zorq said:
In the US, campaigns can last for as long as 2 years before election day. If that isn't enough time to figure out that 'your' revulsion of abortions is more significant than your love of food stamps programs, I don't know what to say.
It isn’t that there isn’t enough time, it is that there are a lot of races and people are generally lazy and don’t want to do homework and they aren’t going to if they have a shit load of candidates in every race they are going to vote in. I don’t expect them to memorize the character of 50 plus candidates and rank or rate them accordingly. I also don’t expect them to be aware of their own ignorance. Although this might not be much of a problem with score voting if voters would reliably rate unknown candidates the lowest score possible.
I disfavor condorcet too, but the Instant results they give aren't their problem. Elections in the US are already too long and already too much of a hassle. I don't need to extend the election season by another week or MONTH to do a runoff. And I don't want to have to go back to the voting booth to vote for my favored candidate a second time when I already stood in line on a work day the first time.
Right now, I only disfavor Condorcet methods for regular voting because I fear unknown candidates getting elected by voters burying the guy they hate. I don’t know if this would be an actual problem, but it is something that can happen. I would really favor a Condorcet method for parliaments to elect their cabinet though instead of just party leaders forming a coalition.
As for the extra election, the first round in the election would replace the party primaries. That should be the important election that gets two good candidates that represent the public well. The runoff should be a fine tunning of the election to get the best candidate and it would be a safeguard in case one of those candidates isn’t as great as
*ze appeared before the extra scrutiny.
IMO Election day should be a national holiday and if we could restrict campaigning to just a month before the election date, that would be great too. Also, If we could eliminate campaign contributions, AKA bribes for corruption, that would be super.
I pretty much agree with this. I have my own ideas about the election time table and how to determine ballot access, but I won’t derail it here.
One more thing, IRV voting is my favorite voting scheme for single seat elections. All Condorcet schemes give bonus points to any party/candidate that happens to sit in the middle of the spectrum (no matter how skewed that spectrum is) or merely be perceived as less controversial, but these are not actually attributes associated with quality government leadership. I want at least a portion of the electorate to be really enthusiastic about the final candidate selected. Most condorcet schemes can't guarantee that. IRV can.
I don’t necessarily agree about IRV. In a system with knowledgeable voters in which there are strong third parties, IRV can be really chaotic.
I think real centrism (not split the baby centrism or Washington centrism) is a good thing. It ensures the will of the majority is going to get done. You can’t use a divide and conquer strategy to avoid doing what the majority wants. You also can’t piss off the majority to please donors.
It occurs to me that your complaint with non-FPTP systems is that when presented with multitudes of candidates, it is more difficult to identify the moraly or politically corrupt ones due to the necessary and perhaps burdensome time investment needed to research any candidate after the first two.
But frankly, one of the primary reasons many people want more than two candidates to choose from (and therfore favor non FPTP systems) is because both of the candidate options that crop up in FPTP systems have significant flaws. So having the time to identify the flaws in all the candidates in an election is pointless because there is often no 'good' choice.
I don’t think it is just the difficulty of research. Another problem is that if there are too many choices
analysis paralysis will kick in and dissuade citizens from participating altogether or they'll get frustrated with the new system and want to go back to something simple.
For the record, I think anything is better than FPTP. I just want to factor in the voter’s ability to adequately judge the candidates when considering alternative voting methods.
I personally would prefer a top two system with approval voting to get the top two. Citizens could just remember a few names each race so it would be much simpler. It would also be easy to form voting blocs around issues in a way you can’t do with the ranked systems. Parties would essentially become glorified advocacy groups that just endorse all the candidates that agree with the platform and they could be the primary guide for voters. You can even have candidates that could be endorsed by multiple parties. Parties could earn a reputation over time so you can make a meaningful vote without having to necessarily know much about the candidates.
In the first round, the voters would elect a flavor of the candidates they want. In the second round, it would be more personalized and fine-tuned. There would be much more scrutiny on the integrity and competence of the candidates. If you had to sit an election out, it would be much better to sit out the runoff.
*Ze: I used the gender neutral Ze pronoun because I hate having to say “he or she” and “they” should really be plural. It would make so much more sense to just normalize gender neutral pronouns.
