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‘The Movement to Convince Biden to Not Run Is Real’
(www.politico.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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We're not trying to force a change in winners though. The elections below president are far more dynamic and the people elected usually win for a reason beyond FPTP.
But also, any kind of proportional representation requires a constitutional amendment. RCV can be installed with a state legislature making a 2 sentence bill.
Really what needs to happen is removing the 100 year old cap on the size of the house. 800 reps would drastically change both presidential elections and representation of people in general. Using 800 reps puts California at 96 members to Wyoming still having 1.
Honestly I'd go further, let's get a round thousand and hook it to a ratio. Obliterating the ability to buy house races will result in better high level candidates and better low level representation. I'd say let's do the full ten thousand if I thought people would for it.
That linked data is collected from local American races. The winner is overwhelmingly the person who won the first round, which is the only round the majority of the time. When people claim RCV will break the two party system they are trying to claim it will change the winners. The evidence largely shows that no voting system can take a single-winner duopoly and break it.
Any new voting system would require only a simple bill from the legislature. "Ballots instructions for every election at every level shall direct voters to select any number of candidates. The candidates with the most votes wins their respective election."
Proportional representation specifically refers to how parties divide the available seats in a parliamentary body. Not how you cast your vote.
RCV allows for changes that FPTP doesn't but that has never meant this would be shaken up right away. Mostly it's a way to avoid vote splitting. So you can run a progressive, moderate, conservative, and an alt right candidate without the traditional alliances worrying about vote splitting.
I apologize for not addressing that, but I didn't think it required expanding on. Yes, that's correct. I feel the preferred proportional method is Sequential Proportional Approval Voting
RCV doesn't eliminate vote splitting, it only mitigates it. If two candidates have similar support in a non-final round, one can act as a spoiler for the other. The problem is that it's harder to understand and FairVote used to lie about it, so a lot of people think it's not a problem. The Alaska special election from a few years back is an example of a spoiler election. If Palin hadn't run (or fewer Palin voters voted) the other Republican would have won. If you want to completely eliminate vote splitting you have to move to a cardinal voting method that satisfies the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, which is most of them, including approval voting.
SPAV is specifically constructed to work with proportional representation. It iterates until all seats are filled. But in the US, by Constitutional law, it's one seat per geographical district.
About RCV though it's still head and shoulders above FPTP, and easy to understand. About Alaska specifically, I don't understand why you would call the party backed candidate who got more votes a spoiler?
Palin lost in the second round because roughly half of Begich's voters did not want Palin. If the less popular Republican candidate wasn't in the race then Peltola still wins. This was a case of RCV working exactly as advertised. A traditional party primary would have nominated Palin, not Begich, and she would have lost anyways.
Yes, that's how it works. The first round is functionally identical to regular approval which is why I like using the two. Approval for single-winner, SPAV for multi-winner.
I'm pretty sure it's just federal law, but I would have to double check. Not like Congress would change it anyway.
That's pure speculation. But using the voting data from the general, we Begich was preferred to both Palin and Peltola in head-to-head matchups. Palin pulled enough votes from Begich to eliminate him in the first round and he lost to Peltola in the second. If Palin hadn't run Begich would have won.
You can read more about it from the linked sources here.
Here's the most relevant section:
You have to be careful analysing RCV results, because people tend to only look at what the election did, and fail to look at what it didn't do. One of the good things about RCV is that it collects a fair bit of information, but then it usually ignores a fair bit of it. When trying to understand whether a candidate was a spoiler or not, you have to ask what would have happened if they didn't run at all, which requires considering collected information the "unaltered" election didn't take into account. If removing them from the election changes the winner of the race, then they were a spoiler. We know that removing Palin would have resulted in a Begich win over Peltola, so that makes Palin a spoiler. She's a losing candidate that changed the winner of the race simply by entering, assuming voter preferences are stable.
Yeah no. That's a lot of noise to ignore that the party and Republican voters preferred Palin. Begich wouldn't even have been there in traditional FPTP. Calling the most popular candidate from a party "a spoiler" is a rhetorical device republicans came up with to go after RCV.
Peltola is also hardly some far left representative. So calling it a center squeeze is a bit rich. This entire write up screams, "I can't approve of the Alaskan RCV election because I'm paid not to."
To be clear, not you, the author of that Wikipedia article.
Edit to add- and sure enough if you go to the talk page there's a partisan group defending it from any changes to bring it towards Wikipedia objectivity standards. This is why your teachers told you Wikipedia is a bad source.
I didn't tell you to trust Wikipedia, I told you to follow through to the linked sources in that section. Also, that talk page suffers from the same problem you're having, which is assuming that the RCV results are the same thing as the public opinion. The entire point of analysing the data is to look past the voting system used and try to understand what people's preferences are. Here's another (very long) source that summarizes the full ballot data and explains that, yes, Palin was a spoiler. Justifying this as acceptable by saying that RCV followed its own rules (which it must do, by definition) is the same as saying Ralph Nader spoiling the 2000 election was the correct outcome because those people had Nader as their favorite.
Look I don't hate RCV. It's certainly better than FPTP. I just don't want people to have false ideas about its function. Spoilers can and do happen, they just behave differently than FPTP. And, I will add, they behave in a much more acceptable way, with RCV spoilers being much more likely to be competitive candidates compared to FPTP. Plus, RCV has less center-squeeze than FPTP. Mathematically, Approval doesn't have spoilers nor does it have a center-squeeze effect, and I would argue that it's better than both RCV and FPTP for this and other reasons, but I do want to re-confirm that FPTP is the worst.
SPAV still requires a proportional system. You cannot just magic it into our system. And even if there's a state willing to go proportional, asking voters to use two different systems is a non starter.
Second. That source is shit too. It's a bunch of mathematicians playing what if? This quote is as far as I got because it makes it obvious.
If you're going to criticize RCV it needs to be on facts. Not on fantasy situations that can be generically applied. Yes if some Palin voters in an alternate universe decided to abandon their entire ideology and vote blue, they could have kept Begich in the race and prevented Peltola from getting those second round votes. But that's an absolutely ridiculous assumption and shows these guys are just playing the numbers game.
Which is what every conservative attempt to attack RCV voting in the wake of 2022 came down to.
You're not bringing any novel evidence to the argument and you're proposing a niche replacement that doesn't even fit our system.
I dunno why you're bringing back SPAV into this, the discussion has had very little to do with it. There are local races that use STV, which is a bigger change to the voting and representation system than SPAV is.
You should just skip down to the part that explains that yes, Palin was a spoiler. You don't seem to be particularly interested in actually having a discussion, I'm not here to score wins or attack one system or another. I'm here to provide and receive a better understanding of how voting and representation systems work. You don't seem to be particularly interested in that.
I'm not skipping anywhere, I'm familiar with the argument. I heard it ad nauseum from Fox News in 2022. The entire theory depends on ignoring the actual ideology on the ground and assuming Palin voters would just as soon vote for a Democrat.
And you haven't mentioned any other type of approval voting until now so yes that's what was assumed. STV is also a multiple winner election system. Which is also incompatible with our Constitution. At this point I'm not sure you're familiar with the US Constitution but in order to do anything that has multiple winners we'd need at least 40 votes to support it in at least 40 different parliamentary bodies. 29 of which are controlled by a party that massively benefits from tying land to seats. No voting system that gives multiple winners going down the list is going to be compatible with our election system for the foreseeable future. Where STV was used in city elections, it's been deprecated because having two different systems on a single ballot is needlessly confusing.
It literally says the opposite, and there's no assumption, it's right there in the voting data. Begich beats Palin and Peltola one-on-one. I'm sorry that you've heard other people talk about this particular election in bad faith, but that's not what I'm doing. We can talk about other particular RCV elections that had spoilers, if you like.
I mentioned both regular approval and SPAV in my first comment. Maybe that's where some of this confusion is coming from.
Can you quote the section that prohibits multi-winner elections? At this point some of the things you've said have me believing you might an inauthentic account, unfortunately. I apologize if you're an earnest American, but I have now have my doubts.
You need to learn more about American elections and how the government is composed. I've told you several times that there is one winner per district. If you want to change that then go off, but don't come in here spreading GOP propaganda while proposing the least suited version of voting for how we put our government together. I'm done responding to this. You really pressed F to doubt on how we elect people.
If you're referring to the House of Representatives, single-member districts is a federal law, not a constitutional requirement. Congress could simply pass another law changing the old one, no constitutional amendment required. The method of representation in the Senate is codified fairly narrowly into the Constitution, but the House requirements are more lax and doesn't forbid multi-seat representation. Technically the federal law allows for it too, but only if your state is grandfathered in. I'm not sure when the bill was passed or why that specific exception was put in.
If you're talking about lower levels, multi-seat representation happens at the local level all the time. There's a few states that have at-large districts in their legislatures, but single-member is way more common.
That's fine if you don't want to respond, I just want to make sure people reading have an opportunity to follow these links and realize that we do have plenty of multi-winner elections in the US.
It literally says the opposite, and there's no assumption, it's right there in the voting data. Begich beats Palin and Peltola one-on-one. I'm sorry that you've heard other people talk about this particular election in bad faith, but that's not what I'm doing. We can talk about other particular RCV elections that had spoilers, if you like.
I mentioned both regular approval and SPAV in my first comment. Maybe that's where some of this confusion is coming from.
Can you quote the section that prohibits multi-winner elections? At this point some of the things you've said have me believing you might an inauthentic account, unfortunately. I apologize if you're an earnest American, but I have now have my doubts.
It literally says the opposite, and there's no assumption, it's right there in the voting data. Begich beats Palin and Peltola one-on-one. I'm sorry that you've heard other people talk about this particular election in bad faith, but that's not what I'm doing. We can talk about other particular RCV elections that had spoilers, if you like.
I mentioned both regular approval and SPAV in my first comment. Maybe that's where some of this confusion is coming from.
Can you quote the section that prohibits multi-winner elections? At this point some of the things you've said have me believing you might an inauthentic account, unfortunately. I apologize if you're an earnest American, but I have now have my doubts.