These are cool strategies! I hope some kind of voting reform is able to pass in these countries for all the reasons you listed. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about the social mechanisms to get voters and politicians on board with alternative voting systems. It seems like RCV has gotten a lot of apathetic pushback, and I’m wondering how you think we should address it. Here are some challenges that come to mind:
All politicians are the beneficiaries of the system that elected them. Getting them to do surgery on the hand that feeds them could be a tough sell.
The city of Burlington (yes, the home of Bernie Sanders) repealed RCV after running into the condorcet paradox in 2009. If people were confused about RCV already, just wait till you have to explain to them why they most preferred candidate, the candidate with the most votes didn’t win, or the election algorithm failed to produce a winner and we have to redo it.
Please redirect me if this has been addressed more fully somewhere else. I feel like the people I talk to about alternate voting systems are already into voting systems and agree that FPTP is pretty garbage most of the time. I feel like I have fewer tools for convincing people who aren’t already into voting systems.
It seems that most of what you’re talking about are single-winner reforms (including single-winner pathologies such as center squeeze). In particular, the RCV you’re talking about is RCV1, single-winner, while the one I discuss in this article is RCV5, multi-winner; there are important differences. For discussing single-winner, I’d recommend the first two articles linked at the top; this article is about multi-winner reforms.
Personally, I think that the potential benefits of both kinds of reform are huge, but there are some benefits that only multi-winner can give. For instance, no single-winner reform can really fix gerrymandering, while almost any multi-winner one will.
The issue of politicians not wanting to “do surgery on the hand that feeds them” (I like that metaphor) is a real one. The four methods I’ve chosen to discuss are all chosen partly with an eye to that issue; that is, to being as nondisruptive as possible to incumbents (unless those incumbents owe their seats to gerrymandering, in which case, fixing gerrymandering has to take precedence). Actually, of the four methods, RCV5 is the most disruptive, so if this is your main concern, I’d look more closely at the other three methods I discuss.
These are cool strategies! I hope some kind of voting reform is able to pass in these countries for all the reasons you listed. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about the social mechanisms to get voters and politicians on board with alternative voting systems. It seems like RCV has gotten a lot of apathetic pushback, and I’m wondering how you think we should address it. Here are some challenges that come to mind:
All politicians are the beneficiaries of the system that elected them. Getting them to do surgery on the hand that feeds them could be a tough sell.
People are scared of change. People are even more scared of math. For example, Massachusetts voters rejected a proposal to start using RCV at the state level despite almost no organizing or funding on the NO side. https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2020/11/04/why-did-massachusetts-reject-ranked-choice-voting
The city of Burlington (yes, the home of Bernie Sanders) repealed RCV after running into the condorcet paradox in 2009. If people were confused about RCV already, just wait till you have to explain to them why they most preferred candidate, the candidate with the most votes didn’t win, or the election algorithm failed to produce a winner and we have to redo it.
Please redirect me if this has been addressed more fully somewhere else. I feel like the people I talk to about alternate voting systems are already into voting systems and agree that FPTP is pretty garbage most of the time. I feel like I have fewer tools for convincing people who aren’t already into voting systems.
It seems that most of what you’re talking about are single-winner reforms (including single-winner pathologies such as center squeeze). In particular, the RCV you’re talking about is RCV1, single-winner, while the one I discuss in this article is RCV5, multi-winner; there are important differences. For discussing single-winner, I’d recommend the first two articles linked at the top; this article is about multi-winner reforms.
Personally, I think that the potential benefits of both kinds of reform are huge, but there are some benefits that only multi-winner can give. For instance, no single-winner reform can really fix gerrymandering, while almost any multi-winner one will.
The issue of politicians not wanting to “do surgery on the hand that feeds them” (I like that metaphor) is a real one. The four methods I’ve chosen to discuss are all chosen partly with an eye to that issue; that is, to being as nondisruptive as possible to incumbents (unless those incumbents owe their seats to gerrymandering, in which case, fixing gerrymandering has to take precedence). Actually, of the four methods, RCV5 is the most disruptive, so if this is your main concern, I’d look more closely at the other three methods I discuss.