C then nobody can vote for Policy A. Obvious solution is to allow any policy or candidate onto the ballot that can gather a threshold number of signatures, instead of giving control over this to some manipulative autocrats.