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New Hampshire Bill Could Lead To Adoption of Approval Voting
Okian Warrior writes "The people at FreeKeene report: 'Four Republican state representatives have sponsored a bill that would replace first-past-the-post voting with approval voting for all state offices and presidential primaries. Under this system, voters would select every candidate they approve of (regardless of party), and the candidate with the highest overall vote total wins. This reduces strategic voting, and would often make elections easier for moderate and libertarian candidates. The bill, HB240, will have a public hearing Tuesday, February 1st, with the House Election Law committee.'"
That now they're adding a 'like' button, do we get a 'dislike' button too?
Instead of the 2 "pre-selected" candidates, we get more choices. I think this system would give non mainstream candidates a better chance.
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
Change for the better, no matter who you support. This can only let people have more direct say in their elected officials.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
The Legislature would still be dominated by the Rep and Dem monopoly.
BTW in the late 1800s it was pretty common for neither the R or D party to have a dominant majority. And they had the same kind of voting we do now. What's changed is the Reps and Dems have rigged the ballot so other parties have to waste efforts trying to get approval to appear. (Which is ridiculous because there's plenty of room on the computer ballot to list everyone.)
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
If it really does make elections easier for third parties, I'm all for it (especially the Libertarians!). Personally, I'd love to see more parties come to power; our current two-party system is pretty much broken. Hopefully it would reduce or eliminate gridlock caused by representatives voting along party lines, and eliminate representatives put in their positions due to the same voting by the American People. One can dream...
This is a WONDERFUL start. I have been saying, for so many years, that until the electoral college is removed and things are switched to approval voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting like Instant Runoff or similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRV we will NEVER see any real change. The "two party system" ("Republicrats") we have is one of several factors that is slowly ruining the country.
Citizens deserve more choice, more power, and more say in who is elected. People should not be forced to throw away their vote by voting their true position OR vote defensively for someone they see as the "lesser of two evils"... which is often their only choice right now.
Approval Voting is a poor choice in comparison to the Schulze Method. Please stop advocating for a broken method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_with_other_preferential_single-winner_election_methods
Hopefully, this will pass, and they will follow it up with getting rid of the primaries altogether. There's no need for a playoff if you're using a system like this.
Although, I think a weighted system would work a little better. Just because two or more candidates might be acceptable to me, doesn't mean that they're equally acceptable to me.
I think the best system, though, is one where everyone ranks the acceptable candidates, then the computer runs through every possible paring (shouldn't be too bad, it's just O(N^2) in the obvious algorithm, and there are a number of obvious things you can do to pare down N and reduce the data). In one of those pairs, the winning candidate will have more votes than in all of the other pairs. That's the most acceptable candidate. I'm sure that there's a name for such a system, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
what you think as left there is WAY too much to the right of anything that is considered left in any other part of the world
Perhaps you're right. Or perhaps the rest of the world is way too much to the left. Have you ever thought about that? It's a matter of perspective.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Left?
Well we have a Communist party.
And a Nazi party.
And the Liberal party - all of these are pro-big government and pro-maximum control by a central authority.
If you think a Nazi party belongs to the left you should get your definitions of left and right straight.
Communist are far left, but a joke party here and not at all a normal left party. Nazi is a rightist fascist party. The liberal party is a joke as well, it too supports authoritarianism. Leftism does not mean authoritarianism, Neoconservativism for instance is a rightist authoritarian ideology.
No, we definitely have those parties as well, but much like the Libertarian party, they don't get much coverage or traction. Also, stop portraying Europe as some bastion of far-left politics. It's not nearly as far to the left as you're portraying. There are certainly more far-left political parties, but they're usually not the ones leading the coalitions forming the government. Here's the political compass chart for the major candidates in the last U.S. presidential election. Here's the political compass chart for the European governments as of 2008. They're not too terribly different.
None of the listed countries are even left of center. The Scandinavian countries are some of the closest to that line, but what really separates them is the gap on the Authoritarian-Libertarian between them and the rest of the pack. If the broad range of European parties is similar to the ones for the 2007 Irish election there certainly is more choice available, but your governments as a whole tend to be quite similar to the U.S. There are also several far-left groups that get even less media coverage than the Green party. Many states still have candidates that run under the Socialist party and there are a number of different anarchist parties, some of which don't choose to participate in the system. You almost never hear about any of these on the news.
I can see how you might come away with your impression if you watched Fox news, where almost anything is lambasted for being "socialist" regardless of whether it has anything to do with socialism. The other American news networks aren't really any better about promoting third party candidates or policies, possibly due to the vicious circle that only effectively allows for a two-party system. I don't follow European politics so I have no way of knowing how much media coverage some of the smaller parties manage to garner, but I don't expect it's as much as the major parties get. The only reason the Libertarian party has been getting any coverage is because it got lumped in with the Tea Party, to which I think several Libertarians would object.
Wow, 70+ years later and their propaganda still gets you.
The NAZIs are about as National Socialist as North Korea is the Democratic Peoples Republic.
I hope some day the city government of Buffalo enacts some bill that gets a /. story
I have to point out that politics, like everything else, is not "left" or "right". Trying to describe anything political in one measure is doing nobody any service. It is like trying to describe music, personality, biology as being left or right; or existing as only a single point on a line - it is crazy.
Case in point- Libertarians MIGHT be described as "left" for civil liberties and mixing religion with state, and yet "right" for foreign policy or spending, center on environment, and off in some other direction regarding defense. Where does one place THEM on a single line?
Common misconception held particularly by Europeans, which is reinforced by the fact people keep repeating this meme without examining it critically; honestly, anyone who thinks the Conservative party in Britain, for example, would not be considered a right-wing party in the US is extremely mistaken. Similarly, fringe fascist/right-wing parties in the UK get far more votes, and exposure, than their equivalents in the US, which usually don't even have enough support to field candidates. See, for example, the British National Party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands in Germany, and Front National in France.
That's not entirely fair. The nazis were certainly nationally oriented, for a certain extremely restrictive conception of nation.
Most Communists and Socialists nowadays are localists. Their attitude is that the real central authority in Washington is the one that allows the wealthy to avail themselves of state violence in order to protect property, and that private property cannot exist without constant and pervasive shows of police power -- which is true, and how you feel about communism and anarcho-syndicalism generally depends on how you feel about this.
The United States doesn't have a Liberal party, and most liberal parties in the world are libertarian and pro-business a the expense of Conservative parties, which generally support government welfare systems to benefit churches and cultural institutions, to benefit the moral and cultural character, and traditions, of the state, and Labor parties, which generally support government welfare as a government entitlement, to benefit Labor-with-a-big-L and drive up overall wages and living standards. Liberalism is the belief that both of these approaches are wrong-headed, and that the state should dedicate itself to securing individual liberty as a means of obtaining both higher living standards and higher moral culture. Both US political parties are "Liberal," they only disagree about which individual rights are more important.
I suspect what the GP is trying to say is that, compared to just about every other first world nation on Earth, the sort of policies advocated by US Democrats are basically the sort of thing you'd see from the CDU party in Germany, or the UMP in France, or the Conservative party in Britain. If you wanted to be called a libertarian-capitalist-Randian crackpot in any other country in the first world, all you'd have to do is advocate a privately-owned health insurance system with a purchase mandate, or for individual political subdivisions of your country to decide wether or not to honor particular kinds of marriages, or to decide if the possession of drugs was either a felony or not a crime at all. When it comes to the whole capitalism and decentralization issue, the US is simply far more radical and ideological than most other nation-states on the planet; that's just a fact.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The curious thing about many of Europe's "right-wing" parties is that they are really only on the right when it comes to immigration and cultural issues. Many nonetheless support a strong welfare state, which puts them squarely on the left. So even with the rise of the new European right, I'd say Europe continues to be tilted considerably more to the left than the US.
Even if your perspective is well to the right of the "rest of the world", surely, unless you're prepared to admit you're a true fascist, you can appreciate that a representative diversity of political opinion promotes a healthier society. Insofar as I believe that the American population isn't *yet* so deranged as to be totally politically homogenized, I sincerely doubt that those of us on the US left aren't such a disproportionately small minority as to warrant no real representation. You'll also note that there isn't a left-wing homogeny anywhere in the world; those states with a real and active left also have a wide range of opinions on the right in all sorts of ways.
I would not give up on this too soon either. Last session (before the last election where a large number of pro-freedom reps were elected), NH tossed out a years old arbitrary ban on various kinds of knives. This session, within days of swearing in the new reps, they overturned a ban on firearms in the statehouse.
There is already no income tax, no sales tax, no seatbelt law, no helmet law. $100 per year salary for state reps. No 'offices' or staff for the reps.
There is also a proposed bill going through this year to require the state government to prefer open standards/open source software.
Recommend googling the freestate project.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
Right. And Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia are liberal democrats? Ever heard of the Strasser brothers and what happened to them? Please explain how the nazis where socialist in any way after that.
I think a lot of the problems with the current voting system could be fixed if states would quit officially recognizing political parties, and quit pandering to them by sponsoring and financing party primary elections, and quit registering voters as members of parties.
Let the parties maintain their own membership lists, and if the parties want to have primaries to decide who their representative will be in the general election, let them finance and run them privately.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
The parent is correct. Compared to most of the so-called "first world" the USA is dominated by radical right-wingers. Whether or not that's a bad thing depends on your own bias, but to deny it and mod people "troll" for pointing it out just makes us look like the kind of yahoos the rest of the world thinks we are...
Caveat Utilitor
In Israel the political system encourages relatively small parties. The result is that whoever actually gets elected finds it increasingly difficult to actually secure the majority one always needs in order to create a functioning government. During the latest elections, Zipi Livni claimed she won because she was leading the biggest party, while Binyamin Netanyaho claimed he won because he was leading the biggest block of somewhat like-ideology parties. The simple truth is that even if you took the two of them and formed a coalition between the two, that wouldn't have been enough to secure a majority.
If you believe that it is better for someone you do not agree with to hold the wheel than to have no one hold it, then this is not such a great move.
Shachar
Really? Engels:
âoeThe state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
All socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.
Marx:
The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities
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Nazis did not subscribe to the fascist views but instead supported a socialist system. Not communism, mind you, which they venomously hated. Hitler himself has stated this as being "socialism" and viewed capitalism as a great evil. They did believe in "private property" however in the end the government owned everything. I don't believe they had time to really implement their views but they did have major control over industries during the war. Attempting to replace nation wide capitalism in 5 years is how you cause massive famines (or industrial collapse as the case may be).
Fascism was, btw, also not a capitalistic system but did not go all the way to "socialism." The goal was to have capitalism but keep it under the control and management of the government so it'd work toward the state's goals (ideological and economic). They were both anti-communism and anti-capitalism. Personally I can't make much sense of what this really meant since it seems an ideological cluster fuck to me.
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's a way to keep the Tea Party from splitting the Republican vote. The guy probably figures that, as it stands, those who would want to vote for a far right candidate would end up costing a more mainstream Republican the election because they can't approve of both candidates. With a system like this, they could.
However, you can get other interesting outcomes. Suppose, for example, that you had an independent, centrist candidate that many people liked but that they were afraid to vote for because they aren't sure he can win. Currently, they'd likely hold their noses and vote for the major party that they object least to, figuring that, at least that way, the party they dislike most won't win. With a system like the one proposed, the independent candidate would stand a better chance because people could vote both for him and a major party candidate as a fallback position.
There's a psychological scale known as Right Wing Authoritarianism. Essentially the test boils down to two questions--
How Xenophobic are you?
How strong does the state have to be to assuage your xenophobia?
Of course, the questions are many, and usually asked in a less direct fashion. Interestingly, Communists in the Soviet Union tended to score as Right Wing Authoritarians. Internationalism may have died a early death. In any case, Mao took a decidedly different path.
"Government is not large in relation to business" - really? Well, I guess it's a relative term and in the eye of the beholder. In this beholder's eye, with about 1 in 6 employees in the US employed by one level of government or another, I consider that absurdly large (and the federal government is at its highest number of employees ever, at about 2.15 million employees). When 1 in 6 employees (and growing) are funded by 5 in 6 employees (and shrinking), I'd suggest "big government" is firmly entrenched and has been for no little time...
It's because NH has one of the largest legislative bodies in the world. The representatives aren't career politicians, there's no salary, just a stipend, and they only meet for a few months of the year. They really do have the best interest of their state in mind (at least what they sincerely believe the best interests ought to be) and very few of them have higher ambitions other than to serve a couple of terms in their current office and then getting back to their small business/job/retirement.
We've established that you don't have a sense of humour, you can stop posting in this thread now.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For example, if you are for the Tea Party, and are a Republican, by approving of both the TP and mainstream candidate (who is presumably more towards the center), you are going to disadvantage your preferred candidate.
Also, there's a reason to whittle down a field of candidates via a primary or other system: it is hard, almost impossible maybe, to take the time to realistically research a field of 10 candidates. Debates with this large a field give everyone just a minute or two, or if more, very few questions, and no real debate is possible.
Perhaps the best compromise would be to use approval voting for primaries, where you select the top 5, and then ranked voting/instant runoff to do the final selection.
How many years have libertarians or others been threatening to scurry to some state and declare it theirs? It's like threats of going Galt; all sorts of strutting and bold claims until someone actually has to act as promised, whereupon the plan implodes as everyone hesitates, then decides they'll do it... uh... soon. Besides, there's a new season of [insert reality tv title] coming up soon.
Both you (marking 1 candidate) and the guy next to you (marking several), both get the same number of potntial votes to cast. You just opt not to cast them all (which isn't a bad thing). Otherwise, right now, you could claim that two people voting are unequal if one votes in every possible category available while the other skips school board elections and other "too small to bother with" positions.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
in practice, their 'socialism' was a political control of everything. there was nothing socialist in regard to economic aspects, other than a few shows of sending workers on an overseas cruise a few times with a state cruiser as propaganda.
No you're picking and choosing the definition of socialism that fits your arguments. That's not how it works. Government control over all industries and economic matters is socialism. It generally doesn't end well for the workers but the decisions are made by the government (which "represents" the population). This is close to the classical Marx socialism although as you noted reality is a bitch compared to his Utopian vision.
moreover, ussr had openly stated that they have adopted a 'socialist' method until true communism was possible. not surprisingly, their 'socialism' was also only political, meaning for the sake of efficient government control over economy for warfare, instead of PEOPLE controlling the economy and decision making for their own well being.
The people controlling the economy is not required for socialism and the stepping stone socialism envisioned by Marx explicitly rejects it.
it is moronically ignorant to propose that either of these outfits were socialist, just because there was the word 'socialist' in their name.
No, they're socialist because they meet the definition of the term or at least attempted to. Just because you associate fluffy fuzzy wuzzy views with that term doesn't discredit reality where socialism merely defined one aspect of a society. The rest of that society need not be pleasant nor does it's uses of socialism need to be pleasant.
see, united states of america claims democracy, freedom, yet, we daily discuss on violations of these as a common practice, which the government and corporations dont even bother to deny anymore, but instead justify. so, does that make what is taking place 'democratic' ?
Everything is an imperfect monster that we choose because it's superior to another imperfect monster. That said the US is a representative democracy in most senses of the word So where do you claim it fails and what freedoms necessary for a democracy does it not have?
really. im tired up fixing the propaganda/conditioning american right has put in a lot of you people.
You're the one who seems to be filled with propaganda, unlike you I have no illusions of magical Utopian societies that we somehow always fail to build. We're all a bunch of flawed pathetic bastards who often forget that in the end we're just a bunch of monkeys with slightly better brains.
Well that would be nice alternative, but I don't see how NH could afford it and keep taxes as low as they are. Though as it is seems to work well enough.
I don't think asking people to plan their career and financial lives so that they can afford to take a couple of months off once a year for a few years of their life is too much to ask of most people. Do we really want people running our local government who are so bad off with their money/career that they can't afford two months off for a few years of their life? If you really want to serve your government you can find a way to make it work. If you can't, you're probably not really fit for the office anyway.
And I don't think you'll see much lobby money floating around the side avenues of Concord. Even if you did, it would cost quite a bit to sway a 400 member body where each representative only has 3,300 constituents under him. These are people who took time OFF from making money to provide a service to their fellow citizens, not people looking to make a buck.
They were originally set up to, and did. That is how our civil war was even possible. That has been neutered now. The EU just hasn't been unified long enough to neuter the states military, or to bring them under the control of the federal government. As I said, the EU states have a long history. The EU federal government is still a newborn. The long history of independent states will likely mean that it will take longer there for the federal government to usurp power, but you can be sure that every year, the EU's government will look a little more like the US.
With no salary, NH has decided that only the rich, self or semi-self employed, or retired can hold office.
I really don't see anything to look up to in a system like that. The state ought to pay their representatives the state's median-salary wage for the months they meet, and require that there be a job available at the end of that time for anyone who has to take a leave of absence to serve.
I've got several friends who are state reps. One works in Retail at a Verizon store. Not rich. Fully employed. Still works at least 40 hours a week. Retail job (7 day potential + night availability) means he has been able to work things out just fine. Another is a full time paid EMT. Similar situation. Another owns a bar so you are correct on the self-employed in that account. I don't know any that are rich (one of my previous local reps probably fell into that category, but she was thankfully booted out last session)
I really would not be able to re-arrange my job so it is true that some people get excluded.
As for requiring a job at the end of the session...Geeze you big government types sure like to wave those guns around.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
If you want to create a real penalty for not being an educated voter, here's a simple trick:
1) Remove party affiliations from the ballot.
2) Remove any option to vote straight party.
3) Prohibit the dissemination of political materials from any political party within 1,000 feet of a polling station.
Of course, in the interim there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as much of the electorate suddenly realized that it had to do research. People would complain that it's a form of "disenfranchisement."
Single dimensional dichotomies are about all that most people can handle when it comes to analysis, which is unfortunate.
It is definitely unfortunate. I think the only valid single-dimensional dichotomy upon which to place ideas is whether their implementation results in increasing well-being for people and society. Well-being here is defined by me, ala Sam Harris, as increasing happiness of individuals and cooperation between individuals.
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