By wanting to be Centrists “between” the two parties, it looks like Yang has fallen hard for the middle ground fallacy.
"Let’s see, we have one party that advocates for putting kittens in a blender, and one party that says that’s a horrible and cruel idea. Therefore, I propose, we only put half of the kittens in the blender.
I’m so logical and moderate, unlike these extremists."
Bingo!
While also having no experience herding kittens or safely operating a blender…
Now that the Republicans are falling off the extreme end of the political spectrum, America does need to replace them as its right-wing party. It just…kind of already has the Democratic party.
Currently, their only policy positions are “we should be able to win elections.” That’s not exactly inspiring. And I’m absolutely in favor of two of their three positions (RCV and nonpartisan redistricting).
Andrew Yang’s best grift by far has been just convincing everybody that he’s a billionaire
… and in committee that turns into “first chop each kitten in half”
The good news on those issues is that recent history has shown that it’s not impossible to get them implemented without a new party coming to power. Two states (one dominated by Republicans and the other by Democrats) have recently implemented Ranked Choice Voting for all elections, and about 9 states have non-political commissions handle redistricting now.
Then social media turns whether to cut them in half lateral or transverse into a culture war.
Hmm. I guess that, in lieu of RCV, open primaries are a good thing. But if you actually have RCV for the general election, open primaries are unnecessary (and detrimental to 3rd parties?).
This kind of language suggests that there have only been two parties all this time and we’ve been waiting for someone to finally create a third one
which is, like, not true
Probably time to tap the sign again:
tl;dr.
How do they propose overcoming the spoiler effect?
It is better than Ranked Choice because you are more clearly indicating what you want regarding the election:
Contrast this with: “This person is first, this person is second, …” ranked choice. So would you consider your vote productive towards your goals if the last person on your ranked list was elected? How about the next to the last? How about the second? How do you represent that you feel two candidates are exactly the same for your purposes?
I put it to you that you might be too used to the “lesser of two evils” system we have now; Ranked choice is a “least of N evils” approach, rather than the meaningful communication you want it to be. If you want the ability to differentiate between candidates you approve of, I suggest score voting (Wikipedia) or range voting as the better way to represent what you actually feel, that being the generalization of approval voting.
Further, the actual election mechanics once ballots are deposited are much more complicated with ranked choice, and the outcomes less meaningful. With approval voting, you add all of the approvals up, and the fraction of the population that approves of person x is N(x) / N(total). If that is greater than 50% of the population, congrats, you are approved of by more than half of the voters for the office. There is no strategy required to effectively represent your needs with approval voting.
What does “Person X wins” represent in terms of the will of the people in ranked choice? They tended to be ranked higher? Could you improve a candidate’s likelihood of winning by changing how you rank people who you ranked lower? Why is that good?
For ranked choice, you’ve got to do multiple rounds, tossing out selections as you go, or you’ve got to do some significantly more interesting process (e.g. Condorcet). This is probably done by a computer. Do you trust that computer? Why? Why should I, as another voter? Can we do a by-hand recount without the computer? How? How fast is it comparatively? I bet range/score voting and approval voting is faster, and I know it can be done by hand.
The argument that a system has “been successfully implemented in a number of places” is just as good an argument for plurality voting (what we have today in the US), so that may not be the best argument.
I will grant that ranked choice is about as likely to move us away from the two-party system we have today towards an N party system as approval or score / range voting, but I have a strong and justifiable (above) preference.
So “Forward” in terms of putting the cart in front of the horse?
This isn’t some crazy hypothetical system that’s never been tried. The ranked votes for each candidate are a matter of public record that can be done with the same paper trail as any other voting, and anyone who has that data can easily plug in into a simple Excel Spreadsheet to check that the results are correct. You don’t need some secret proprietary software. The math is dead simple. So the “how fast is it” question is kinda strange to me.
Luckily he won’t split the vote, because no one cares
you can avoid the spoiler effect via ranked choice voting
Ranked choice voting has no advocates in the two major parties, yet would be a tremendous benefit to the country. If they do nothing other than move ranked choice forward, that deserves support.
Alaska and Maine both enacted RCV through ballot initiatives, so that’s a good way to go in states that have that as an option for voters. In others it’s unclear to me how a new party could help push that through the legislature without winning an outright majority first, and a brand new party has a very slim chance at winning much without RCV. A real chicken-or-the-egg conundrum.
The meanings of words change, to be a Libertarian means you are a conservative that will trade others rights for a tax break.
Are you really going to argue about the terms used in an article written at a time when libertarian didn’t only mean that, and was written by someone who was a lifelong socialist?
