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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
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.
...then the computer runs through every possible paring...
Because you are taking the time to think this through, I'd like to point you to the well-established research field of voting theory.
It's actually quite interesting. There are many criteria an election might hope to satisfy. Provably no voting system can satisfy even a small set of desirable criteria (see Arrow's impossibility theorem). However, in my view (and many others), the methods that consider all pairwise elections seem in some sense to be the fairest according to my own personal aesthetics. These are called Condorcet methods. They are actually even used in practice for some things, some even in the open-source community.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.