“Per capita” is completely irrelevant here, because of the consistency condition the question is how many ballots need to be dealt with in one stack. We use forms of IRV in many small elections, like mayor, and it would work with a parliamentary system provided each constituency was sufficiently small. An IRV tabulation (like the at-least-3 different forms of STV you use in Australia) requires multiple sorting iterations - one for each trimming of the candidate pool - and it simply cannot be done by hand for a large number of ballots. That isn’t a deficiency in our national will, that is mathematical reality.
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The ballots are initially counted at the polling places (of which there is one every couple of blocks in an urban district); despite the large numbers of votes cast, the actual amount counted by any one person isn’t that big.
They all count the first round, then phone their results into headquarters, which adds up the totals and tells them which candidate to eliminate for the next round.
It’s a fully scalable system.
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This post by @ActionAbe sticks in my mind:
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I guess we see “blame” differently. I don’t see accountability as relevant at all, but see blame as a diagnostic tool. If you don’t bother figuring out what went wrong, how can you fix it?
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So, you could do the counts at the precinct level by sorting into bins, one for for each ranking of the parties running. (For example, in a state with 6 parties on the ballot, that would be 6!=120 bins - probably a perfectly reasonable amount.) They would transmit this count vector of length 120 to the state office, which would then add the vectors from all the precincts. Then the 50 state totals would be transmitted to some national office and merged (you can’t just add them, as each state has different parties on the ballot, but 50 vectors are easily mergable). At this point the calculation is easy.
However, to get to this point you’ve had to wait until you’ve heard from all the precincts (I don’t know how many of them we have in the US, I would guess at least 50,000) before you can get even a guess at the result - consistency condition again - which could take days (most US elections it is weeks before final counts are in), and you have to believe that the numbers that, say, North Carolina transmitted up are correct. A relatively small number of corrupt voting districts can have a much greater effect than they do in our current system.
It could be done, but nobody would believe the result.
What is the size of the largest constituency for which you do ranked voting? I don’t know how many voters you have in each Senate district, but if it is much fewer than 200,000,000 then maybe stop with the glib assertions about scaling.
These discussions have been had numerous times, recently even the UK (which is quite small by US standards) decided it was impractical. While it isn’t my specialty, I occasionally teach the mathematics of voting systems, and honestly the more I know about alternatives the less crummy our current system looks.
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Yes, the Presidential election is big, and would be more hassle than most. But it is only one of many US elections, and when US folks are discussing IRV voting they usually aren’t talking about the Presidential election only.
The seat I live in has about 100,000 voters, which, yes, is smaller than the 700,000 or so that is apparently normal for US Congressional districts (although that difference halves when you account for our 100% turnout). But as the time required for counting mostly scales with number-of-voters-per-booth rather than number-of-voters-per-electorate, that doesn’t matter much.
Given that most Presidential contests are going to very rapidly resolve to a two-horse race (when the first preference vote is 45/45/5/2/2/1, it doesn’t take long to redistribute the preference votes of the minor players, and you don’t have to look at the preferences of the major-party votes at all), I don’t see it as that big a problem even at the national level.
Doing all this does require the investment of sufficient funds and organisational ability into the electoral infrastructure. Doing democracy in a way that actually represents the will of the people isn’t easy or cheap. But it is worth it.
Yeah, America is big. But so is the US govenment, so is the US economy. Per capita, y’all are substantially wealthier than we are. In aggregate, y’all are unimaginably wealthier than we are. If we can afford it, so can you.
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I hate to point this out but it was SANDERS’ unwillingness to convince his people to vote for Clinton that put Trump in office.This debacle rests at his feet and his alone and as far as I’m concerned he can shut the fuck up now.
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The poll data suggests that it was specifically Sanders voters, not the party base.
We already do IRV voting in many US elections, at levels where it is feasible. If states wanted to have IRV for Senate or Congress they have the authority to do it; it has been rejected where discussed, for a variety of reasons but including practicality and integrity.
I don’t see it as that big a problem even at the national level.
I got that, especially when you edited out the qualifiers in my original response to @Hanglyman. I think these qualifiers - which distinguish a US national election from an Australian senatorial election - are significant, and the fact that IRV has not been adopted for direct national vote in any but a handful of tiny countries in the 1.5 centuries it has been around suggests that others agree with me.
“Note that these are registered voters: in other words, this is not about voter suppression in GOP-controlled states. If these registered voters – whose registration was not suppressed by GOP tactics – had come to the polls, Hillary would have won.”
Making it difficult to register, forbidding felons from registering, requiring people to register in person all do suppress turnout. But suppressing registration is not the only way to suppress votes. Registered voters are suppressed when they have to meet newly passed ID requirements, when their polling stations are shut down or moved, when the hours to vote are reduced, when they face long lines and can’t vote and get to work on time, when the machines they use malfunction and they have to wait for replacement machines (Detroit).
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There’s a wonderful book that I recommend to everyone I ever meet – it’s called “Women Don’t Ask” written by two female academics (http://www.womendontask.com/authors.html). Bear with me as I make my point, I beg of you. It snowed in lower Alabama and we all go a bit crazy when that happens. Seriously, the snow stayed for two days – I’m offering a picture of the world’s smallest snowman made by my daughter before I launch into something I think may draw ire (her 8-year-old legs given for perspective).
Anyhoo, in this book, “Women Don’t Ask,” the authors conduct a vast amount of statistical modelling and literature reviews and ultimately arrive at the following point: Ruling out all other variables, including childbirth, women still make less than men. In other words, with the smartest minds on the case, there’s still a pay gap that cannot be explained.
I can’t stop thinking about this “missing variable” in the pay gap as it applies to the election. We have the first female nominee from a major party running for president and it uncomfortably feels to me as if we are all pretending that the playing field is suddenly level. We and everyone else judge her solely on her merits as a candidate? I want that to be true. I need that to be true.
But in what possible sphere of any of our lives is gender not a variable? If you have it, point me to it, and I’m there like flint on steel.
She is a woman. Is this why she lost? No. Is it a variable? Yes. Is it a variable that is conveniently ignored? Hell, yes. It’s too uncomfortable for any of us to consider, so we talk about other very valid issues, ignoring the elephantiasis of the variable.
If we really, truly want to understand why she lost the election, we must consider gender. It’s not the only consideration, but by all that is holy, it is certainly a valid one. If we don’t include her gender in our discussion, then we ignore it at our peril.
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Cue the replies of: Sexism can’t be a factor because this-many women voted for Trump.
But I included a picture of the cute snowman! It’s supposed to be like a kitten hugging a dog before I bitch slap anyone. I am from the South, you know.
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I couldn’t vote (I was in the wrong country)
That’s no excuse. I’m not in the US and made an effort to vote and even register as a Democrat for the primary after being undeclared for 20 years. Your opinion, while it is well intentioned, doesn’t mean squat and rings quite hollow. Please take the time for the next election and get informed. Reminder: Don’t wait 4 years…
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Nope, sorry. Not buying it. If you look around, you’ll find plenty of people on these boards who voted Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general. Before you deny it-- I’m one of them. I’m sure you saw polling data that suggests otherwise. Well, we all saw plenty of polling data that said Hillary had the election all but locked up. I’m not buying into any more numbers this election cycle, thanks.
And Bernie did exactly what he was supposed to. He conceded, he contributed ideas to the party platform, he urged his people to vote for Hillary as our country’s best hope against Trump. And what did Bernie voters hear from Clinton’s proxies? “Jeez, grow up.” “Get over it.” “Get in line, crybabies.” So if there were any ill feelings among the Democratic voting public, perhaps Hillary and her spokespeople would have gotten better results by reaching out and embracing people, not taking her victory for granted. That’s not Bernie’s fault.
But by all means, please continue to blame Sanders for the election, the price of tea in China, and all the ills of the world. I will continue thanking my lucky stars that there’s at least one politician in this country who’s got the balls to stand openly in defiance of Trump, whether it’s calling for rallies in support of the ACA or pointing out Trump’s twitter hypocrisies on the Senate floor. So no, as far as I’m concerned, Bernie should not shut the fuck up now. This country cannot afford it.
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What a joke to conclude thatthe it means that the critiques from Sanders were CORRECT.
It just proves they were effective. And that he was a net negative for progressives in this cycle and indeed throughout his career. He’s never helped progressivism. He could have done that by helping Howard Dean with the fifty state strategy when it was HIS idea more than a decade ago.
No, it just shows that Sanders indeed poisoned the far left.
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As I’ve discussed elsewhere, abolishing the Electoral College entirely causes serious problems in terms of attention paid to lower-populated states during and after campaigns. It still works as a leveller in the sense that “states’ rights” has Constitutional aspects and isn’t just a euphemism for allowing racist laws.
Better to reform the EC by requiring that electors be allocated by the popular vote within a state and by demanding that the electors are held accountable for their votes. The winner-take-all system current in 48 states makes no sense.
Otherwise, your suggestions are ones I regularly make myself. #2 would have to go hand-in-hand with #3, which in turn would have to have top-notch validation and design features*. Election Day becomes tabulation day. However, taking into account the duopoly’s vested interests in keeping things exactly as they are and some states’ aversion to (gasp) nation-wide standards, none of them are going to happen anytime soon.
[* and also with strong and trustworthy open-source electronic tabulation systems, but we could use those for FPTP, too]
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I agree with most of what you say here, but disagree about the “basket of deplorables.” Calling the 25% of the electorate that makes up the GOP base what they are (and have been in some form since 1968) was one of the few good things she did in an otherwise lousy campaign. It wasn’t like they were potential voters for her.
The phrasing is a little odd and highfalutin, but it sounds to me like it was the result of too much time spent with marketing statisticians (“we’ll just write off this chronically bigoted psychographic basket and focus on these others.”) rather than aristos.
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(raises hand.)
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I agree, but if we consider gender from the angle of sexism we should also consider it from the other angle: the large number of progressives and liberals who were as excited about electing the first female President in 2016 as they were about electing the first African-American President in 2008. And yet, for many of them her awfulness in other areas (business-as-usual Third Way policies, lack of charisma, campaign missteps, etc.) cancelled that out.
Obama did a better job on the hopey-changey rhetoric in 2008, even if it wasn’t put into practise. He was also undeniably better at and more comfortable with connecting with members of the general public. The ginned-up birther controversy aside, he also didn’t have the baggage (invented or real) that Clinton did. Finally, the DNC establishment in 2008 hadn’t yet learned that if they wanted her to get the nomination they’d need to work harder (and more obviously) at rigging things against an insurgent primary candidate.
[Sweet snowman, too!]
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