Now obviously we all espouse ranked voting, but the most popular rule—the single transferable vote—is known to sometimes eliminate candidates for getting too many votes, which is what happened in the 2022 Alaska special election (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Runoff_voting for an explanation of how this happens).
So, which voting rule do you like the most? I’m new to this world, but so far the Dowdall system seems like a good compromise.
This probably isn’t the progressive answer you’d expect, but perhaps under a centuries old definition of progressive: weighted technocracy. People vote only in the field of their own expertise, and leave all other issues to those who have expertise. It is a sort of direct democracy with votes weighted by credentials.
Unfortunately you need an insane amount of checks and balances to make it work without power becoming overly concentrated in a Soviet style steering committee.
Cyteen, by CJ Cherryh, explores this well in a fictional context.
so basically…
the only people who can decide if it’s appropriate to go to war are… what? soldiers?
and the only people who can draft, lets say, anti-trust legislation are… corpos who almost certainly love monopolies?
I don’t think that would end as well as one might imagine, even with checks and balances.
What about a system where each person can only cast a limited number of votes, so you have to choose which issues are most relevant to you?
also nope.
Think about issues like Abortion. Do you really want to create a system where only the people who care the most are voting? Most americans support abortion rights- by a huge amount. But, suddenly you start making a question about voting for that or the spending bill… and something’s going to have to give, right?
Besides which, I’d much prefer a dispassionate voter base. A fairly large number of people on the abortion issue are very passionately apposed to it. But also kind of stupid; voting on pure emotion rather than facts or science or empathy.
Fair point—but simple majority rule doesn’t guarantee the rights of minorities and others disproportionately affected, either. You generally need constitutional limits to prevent abusive legislation.
I didn’t say it does.
But only allowing the people who are passionate about a given issue removes the ability to compromise on the issue. It’d polarize things; ensuring that everything was extremely one way or extremely the other way, and never in the middle.
I think that conflates the deliberative process with the actual casting of votes. The people who are passionate about the issue would still try to convince those on the sidelines that the issue was worth spending a vote on, and people who weren’t planning to actually vote could still care about the issue and participate in the debate.
Okay. So hypothetically….
I’m most passionate about climate change and resiliency, toss in abortion access, gay rights, public education, a few other issues.
Ooops I’ve spent all my votes and along comes a budgeting bill for next year that defunds all of that. So much for all those votes.
Or a storm comes up and Florida needs emergency aid. Or fires in California. Or Texas or any where.
Suddenly, I don’t get a say in that because…. I participate?
If your goal is to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, this fucks them even harder. The majority can afford to push legislation that doesn’t pass until the relevant minority can no longer vote and then push awful legislation that gets passed with 1 orn2 % of voters voting.
If we’re going to do direct democracy, then we need to give everyone and equal vote for every thing. anything that seeks to limit who can vote on what or how many times is inherently disenfranchising.
Even attempts to halt the tyranny of the majority- like, in point of fact, the senate, disenfranchises voters. (The reason the states only get 2 senators is because southern states were afraid they would be rolled over on account of their low population. So people who live where there’s more people lose voting power.)
Presumably you’d allocate the votes and announce the propositions at the same time—so for instance in one election everyone would get a ballot with twenty propositions and instructions to vote yes or no on up to ten of them.
Or come to think of it, here’s a procedure that might simplify things for voters and avoid the issue of fakeout dummy propositions, too:
Let’s say you get to cast 3 votes, and that I’m a corrupt politician. I’d put an issue that you care deeply about on the ballot with 3 other issues that you’re likely to care about. If I can engineer a ballot with 4 issues that you really care about, but only 3 issues that my coalition cares about, we can concentrate our votes while you’re splitting yours, and we win all 3 of the ones we deem important.
If voting were costly, you wouldn’t cast a vote just because you cared about the issue unless your side were also in danger of losing. If someone proposed a dummy bill to get you to waste a vote, but no one voted for the other side, you could refrain from voting either.
You wouldn’t know that it’s a dummy bill or no one voted for the other side.
Sounds like the perfect opportunity for the media to run one-sided stories about how much support there is for one issue or another, to scare people into opposing it. You don’t know how many people voted for an issue until it’s too late to cast your own vote.
That sounds very reasonable. It ensures that if it happens, it’s for a cause you’re willing to die for.
that doesn’t mean it’s a good or just war. or that they’re willing to die for it. There are plenty of people who are retired military that are totally fine with sending other kids to die for stupid shit. Bush W served in the TX nat guard, for example, yet was perfectly willing to fabricate lies to get a war going in iraq. Rumsfeld was a navy pilot and was totally complicit in that as well.
And then there are the people who are habituated to the battlefield, and don’t know what to do with themselves when there’s not a war on.
And then there’s the assholes that just want to kill people without going to jail for it.
In no way does having served in the military mean their judgement is any better as to whether a war or cause is just. In fact, for comparison, Bernie Sanders never served because of his pacifist beliefs. in the contest of the War in Gaza, who do you think is on the right side of history? Him, or all the other senators who served in the military and are pro-Israel?
Sorry, but having served in the military does not make you inherently moral, ethical, or any less reactionary than the rest of us. Being willing to die for a thing, doesn’t make that a good thing.
Ah, I see what you mean. I thought the proposal was for those who make the decision to also be the ones fighting the war. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee that the cause is just, but I think it would still be a lot better than what we have now.