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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.'"
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...
Interestingly, so does TFA. It's even quoted in the summary!
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Nope. The thing is, this voting is more expressive than FPP. Allow me to use the infamous Gore/Bush/Nader choice to illustrate.
With FPP, assuming you like Nader best, Gore second best, and Bush worst. You can either vote for Nader, or vote for Gore. If you know/assume that Nader will not win, you vote for Gore, but if you assume that Nader could win, you vote for him.
Now suppose you bet Nader could win, and you're wrong. Since you had no way of also expressing your preference for Gore over Bush, your vote is now meaningless, except as information about Nader's level of support.
If on the other hand, you bet Nader couldn't win, and voted for Gore, then even though you bet correctly, there's still a loss -- now the information about third-party support is missing, because you couldn't express that in your vote. (This is one reason third-parties aren't successful -- not only the direct loss of votes due to stategic voting, but the lack of information on real support among real voters means third parties can't build momentum, can't assess their numbers and effectively form a coalition behind a single candidate, etc.)
Range voting or Score voting (two names for the same thing) is the most expressive possible -- you assign a score on a discrete or continuous scale from 0 to 1 (or 0 to 10, 0 to 100, etc. -- same thing in principle) to each candidate, each candidate's total is summed, and the candidate with the highest aggregate score wins. (Or for multi-winner elections, the top n candidates win). You can express your degree of support for each candidate precisely, and the totals will show it. Also, there'll be no races like 1980, when a third-party _should_ have won (i.e. the majority of voters preferred Anderson to both main-party candidates, but couldn't express that preference without risking a win by their least-preferred candidate), though those do seem to be fairly rare. (Of course, since a more expressive system lets third parties know where they stand and form effective coalitions, they'll become more common, and candidates will become less "not-the-other-team" (for main parties) or single-issue (for third parties) and more representative of the people's actual will.)
Approval voting is a simple variant of range voting where the range is discretized all the way to one bit -- a simple yes/no on each candidate. This does cause a loss of expressiveness, but it's still way more expressive than the existing system, and better than most alternative systems. In fact, it's nearly equivalent to range voting in practice, because the best strategy for range voting (yes, basically all voting systems have a strategy better than absolute honesty, and range voting is no exception) is to exaggerate preferences (better than FPP, where the best strategy is usually to lie about preferences between a major party and a minor party) by listing all candidates in order of preference, pick a dividing line based on expectations of how the rest of the voters will vote, and give maximum score to all candidates above and minimum to all voters below. Of course, approval voting forces the scores to the limit for you, by removing all intermediate values, making the best strategy only a matter of where you draw the line in your honestly ordered list.
To answer your specific scenario:
Yeah, if most voters on both sides are willing to choose the same third party over the "other team", and it's as you say "a toss-up between the two big parties" (i.e. no consensus in the populace between them), most sane people with their heads out of their asses would say having that third party win is the best outcome. Now if everyone's choosing all third parties over the other team, then they're drawing their approval line way too low, and failing at strategic voting. They'll probably learn from that, and be a little more circumspect about which third party they support in the next election -- getting a fairer result.
Honestly, your complai