this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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You vote your conscience in the primary and you do your duty in the main. Simple as that.
Yeah, and that relates to why I think the focus on ranked choice voting or more parties is a red herring.
I'm cool with both of those, but they're not a silver bullet for our problems. We already have parties within parties, which isn't terribly different than coalitions. And we have at least two rounds of voting to narrow the field.
No matter what you do, democracy is going to be about compromise. It makes sense that you have to compromise more and more as the field narrows. Voting for Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general isn't that different from voting ranked choice Bernie #1, Hillary #2.
Ranked choice would absolutely still help. The two party state is utterly awful. And while primaries exist and people should use them, let's be honest: most people won't. We need it to be easier to vote for who people like. Primaries aren't that, since they're an extra vote you have to be aware of and take the time to research and vote for.
As an aside, ranked voting isn't what I'd consider ideal for the general election, either. It's still heavily disproportionate. Proportional voting is far superior for ensuring representation. Eg, suppose 25% of the population likes progressives, 50% likes centrists, and 25% like conservatives. Any form of single winner ballot (ranked choice or FPTP) is gonna favour the centrist, even though that means 50% of the population don't get their ideal representation.
Depends which form of ranked choice. The naïvely-designed ones like Supplementary Vote, Contingent Vote, Instant-Runoff Voting, Top Four, Final Five, etc. don't fix the two-party system at all, since they only count first-choice rankings in each round, just like our current system. Unfortunately those are the only ones being advocated in the US. We need Condorcet-compliant systems if we actually want to fix the spoiler effect and end the two-party system. Total Vote Runoff/Baldwin, Ranked Robin, Schulze, etc.
Yes!
Actually, both FPTP and RCV suffer from the "center-squeeze effect", so centrist candidates are at a disadvantage and they favor more polarizing candidates.