- cross-posted to:
- fairvote@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- fairvote@lemmy.ca
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/31925477
For Drutman, US efforts to incorporate ranked-choice voting can have only a limited effect, and don’t necessarily change the core problem of politics in the country, as he sees it. The system still pushes towards two dominant parties, and avoids proportional representation at the district or state levels. In his view, the goal should be more parties, focused on giving more voters a voice and on building cross-party coalitions, instead of experiments with ranked-choice voting to elect particular candidates. But he does see a positive note from these experiments: “There’s definitely interest in electoral reform.”
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My concern with proportional representation is that it typically means you are voting for a party, not a specific person. Imagine voting for the Dems and not knowing if you’re getting AOC or Joe Manchin.
With Ranked choice, you can know exactly who you are voting into (or out of) office. I’d rather let the voters be the ones who choose candidates directly and not have the party do it for us.
There are ways to mitigate this. Scotland and Wales use a system that’s basically FPTP with compensation. It’s not perfectly proportional and some of the elected representatives are from a party list rather than being voted on individually, but the individual ones are picked first and it’s proportional enough that voting for smaller parties isn’t a waste of time
Well, as AOC famously said, she’d be in a different party from Joe Manchin if we had a multiparty democracy.
If you feel the party doesn’t represent your views then either vote for or found another one, or advocate for a split. To me this seems much smaller than the problems with the current US system. But maybe someone with direct experience in multiparty democracy can share their experience.
Also, I think it’s possible to create a direct candidate election system that is also proportional. One idea would be to grant each candidate voting power relative to their vote share. So if there’s three parties, you send three members to represent your district, but maybe one gets 50% of the voting power, one gets 40%, and another gets 10%. But I haven’t heard many people discuss such systems.
The issue isn’t just one of partisan extremes. Just look at the near miss in the Democratic primaries this year. Biden was the choice of the party leadership and it took his public humiliation and a massive pressure campaign to get a replacement. The people calling the shots at the party level do not necessarily have same interests as the voters, even when they are politically aligned.
Sure, you can jump ship and go to a new party, but that only works when enough voters care to make them jump ship, and when there is a worthwhile alternative. That also means abandoning anyone you support in the party, because they are all lumped together and there’s no separating the people you want to vote for from the people you oppose. Building a new party from the ground up is a much more extreme reaction than just voting for a different person.
I wouldn’t have the same objection if we had a system where we were had proportional representation spread across specific candidates voted into office. I would have some questions about how it would work, but it would address the issue I’m bringing up.
Well, I generally agree that party leaders have way too much power, but that seems to be an issue across many different systems. Your example is from a FPTP system. Is there some reason to think it would be worse if we had proportional voting? I mean I can see how party leaders might have more power in some ways. But on the other hand it’s much easier to abandon them for another ideologically similar party if they abuse it. Yes it means abandoning AOC or whoever your favorite is but they can also jump ship if need be. I think we need a different solution to overly powerful party leaders.
But the thing is, there are so many things I would want to change about the Democratic Party, but I can’t abandon them because my only alternative is far worse. If we had a diversity of somewhat similar parties then it would be much much easier to pressure them into doing what voters want.
Ranked choice would do this to some extent as well, so I broadly support both. However, I have concerns about election security with ranked choice. Unless the election authorities share their ballot data, it’s very very difficult to determine who the true winner should be from exit polling or similar. There was a major fiasco in Alameda co California where the wrong candidate was seated by accident and no one even noticed until a later audit was done by a non-profit group.
Never been about fairness, Chief.
Overall, many voters seem to be most in favour of a system known as proportional representation, in which political parties are represented in governments roughly according to their vote share. Voters in democracies that use this system, such as Denmark and Ireland, tend to have relatively high approval ratings for democracy in their nation, and relatively high turnouts. But this pattern is clearest in wealthy countries.
Not only wealthier countries, but countries with smaller populations. All of the world’s top democracies have populations under 50 million, and most are under 10 million. Denmark has a population of just under six million, and Ireland has a population of a little over seven million. It seems like democracy works best when the nation is relatively wealthy, the people are relatively well educated, and the population does not exceed a certain threshold.
Germany is usually at least in the top fifteen of that list, if not in the top ten. It’s not as big as the US, but the disparity is substantially smaller than between the US and Denmark
I would be quite interested to see how they would rank the EU. Not an average of the EU countries, a score for the actual EU itself
This is the purpose of federalism—to manage governance by and for smaller, like-minded groups of people. However, people seem to have a hard time staying out of each other’s business. Furthermore, it’s hard to justify a hands-off approach when a state or lower level of government is using 55% majority to oppress the other 45% (see the American South). And maybe most importantly, it’s always in the interest of national leaders to increase their power, so we tend to see a steady creep of stronger national governments at the expense of states or smaller units.
I suspect there are ways to counteract these forces but we’ve yet to trial most of them. Ideally you want your basic level of government to be as small and like-minded as possible. But I think to avoid tyranny of the majority, you need to let people opt out. Most people don’t seem to be too aware of these issues in the constant struggle for ultimate power but I think it would solve a lot of our issues if we just let more people live how they want to live.
So I agree that smaller democracies work better, but I hope you’re not saying the solution for larger democracies is to make them not democracies. The solution to me is clearly that we need to make them smaller again.
I hope you’re not saying the solution for larger democracies is to make them not democracies.
No, absolutely not. My preference would be for larger democracies, like the US, to be broken up into many smaller democracies.
You can also lower the number of constituents each congressman represents
Denmark has one representative for every roughly 33,400 of its citizens. The United States, in contrast, has one representative for every approximately 626,000 of its citizens. For the United States to have a similar representation ratio to Denmark, the US Congress would need to be expanded from 535 (voting) representatives to over 10,000 representatives.
However, it is important to point out that the US is a federation, and that most US citizens also have state representation. The state representation, though, is separate from federal representation, as each state is a semi autonomous jurisdiction.
