Voters in Montana on Tuesday delivered a major blow to big moneyed interests by overwhelmingly passing a ballot initiative barring corporate cash from political campaigns in the state.
With 87% of votes counted as of Wednesday morning, Montana Constitutional Initiative 194 has ++received++ support from more than 65% of voters, with just 35% registering opposition.
Great choice and now all states do the same, ranked choice voting too!
Ranked Choice is a slight improvement over our current system, but it was first invented in 1785 and has some inherent flaws. Flaws that can be exploited by bad actors to subvert elections.
May I suggest STAR. It was designed in 2014, and makes it much harder to subvert an election.
I disagree on the improvement being slight. Having incentive to campaign cooperatively because second choices count could dramatically change political culture. And Australia has used ranked choice for a century, without becoming any hotbed of subversion.
Further, RCV has a foothold in the US Alaska (pending surviving the latest repeal initiative on yesterday’s state ballots), Maine, and many cities. It’s much more realistic to spread it than to start from scratch with something else.
I say very slight because of the many, many, glaring flaws of the system.
The fact that it does not eliminate the spoiler effect is a major one.
All it does is kick the spoiler effect down the road a bit. It eliminates the also ran candidates. As soon as a third party candidate actually becomes halfway viable, the spoiler effect kicks in harder than ever and skews the election the other way.
And FairVote (the assholes who keep pushing a broken system) know this.
The simplest argument against RCV is thus, the current US primary system followed by a General election functions nearly identically to a version of RCV capped at two rounds.
I have no interest in making third parties viable. I see the governance failures of parliamentary systems that fail to form majority governments and spend all their energy fighting each other instead of improving the lives of their citizens, and I don’t want that here.
What I hope for from RCV are 1)making the major parties more representative, by providing high-quality information on what single-issue parties are appealing to voters. Currently parties do polling and focus groups, but these are by nature small samples that can be misleading, and a full-voter sample would be hugely valuable in guiding party strategy in the way voters want. And 2)reduce negativity in campaigns, and hopefully bleeding over into less negativity in governance. The whole campaign ecosystem is intensely negative because it works for winning FPTP. Creating a structural incentive to have some positivity - making second choices count - has the potential to encourage bipartisan work (who wants to co-sponsor a bill with someone who media blitzed horrendous lies about you and your family?) and ultimately make government work better for the people.
Well, it fails at number 1. Flat out.
And it also fails number 2.
All while introducing new failure conditions.
RCV is a bad system. We’re already doing a version of it more isn’t a fix, it’s just more complexity to an already broken system.
The actual way to get the very things you want are with Cardinal voting systems like STAR.
You can’t just call those “glaring flaws” when it has a proven track record in the real world.
Let’s look at that track record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-negative_responsiveness#Specific_examples
Three massive, and provable failures that flipped an election due to a spoiler candidate. The very thing RCV claims to prevent.
There’s a reason why Condorcet only used his version of RCV as an example of a system that could not reliably produce the pairwise winner.
Then about 50 years later an Englishman reinvents the system but for multiple winner elections. Then later another Englishman strips out the multi-winner part and we’re back to the same system described in Condorcet’s 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix.
Translated that’s Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions.
Portland OR! Just did my rcv ballot the other day