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.
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:
So they know you get 9 votes, they slap in 10 laws, each slightly different.
Now say they also added a few laws. Maybe played the same games. Do you add more total votes?who decides how to allocate votes?
No matter, the underdogs will never get enough votes to pass their competing legislation.
It would become an unmitigated disaster as it gets too complicated, and turns people off voting.
That’s the object of steps 1 & 3 above: everyone casts a (potential) vote on all propositions, and votes not required to counter opposing votes keep rolling over. So you can’t force anyone to waste a vote by dispersing them among duplicate propositions—the end result is identical either way (assuming everyone votes consistently).
To play devil’s advocate, the chairperson can deny these motions as frivolous and disruptive.
What about emergency measures? If there’s a bill that would’ve failed had it not underwent this measures, won’t people who oppose it just decide to make sure the next one doesn’t contain anything too important and make a proposition to repeal the bill, minorities be damned?
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.
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.
You wouldn’t know that it’s a dummy bill or no one voted for the other side.