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:
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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.
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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
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The city of Burlington (yes, the home of Bernie Sanders) repealed RCV after running into the condorcet paradox in 2009.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.
Are you relying on willpower? I’ve found it useful to see myself as a dumb robot that responds instinctively to its environment, and focus on data driven behavioral interventions instead of personal decisions. For example, instead of “committing to spend less time on Facebook”, I got a chrome extension that makes me wait 30 seconds before o can access Facebook. Instead of trying to will myself to brush my teeth every night (which wasn’t very effective), I kept a bottle of gummy vitamins in my bathroom and I got to eat one if I brushed my teeth after. To get myself to do work, I put up my daily pomodoroS on a board my housemates could see. These feel stupid, but worked much better than any personal goals I ever set.
I also realized that working on my depression made the small stuff come more easily. That may not be your situation though.