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Electoral Reform?
The American Interest has an article out on “depolarizing” America through electoral reform:
There is a simple and feasible electoral reform that stands a good chance of emboldening moderates and facilitating their electoral success: Ranked Choice Voting (otherwise known as the Instant Run-off or the Alternative Vote). Under Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), voters rank all the candidates, or some number of them, in order of preference. If no candidate obtains a majority of first-place votes, the candidate with the lowest number of first-place votes is eliminated, and his or her second-place votes are redistributed to the other candidates. The process of elimination and redistribution of lower-preference votes then continues until a candidate gains a majority or wins a final two-candidate face-off.
I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, America is likely to face a major ethnic crisis over the next fifteen years or so The last time that coincided with a highly-polarized political environment, it led to a civil war, which makes tilting the electoral landscape in favor of moderates an attractive idea. But it is also true that America’s problems (including, arguably, polarization) are mostly the fault of moderates.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I don’t think the current electoral system is biased against the sort of moderate I admire: willing to compromise (but only from a position of strength), respects and empathizes with Republican voters, and (especially) doesn’t care how other people or the media label him. (Most of my moderate heroes were pilloried as far-right extremists in the press.)
I could be wrong; today’s moderates are far more partisan than in the past, and some might consider that a bad thing. I don’t know. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Published in General
You either assign your preferences yourself by ranking them on your ballot – which is the best approach – of parties ‘exchange preferences’ – presumably with like minded parties (eg the Tea Party might exchange preferences with the Republicans on the assumption that if you don’t vote for the TP then they’d rather your vote went to the Republicans than to the Democrats) – and who a party exchanges preferences with is one of the factors you take into account when voting for or against their candidate. It’s not arbitrary.
If you have political parties you have slate politics to some degree.
Given n seats up for election, for whatever reason, the Left seems to be very good at assembling a list of n + 1 or 2 candidates from one or two parties who are pretty much in lockstep on major issues. Party discipline usually seems good, and once in office the agenda is advanced well.
This. We have enough people that can’t figure out how to manage a ballot in the current system.
You want to solve the problem of moderation? You get one vote per thousand dollars of net income tax paid, rounding down.
We have ranked choice voting for our mayoral race here in Portland, Maine, and it will be up for a statewide vote in November, 2016. I expect it will be enormously expensive to implement on a statewide basis and will take much longer to get results from the 400+ municipalities we have here in the Pine Tree State. Although this is a progressive initiative, it can cut both ways. It tends to have more of an impact on the outcome when there’s an evenly split electorate among 3 or more choices. When you have two front runners with a distant third, where one of the front runners is ahead by a significant margin, the leading candidate tends to win most of the time anyway, especially if that leading candidate if close to 50 percent. I intend on campaigning against it anyway, but it’s important to understand how it can play out.
‘Beat me to it… ‘Well said.
Fundamental to Ranked Choice Voting is that it places a candidate in office who is not the choice of the majority of voters. This has consequences. As in Oakland.
Further, the system can be gamed more than traditional voting.
The default position of any government entity is growth in size power and the harm it does. Therefore what we often call moderation isn’t moderate it’s a slightly slower loss of freedom and prosperity. People who believe in the constitution and limited government, the free market, and know that non accountable power is always abusive and easily corrupt must push relentlessly for cuts, reforms and rolling back of the administrative state. This isn’t radical or immoderate. Are any of the people on our left, which now dominates the Democratic party, moderate? Is opposing them immoderate?
Given you’re a two mega party state, RCV will have no impact on things whatsoever. I fail to see how this could possibly get more moderates into the government.
One thing I would do is reform the Electoral College. Make it by congressional district with only the two senate seats going winner take all. This will make the entire country a ‘battleground’ and you will have to make policies that appeal to the entirety of the country instead of ten ‘swing’ states. Both parties will then have to moderate there views in order to win everywhere instead of taking it for Granted that Texas is Red and California Blue.
Richard Epstein has an interesting take on this matter: our current system is actually a blessing because, if I recall correctly, it limits the scope of electoral fraud to just a few states. I’m not sure I agree though; even if it is true, ballot integrity is such a joke here I’m not sure it makes any practical difference.
Our current system placed Bill Clinton in office twice without a majority. And Rick Perry won his second term with barely 1/3 of the vote (granted he’d have probably won in an RCV situation, but still…)
I think not voting is irresponsible too. I don’t want people threatened with imprisonment for it.
It’s a $50 fine. Like a parking ticket.
And if they don’t pay the fine…?
One thing I agree with libertarians on is that government is a form of violence, and if that statement makes you uncomfortable then it’s probably because you want government to do things you know are not deserving of a violent response. I don’t care how small the initial punishment is, the government should not be threatening people to force them to vote.