I was for maybe 15 years very vocal about approval voting, but I've been swayed by a lemming this year for STAR voting.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Ooh, that's very interesting. Like the Borda count though, a party with a base can win the election by running a ton of similar candidates, but I guess that's already illegal for most of the US election systems.
It does need fine tuning for purpose, but I admire highly expressive voting systems. Condorcet would be good too.
This probably isn't the progressive answer you'd expect, but perhaps under a centuries old definition of progressive: weighted technocracy. People vote only in the field of their own expertise, and leave all other issues to those who have expertise. It is a sort of direct democracy with votes weighted by credentials.
Unfortunately you need an insane amount of checks and balances to make it work without power becoming overly concentrated in a Soviet style steering committee.
Cyteen, by CJ Cherryh, explores this well in a fictional context.
so basically....
the only people who can decide if it's appropriate to go to war are... what? soldiers?
and the only people who can draft, lets say, anti-trust legislation are... corpos who almost certainly love monopolies?
I don't think that would end as well as one might imagine, even with checks and balances.
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:
- Have each voter vote on all the propositions, but rank them in order of most to least importance.
- Collect the ballots and sort the propositions in order of importance as designated by voters. Give each ballot ten votes to start with.
- For each prop, take the ballots with n remaining votes for which the prop is listed in the top n remaining props. Sort the yes and no ballots into two stacks in order of how important they ranked the current prop. Begin taking ballots from both stacks and remove a vote from each ballot, until one stack or the other runs out of ballots. The side with remaining ballots wins, and the remaining ballots keep their votes.
- Repeat until all ballots have run out of votes and/or there are no more remaining propositions.
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?
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.
laws, each slightly different.
To play devil’s advocate, the chairperson can deny these motions as frivolous and disruptive.
so... how do you decide who gets to make that decision?
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).
Why are you making it more complicated, just to ultimately limit the voice of people who are participating in government?
Like. Seriously.
It doesn't matter what you do to make it less unfair. it's still going to unfairly disenfranchise people from voting on all the issues. There's nothing in your proposals that solve that. All you're doing is making it even more complicated, and making it harder for anyone who has.... a job, a family, goes to school or any combination thereof. I haven't not worked in some capacity (school+job/career) less than 40 hours in my life. Most of it I've been working 2 or more jobs 60-80 hours a week. and lets be honest, people who are retired aren't usually able to stay informed either.
how many bills do you think congress is currently votes on in a month? and that's ignoring all the steps leading up to it (like committees and sub-committees. i assume you'd retain congress to draft the legislation and handle all that.)
in 2023, The senate had 351-some roll call votes, the house of reps had over 421. that's just votes. With specific bills frequently being lumped in for shared votes. 30 and 35 a month, on average. and last year was low, because of the bipartisan ship fucking everything over.
Lets say you create a monthly ballot system with every thing on it. That's still- probably- going to be more than 50 proposed bills up for voting. Some of them are quite large, like spending omnibus bills that are hundreds or thousands of pages. and that's ignoring people playing games or putting up competing bills.
Do you really expect people to be able to actually be an informed voter while doing all the things necessary to maintain our lives and family in good health? Are you going to pay me- and everyone else- a full time wage to actually do that? because that's the kind of effort you seem to think people can do.
Nobody has that kind of time on their hands. This is why we have representational governance in the first place.
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.
the only people who can decide if it's appropriate to go to war are... what? soldiers?
That sounds very reasonable. It ensures that if it happens, it's for a cause you're willing to die for.
that doesn't mean it's a good or just war. or that they're willing to die for it. There are plenty of people who are retired military that are totally fine with sending other kids to die for stupid shit. Bush W served in the TX nat guard, for example, yet was perfectly willing to fabricate lies to get a war going in iraq. Rumsfeld was a navy pilot and was totally complicit in that as well.
And then there are the people who are habituated to the battlefield, and don't know what to do with themselves when there's not a war on.
And then there's the assholes that just want to kill people without going to jail for it.
In no way does having served in the military mean their judgement is any better as to whether a war or cause is just. In fact, for comparison, Bernie Sanders never served because of his pacifist beliefs. in the contest of the War in Gaza, who do you think is on the right side of history? Him, or all the other senators who served in the military and are pro-Israel?
Sorry, but having served in the military does not make you inherently moral, ethical, or any less reactionary than the rest of us. Being willing to die for a thing, doesn't make that a good thing.
Ah, I see what you mean. I thought the proposal was for those who make the decision to also be the ones fighting the war. Of course, it doesn't guarantee that the cause is just, but I think it would still be a lot better than what we have now.