[john111]

I found this video really interesting. I knew that the current US system, first past the post, has a lot of problems from watching CPG Grey's [1] videos on it. I didn't know that the alternative systems, like ranked voting, had all these other weird problems.

It's depressing, really.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

[quicklime]

While it's true that every voting system has paradoxes, I don't feel that this makes every system equally bad.

The US has what I would consider a big systemic problem, which is that the first-past-the-post system leads to spoiler effects, and the result is a two party system. When I've talked to some people about this, the response I got was "well all voting systems have problems so we can't fix it without introducing new problems".

But the monotonicity paradox for elimination voting doesn't seem quite as serious. It seems to only be likely to come up when the two major choices are close anyway. If all voting systems are evil, it's the lesser evil.

If the US could implement elimination voting, we could remove a big problem (the two party system) and replace it with a smaller one: an occasional wrong choice between the two major parties. But this can happen anyway, for other reasons, eg one candidate wins the popular vote and the other wins the electoral college.

I'm aware that the Democratic and Republican parties benefit from the two party system, so they might not want this, but it seems to me that this is what voters should want.

[Terr_]

I'd like to add that changing the "front-end" of voting (having people rank choices rather than pick-one) enables a whole slew of potential better-algorithms, because the input data is fundamentally better.

[anderskaseorg]

This might interest you if you think that elimination voting solves the spoiler effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

[warmwaffles]

What I think would solve some issues is to have a last option on the ballot that says, "None of the above" and if that wins, then the current president if they reached their term limit, steps down, and the vice president takes over for the next term. IE pretend the head of state has passed away and move everyone up in succession.

Basically it removes the "lesser" of two evils from the equation. Yes one could argue, the party in power could stay in power if every year the party abstains from voting but I don't think that would be a likely outcome because, lets face it. The VP probably wouldn't be a leader everyone likes come the next election cycle. They could also abstain from running in the next election if they choose.

EDIT: Also puts a lot of emphasis on selecting a good VP for either party since they could possibly succeed after 2 terms.

[logfromblammo]

I would prefer a "none of the above" option that is not actually implicitly choosing a specific person.

If "none of the above" wins, then the sensible thing to do would be to re-start the elections process from the primaries, wherein any person who was a candidate in the previous iteration(s) is ineligible to run again. Mid-November to January is more than enough time to re-do the entire election cycle.

[filoeleven]

This makes sense to me, excepting the timeline perhaps, only I'd also modify it to mean only that whichever candidates were the finalists in the previous iteration are ineligible to run again. In other words, my party may have picked a candidate that the nation as a whole rejected, but it does not mean that another candidate who ran in my party's primary would be rejected by the nation as a whole. Otherwise I think you may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[logfromblammo]

The public story of the primary races is that they select for the most desirable candidate of those running. If the electorate decides that the "best" of those candidates is not suitable, isn't it reasonable to assume that none of the rest could beat the "none of these" option, either? Do you really want to force vote after vote of people saying "no" before trying an entirely new crop of candidates?

You're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You're throwing out the unidentifiable goo, the dirt clod, the rotting fish, and the floating turd. The "none of these" result is a clear indicator that there is no baby worth saving in the entire tub full of bathwater.

[filoeleven]

If we had open primaries everywhere, I'd be more inclined to agree with you here. As someone who lives in a state with closed primaries, the way it looks to me is that the candidate selected as "most desirable" by a party's base is not at all necessarily the one who will be "most desirable" for the country as a whole--especially when combined with the much lower percentages of people who come out to vote in the primary elections, hence my hesitation to toss 'em all out. The ones most likely to succeed are the ones who pander the most to their hardcore base, to the distress/distaste of much of the rest of the population, especially those outside the party in question.

I am however on the record elsewhere as saying that a necessary part of the path to improving Washington is, in fact, to throw them all out, so I won't fight you too hard on this!

[warmwaffles]

You start to run into issues if you don't allow the same candidates to run again. Issues being that you are suppressing the right to run for office. Now, if the party made the candidate ineligible then that's a different story. Also no clue why I was downvoted without a reason.

[thwarted]

Issues being that you are suppressing the right to run for office.

Their ability to run for office isn't being suppressed, they ran for office the first time and lost. They could possibly run again at the end of the next term. This is no more suppressing a right to run for office than the 22nd amendment suppresses a right to run for office.

[ianai]

You run the risk of the exact same outcome running every body again.

[warmwaffles]

We have that risk now, yet it doesn't happen.

[Asooka]

Personally, I would rather choose a random sample of all politicians within the country to put into power. Over time, this should tend towards a compromise for everyone.

Failing that, each party having a number of seats proportional to the number of votes they received is not that bad of a system.