The distinguishing and necessary result of democracy, practically unique when compared to any other form of government, is that it provides a nonviolent means to remove aggressively incompetent people from office.
> Sadly, this has never
> happened, anywhere, ever.
If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today.
However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted, it ultimately comes down to an assessment of what candidate voters would have been willing to back.
No, this didn't happen at all. There has been no election yet, and polls are not elections, they're just random-ish samplings. The polls showed voters weren't very enthusiastic about Biden, but back in 2015, the polls showed that Trump was absolutely certain to lose in a landslide to Hillary, and that didn't happen. I do agree with the poll results this time around, but that's just my opinion and not at all backed up by an actual election, which we now won't have (since the election will have a different candidate). We'll see how well the new candidate fares.
>However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted
This "mechanism" was not part of the government at all, and not really part of "democracy". It was just a bunch of opinion polls organized by mostly the press, and they influenced Biden to stop his campaign, but again this is not some central feature of democratic systems at all. The only way of truly assessing what candidate voters choose is to have an election. Everything else is just guesswork.
Since that is the only thing that has enabled Republicans to barely win presidential elections since 2000, we will not get anywhere close to passing such legislation, let alone get it approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
As a side note, the last attempted constitutional amendment was the Equal Right Amendment, giving equal rights to women. It was proposed in 1972, and is maybe close to finally being approved.
Actually all it requires is the state legislatures of enough states to hit 270 EC votes to pass the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta.... It's at 209/270 at the moment.
The electoral college is an utterly idiotic system, but can be broken from within.
Say huh? It is literally the same thing as now but in reverse and much much worse. At least now your vote has a chance of counting for something if only influencing your elector. If you live in a state that has agreed with the compact and has a small population, your vote doesn’t mean a damn thing even if you vote for the popular vote winner. Your vote is not yours, it’s the mob’s.
Oh and of course if you're for a small-state bonus in presidential (i.e. federal, nationwide) elections why is it that geography of all factors should be the one distinguishing point? How about skin color or profession? You as the artisanal baker that you are by vocation, don't you feel that artisanal bakers are always underrepresented in parliaments? Shouldn't your vote as an artisanal baker be given more weight, just like the way that citizens of New Hampshire get preferential treatment the Way God Intended?
If you don’t believe that geography and states is the correct framework we should use, go work to amend the constitution. Why “break it from the inside”? Go make your case and let your argument win on its merits and get the votes. Stop trying to game the system, go change the system.
In the current system, some people's votes, those of the least populous states, count for far, far more than some other people's votes (those in the most populous states).
Plus, today, if you live in a state that is overwhelmingly in favor of one party, your preference for the other party doesn't count in the slightest. If you're a blue Texan or a red New Yorker, there is 0 point to you even going to the polls. In a national voting system, your votes would truly matter as well.
It may feel nice if your state casts its votes for your preferred candidate even if they lose the general election. But it is absolutely 100% entirely irrelevant rationally. And this is the only thing lost if the law change goes through.
You are only disenfranchised if your votes can't affect the outcome in practice or in principle. Like, say, the votes for president of Republicans in California or those of Democrats in Texas in practice. Or the votes of those in Puerto Rico even in principle.
Second of all, the constitution leaves it up to the states to decide how to appoint their electors. It follows that any system chosen by that state is as constitutional as any other system.
I would also add that a major improvement to the current rotten system would be for states to appoint their electors proportionally, instead of winner-takes-all. That would solve by far the biggest problem with the current system, which is not that Maine gets more representation per citizen than California, but that voting Republican in California is entirely useless.
Your reply was that the constitution doesn't say that the USA is a direct democracy.
So, I explained that adopting the national vote wouldn't make the USA a direct democracy. I also explained that the constitution doesn't say that the states need to decide the electoral votes based on local popular votes only.
So, I refuted your argument in two different ways. I'm not sure where you feel I didn't respond to it.
That's the point of the Electoral College. It weeds out groupthink, which is the downfall of direct democracy.
It's not stupid just because you refuse to use it right.
The real problem of the system is the state based system, where winning a narrow majority in a state is equivalent to winning a landslide, since you get the same amount of power. Also, the fact that different people get different leverage based on whether they live in a smaller or larger state is highly unfair.
The electors themselves have not actually decided an election in a hundred years or more (as in, electors deciding against the official choice of their state). While they legally could, I would bet you however much you want that they would get literally lynched, if not arrested and replaced, if they tried to. For all practical purposes, the USA has a weighted state-based popular vote system, where the president is the one who wins a majority in states with enough weight.
Edit: researching a little bit more, the electors have never changed the result of the presidential election. The closest they ever came was in 1836 when enough electors ignored their state's vote for vice-president, and still the VP who won the by-state popular vote got elected later in congress. The president was separate and won the electoral college per the popular vote as normal.
So, this concept that electors serve some purpose to safeguard democracy from populism is a pure fantasy. It may be a fantasy that the founders shared, but it has never panned out in reality.
The polls had Trump winning in 3/10 simulations, which is far from absolutely certain:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
My point includes the suggestion that there is never a "best"; the optimal outcome is to elect the least worst candidate.
ALI: I shall stay here and learn politics.
LAWRENCE: That's a very low occupation.
ALI: I had no thought of it when I met you.
c.f. also Adams on presidential elections, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416
I've actually had a few runins in my past with some US senators where I got to actually sit and listen and converse about some problems. I was always unimpressed with the caliber of the man, to be honest, in terms of both their emotional and cognitive prowess. Having random people vote on the issues probably wouldn't yield worse results.
Something I've come to believe is that US democracy doesn't naturally select for anyone based on leadership skills, credentials, or any virtue that is needed in such a role. It seems to select for people who can get votes, which can mean a lot of things. I think that is a key issue.
Despite what the law says, people in the administration don't actually have to follow the orders of their appointed superior. If they feel that the senator/congressman/president/etc can be fooled, or simply that enough of their colleagues are on their side, they can just ignore even direct orders. What's the senator going to do? Call the police because their subordinates are ignoring them?
So one of the most necessary qualities in an official is being able to control the levers of power - through connections, charisma, physical power in ages past, money - whatever it is, you need your subordinates to actually do what you tell them. Government isn't a boardgames where people follow the law just because those are the rules of the game.
Me neither, but it reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke novel "Songs from Distant Earth". In it, a distant colony of Earth has a very small population, since the planet is all a big ocean, except for a few small islands. The small society has a mayor, who's randomly chosen from the population for a limited term. The only disqualification (other than obvious things like age) is that the post can't go to someone who actually wants to do the job. It's similar to how no one in their right mind actually wants to sit on a jury, but people do it because of civic duty.
The US has suffered for the lack of information. How can this be addressed, in the next 20 years, is a much more interesting question.
https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/03/20/chair-nikki-fried-defe...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-democratic-challenger...
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/12/08/dean-ph...
How primaries work is entirely up to the party. They may require votes, weigh some votes more than others, or whatever other scheme they choose internally.
As Maya Angelou once said, when people show you who they are -- believe them.
Plenty of people lived long lives back then.
Turns out just having steady access to food, living a low stress lifestyle, and not having to wade through literal shit on the streets was all it took for some lucky ancient humans to have the same lifespans as modern humans.
But fair enough.
It includes people who die at birth, childhood illnesses, etc.
Once you were past 20, your remaining life time jumped significantly
Citation needed. That claim seems clouded by today's standard of living.
Before there was clean drinking water, alcohol was much more widely consumed. Were people demented, drunk, or experiencing alcoholic dementia?
Before OSHA, jobs could cause similar symptoms. "Mad as a hatter" referred to hat-makers commonly getting mercury poisoning, as one example of job-induced dementia.
Before the FDA, we have examples from food and medicine.
Etc.
Exactly. There's no point in putting an upper age limit on a position when no one lives long enough for age to even be a factor.
Socrates made it to 71.
These go hand in hand: our current voting system breaks down if multiple candidates draw votes from each other, but a better voting system would be immune to that failure mode and could give people a free choice of several reasonable candidates without having some of them withdraw and throw their support to others.
In models that ignore some of people's preferences, voting "1 Preferred, 2 Lesser Evil, 3 Greater Evil" is dangerous, because your preference for Lesser Evil over Greater Evil is ignored. This creates an incentive for people to keep voting the way they do now, with the compromise candidate on the top.
Approval makes sense because it's easy to explain. Condorcet makes sense because it's relatively close to ideal at the cost of making it slightly more complex to vote. Any model of the form "Ranked choice, but ignore some of the preferences" is the worst of both worlds: more complex to vote, but doesn't produce as good of an outcome.
All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support. They're not going to overhaul the voting system when they can't agree on the national vote even mattering.
It ignores preferences below the top 2, just like the current system ignores preferences below the top 1. It's probably an improvement, but the minor advantage in ballot design doesn't seem worth rolling out a half-measure.
> but it's quite clear in practice that any ranked choice voting system has to have a limit on how many choices you can express
In practice, 99% of ballots will only include the candidates listed on the ballot. Perhaps set a limit of N write-in candidates for some reasonable N, to avoid someone playing edge-case games like "you are legally obligated to count my ballot containing 200 million names!!!1!". But there's no obvious reason not to allow as many rankings as candidates on the ballot plus number of permitted write-ins.
> All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support.
There's widespread opposition from the party that regularly loses the popular vote. I do hope it passes someday, though; it'll be a first step towards serious voting reform.
why is it that there are not the best 5, 50 or 500 people on the ballot and I as a voter can mark any and all that I think I know will do the job the way I want them to
"Check the box next to anyone you approve of" is not hard to figure out.
"Write down the candidates you find acceptable, in order of preference" is not substantially harder, either, and provides additional benefit (the ability to express a preference among the candidates you approve of).
I am concerned tho that preference voting (is that the right word?) gives people too many opportunities to screw up—there are too many things that can go wrong on the ballot (ones I've seen have three columns for 1st, 2nd, 3rd preference, and there should be at most? exactly? one mark in each column). Also vote counting has too many ifs and whens and seemingly arbitrary rules how my ballot will be counted in case my 1st choice doesn't clearly make it on first count.
Writing down candidates names will make for some fun days when it comes to counting. Plus, what if multiple candidates have similar names? And, a ballot with a scribbled "Miller!!1!" on it, do you mean Ms Annie Miller from Portland Oregon? That one? Lastly, when was the last time another person was able to read your scratches?
Here in Australia you number the box next to the candidates name from 1 to N this is not normally an issue for the local seat in the lower chamber (house of representatives) where there are a manageable number of candidates, but in the upper chamber where senators are elected on a state wide basis you end up with sometimes farcical situations like the infamous "tablecloth ballot paper" which had 264 candidates.
There has been some attempt to reform this such as forcing people/party's to pay a registration fee in order to appear on the ballot (this is done to cut down on so called nuisance candidates but it is arguably undemocratic, although I believe you are eligible for a refund of the fee if you poll above some threshold % of votes which is a fair compromise in my opinion).
It's not enough (£500 currently) to be a meaningful expense to any candidate actually trying to win, but it's enough friction for 'fun' campaigns that we get enough to be funny but not enough to really interfere with anything.
And, yeah, ours is called a deposit because if you get 5% of the vote you get it back - and the phrase "lost their deposit" to reference a candidate who thought they were real utterly cratering on election day is pretty widely known.
Of course the UK's system of government is largely a patchwork of oddities that, put together, mostly work for us, so how well any particular oddity will work in another system is invariably debatable.
You could list the candidates in random order with a number next to them, and then have people write down those numbers in order. That, like anything else, would have failure modes, though.
An NxN matrix for N candidates allows using "marked or not" detection, but it creates a huge ballot even with just a handful of candidates.
Dowdall's method assigns 1, 1⁄2, 1⁄3... points to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd... candidates on each ballot, then elects the candidate with the most points. Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted, which gives each one very different properties.
Ranked voting systems are usually contrasted with rated voting methods, which allow voters to indicate how strongly they support different candidates (e.g. on a scale from 0-10).[1] Rated voting systems use more information than ordinal ballots; as a result, they are not subject to many of the problems with ranked voting (including results like Arrow's theorem).
That's a bucket full of problems. I remember that I had a similar problems years ago when I wanted to consolidate several lists about the "daily usefulness" of Chinese characters. How much does it weigh when you put A, B, C in that order? is A=1/1, B=1/2, C=1/3? or maybe A=0, B=-1, C=-2? To quote the above, "Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted". This should be a red flag! I'm happy to see that alternatives to first-past-post are tried out in some locations such as Alaska, Maine and Australia, but why ranked voting?
Ranked voting is only good when you think of yourself as a sole, lonely voter. You put the candidates into this order: A, B, C. But there will be other voters with other preferences. Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD. Now you have three favorites A, E, F that are preferred choices, and there's that also-ran B who only was second best. But B got three second-best votes whereas each of A, E, F only got one vote.
So answer my question: how many second, third, fourth votes will it take to surpass a given number of first votes? If there's another ballot in the same election with GCBD on it, now you have B with 3x2nd and 1x3rd place. You cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide these numbers. There's no clear answer (although practical procedures can and have been proposed and used) and that bugs me. The entire thing looks like a game of Bridge, Skat or Poker to me, full of justifiable but ultimately very arbitrary rules, hard to explain and tricky to get right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method says that much to me. One also has to account for unranked candidates and decide whether it should be possible to give one rank to several candidates, and then whether (as done in sports) the next rank must be left empty.
It just goes on and on, the list of options to do the ballot and to do the counting is truly mind boggling. This is the reason I've come to much prefer preference voting over ranked voting. Ranked voting is much too complicated for general use in a general election whereas preference voting is simple and clear and the number of "design choices" as it were is drastically reduced when compared to ranked voting.
The ordinary case of preference voting is extremely explainable: if more people prefer A to B than prefer B to A, A beats B; pick the candidate that beats everyone else. "It's like running a bunch of head-to-head elections all at once."
They're also really easy to tally into a table: "A ranked above B" is a point for A over B; "B ranked above A" is a point for B over A; A and B ranked equal relative to each other doesn't add anything to either of those two cells.
The corner cases like cycles almost never come up. And even then, it's relatively easy to explain a high-level understanding of the most common methods: "if there's a loop of people who each beat the next one in the loop, ignore the one with the smallest margin of victory". If A beats B in a landslide, B beats C in a landslide, and C very narrowly beats A, A wins.
Also:
> Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD.
Every ballot implicitly ranks every option, and the usual assumption is that if someone doesn't even care enough to list a candidate, they prefer every candidate they did list over any candidate they didn't list. (There are UX design ideas that could let someone say "this candidate is last" without ordering every candidate, but that adds complexity.) So these ballots are:
A > B > C > D > E = F
E > B > C > D > A = F
F > B > C > D > A = E
Given especially US multi-race ballots, I find it a lot harder to see the incremental complexity of approval voting having a noticeable effect (though note for calibration that there's plenty of criticism out there for how confusing many multi-race ballots are as is).
What does this have to do with my agreeing with you that approval voting wouldn't confuse people?
Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works. “If you just shut up and do what you’re told by the political scientists, it’ll all work out.”
It’s the ‘how it works’ part that loses people. Strategies employed by those who understand it fully can even advantage more savvy voters over the ones just strictly following instructions. For instance, manipulating ranked choice by strategically not choosing any second or third choices. People know that they don’t know fully how systems besides FPTP work, and it makes them feel like these are a way to cheat them.
The instructions are simple, the mechanism and the possible ‘optimization strategies’ are more complex.
I’m not saying people are stupid, just not experts in this flavor of nerdery, and suspicious.
This is not a useful strategy for good preference-ordering systems. "strategically" not making a second or third choice is on balance much more likely to cause you to fail to get your preferences, because the scenario you thought you were hedging against didn't happen.
> Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works.
It's easy to understand how approval voting works, as well. That's the primary advantage of approval over Condorcet: ease of understanding. "Vote for anyone you approve of and would be satisfied to see in office. This way, you can vote for candidates you like more, as well as candidates you think have a better chance of winning, and you don't have to choose whether to vote strategically to keep someone you don't like out of office or to vote for your favorite candidate. We tally all the votes, and the person with the most votes wins, which means they're the person approved by the most people."
While Condorcet is a bit more challenging to understand (the easiest explanation being based on "who would beat everyone else in a head-to-head race", leaving aside the cycle-breaking mechanisms), it's much more resilient against the need for strategic voting. In Condorcet, there isn't an incentive to vote strategically; just write down your preferences.
Approval does have scenarios in which strategic voting may be desirable, notably when a less mainstream candidate is close to overtaking the mainstream candidates and enough people are willing to drop their approval of the closest mainstream candidate. That's a dangerous strategy to try, because it also gives an opportunity for the most popular opposing candidate to try to win. The existence of that strategy is one of the biggest arguments for Condorcet over Approval.
So, the massive tradeoff here is:
Do you want a system that's trivial to explain to people with no additional complexity under the surface, trivial to adapt existing voting procedures and ballot designs for, and is better than FPTP along most axes, but still retains one of the notable flaws of FPTP, namely having particular scenarios that still encourage strategic voting? That's Approval.
Or do you want a system that's better than FPTP along pretty much every axis, encourages and benefits from honest voting with no "strategy" required or desired, but is a bit harder to explain to people and has some additional complexity under the surface, and is harder to adapt existing voting procedures and ballot designs for? That's Condorcet.
Also, frankly, if you're going to talk about systems that present voters with something easy to understand on the surface but have complexity under the surface that most people don't understand and that does cheat people, we already have that system in place: FPTP with the Electoral College, gerrymandering, myriad forms of voter suppression... Compared to that, both Approval and Condorcet are simple.
Pleas do not google preferential voting, no country has ever implemented it. Definitely not Ireland.
The current system is the best thing in the world.
On serious note.
This will never be allowed in US as the whole 3rd candidate is wasted vote argument goes away. And suddenly there is a crack in the door for a other candidate to win.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/government-in-ireland/...
Democrats didnt get a chance to do that with Biden this time, there was no primary.
I meant that if the voters don't want an 82 year old president, they can just not vote for him.
I did not talk about primaries.
So why can't I pick a candidate that is under 30, or born overseas?
The rules make no logical sense and need updating.
Max age should be retirement age - max duration of the term.
In my opinion career politicians should be ended altogether but that's another matter.