Both sides are a march to capitalism. Support Ranked Choice Voting.
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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How?
Find your states organization for such, or start one.
I live in California so the organization I volunteer for is https://www.calrcv.org/
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the voting system alone won't break the two party system.
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Approval Voting is a better voting method anyway.
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We're going to need to move to some kind of proportional system in order to get more parties, and sequential proportional approval is better suited for that task as well.
I'm only coming at you so strong because it's important that we get this right the first time. Approval is the way to go, both in the short term and the long term.
For those that don't know, approval works like this: vote for any number of candidates, most votes wins. That's it. It's dead simple while being one of the more accurate systems by multiple measures.
Link 1 Simulating Elections with Spatial Voter Models
Link 2 Simplified Spacial Model Example
Link 3 2012 OWS Polling
Link 4 Democratic Primary Polling
Link 5 2024 Republican primary
RCV has problems with spoilers, vote-splitting, and non-monotonicity. RCV is so messy we're not exactly sure how often an RCV election was influenced by a spoiler, but it could be as high as 14%, which would put around 75 people into Congress thanks to a spoiler. We know our happened in the Alaska special election, for example.
Anyway, if you want to help switch your local or state elections to approval (and you absolutely should) volunteer here!
Where did you get the 14% figure?
So unfortunately I didn't bookmark that particular source, but the estimates can range fairly significantly. They're sensitive to your technique and your definition of a spoiler. For example, this article calculates both higher and lower probabilities of a spoiler. I don't think it's good for much more than saying that, all else being equal, RCV has fewer spoilers than FPTP (choose one). Contrast that with approval, where spoilers simply don't exist, and approval clearly takes the cake in that category.
This sounds too good to be true. What are the downsides they aren't mentioning?
Also, how would this system handle write ins? Could your ballot potentially be 1000 pages long?
Great question! I tried to keep it short, but yes of course there are down sides. In fact, mathematically speaking, there literally can't be a perfect voting system. Check out the massive tables in this article for which voting method satisfies which criteria.
The down sides people usually complain about when it comes to approval voting all stem from the same feature, you only get to vote yes or no on any given candidate. If you like both Trump and DeSantis, but it's very important to you that you give more support to Trump, sorry this voting system doesn't have that feature. Similarly, if you don't like Ted Cruz so much that you want literally anyone else to beat him, you can express that opinion by voting for everyone else, but you can't differentiate between all those other candidates.
Every voting system has trade-offs, in this case that troublesome feature (simplicity) is also a bonus. You can't invalidate your approval voting ballot. Any combination of votes is valid. RCV has to either invalidate ballots that don't follow the instructions, or come up with a list of interpretation rules to try and make sense of ballots that don't list the candidates in a neat order. By some estimates the invalid rate for RCV is seven times higher than FPTP. Approval is, again, bullet proof in this regard.
Approval is also extremely easy to understand. RCV seems simple enough, but then it can end up doing very strange things and elect nonsensical winners. The frequency of strange things happening under RCV is debated, but the more competitive the race, the more likely confusing results will follow.
I said I'd keep it short, which is why the first comment didn't have too many details. You can talk election systems for days (notice I didn't talk at all about how these systems translate to proportional methods). In a practical sense, RCV and approval agree on the results the great majority of the time, all the way from winner to loser. In those scenarios, well, why go through all that extra trouble? Keep it simple!
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Ranked choice won't fundamentally change much. The parties allowed will still be within the capitalist window of allowed positions.
What is really needed is a democratic centralist system, but that can only happen after revolution.
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It’s the wealthy that have nothing to worry about, as Joe nothing will fundamentally change Biden has said.
He wasn’t lying, he knew he wasn’t gonna get much shit through Congress when he had a 50/50 split with two of those on his side being Sinema and Manchin and the other side having folks who possibly schemed in having his entire administration cancelled before it ever began
Manchin and Sinema played their assigned roles as rotating villains. And if a rotating villain can’t be summoned, there’s always the Senate parliamentarian. And if not that, then there’s always splitting the bill, as was done for the impending rail strike last year.
The Democrats punk us over & over. 
Both parties work for the capitalist class and against the working class.
The rotating villain thing gets way too much credit. When the Republicans have control, it's something like 56/44. When the Dems have "control", it requires the vice president to break the tie.
Manchin is the best thing you're going to get out of fucking West Virginia any time soon. It's time to stop counting on him as the 50th vote.
Sinema is different, and should absolutely go fuck herself. But she's just a regular, actual villain, not some rotating conspiracy.
Meeting a democrat in West Virginia is like finding a dodo bird in the wild.
Well, more accurately, it’s like finding a truffle.
I mean, they’re there. They defiantly don’t take their politics out to town with them though. In some places it can even be dangerous. No way I’d put a sticker on my car that’s for sure.
Had a dude put a Trump sticker on my bumper once though. I was surprised when I kept suddenly getting “hell yeah buddy” everywhere I went haha. Peeled that off real quick.
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You think they get together and decide who pretends to have beliefs that happen to fuck the whole party? This sounds like absolute bullshit from a BoTh SiDeS-er.
I don't think they need to. For the most part, it's just convenient for the majority to not get anything done and it's campaign material for Manchin to betray the party. I think that by and large, it's a symbiotic relationship where both sides get what they want.
I think it does happen once in a blue moon. Congress is more educated on their votes than the general public, and sometimes all the information isn't public. Once in a while they feel they're going to need to make a vote that isn't popular with their base, and might actually do the rotating villain thing. But that's also going to take into account how strong/weak they are in their districts, and would never be Manchin or Sinema.
We might even see this more in the near future, where Congress is being briefed by experts, the military, the FBI, and the CIA while the general public is being briefed by AI-powered social media propaganda campaigns.
Of course people like to blame the "rotating villain" every single time the party does something they disagree with, because obviously the user's opinion must be the majority opinion.
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The sky was the colour of a TV tuned to a dead channel.
In the more recent publications, he talks at length about that opening line in the introduction.
It's a great opening line.
One that makes no sense to younger kids, so he explained TVs, broadcasting, analog, the whole nine yards. It's pretty kewl.
War of the ants, we used to call it.
Even in the 90s it was common for my TV to be blue when there was no input to display.
Theyre talking about a empty channel that is showing static, AV signals are different.
Is it weird that my first thought was "because it's asbestos and you're not going to live much longer anyway?"
TBF I don't when it started, but it was in use long after asbestos was outlawed.
I thought dry asbestos was harmless? Watch out for trying to remove it, though. The powder is terrible for you.
Undisturbed asbestos is safe-ish... BIG emphasis on the "ish".
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If anything, lower and middle class have been paying more under the Trump tax plan for years. They should be worried about that.
I'm middle class and I ended up paying 600 dollars more the year Orange Boys "Tax Reform" took effect.
I don’t get it. But I also don’t subscribe to mainstream media and news. Is this a play on media trying to sell bidenomics as good for common, or most, people?
I think the implication is that rich people don't have popcorn ceilings, so if you do, you don't make enough money that his tax plan will hurt you. The premise seems flawed to me, but I could be interpreting it wrong.
Ah, I was thinking "it's probably asbestos so long term financial planning is not something you should worry about" but your interpretation makes way more sense.
I was thinking "Should they worry about crumbling lead paint?"
Nah you’re spot on.
will the tax plan actually "hurt" the rich or will it simply limit their means to get even richer?
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"The media" isn't trying to "sell" Biden's tax plan. Some guy on the internet is saying via meme that if you have popcorn ceilings, you don't have to worry about your taxes going up under Biden. Biden has famously pledged that he will not increase taxes on people making less than $400,000/year, so the implication is that people with popcorn ceilings make less than $400,000/year.
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my dad taught me how to do a lot of home renovation: installing new flooring, removing carpeting, painting interior and exterior walls, building screened in back porches, et cetera. one thing we did together was scraping the popcorn ceiling with a paint scraper, then tidying it up with the mud/putty/whatever it's called and painting it. I just wish i could buy my own place so i could renovate it.
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