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by fsargent
1269 days ago
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I'm the Chair of the Board of CES. AMA. This is really troubling - and the staff has been away trying to get some relaxation during the winter break, but if there's any message I can put out there it's this. Support the Center for Election Science. Funding, volunteering, advocacy. We exist because there's a simpler, easier to implement reform that doesn't suffer from these issues. We see too many places that have adopted RCV and then reverted back to the old system. The main restriction on what we're able to achieve is our limited budget. We've got some massive campaigns in the pipeline, but our ability to execute on them will depend on having enough funding for staff and campaigning. The main reason I joined Center for Election Science in the first place was because I felt it was the best bang for the buck reform. Voting reform doesn't just elect the democratically selected candidate, it also elects higher quality candidates. This means we get better, more nuanced policies, less flip flopping, and politics becomes boring - because everything _just works_. |
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I admit I do have one reservation about supporting approval voting. Specifically, I'm concerned about the "chicken dilemma" situation.
An advantage of plurality is that voters are strongly incentivized to tell pollsters their true favorite, in order to get their true favorite performing better in the polls and attract strategic voters. This means polls tend to track election results, which seems good for legitimacy. Additionally, adding polls to the mix means plurality isn't quite as bad as people say -- in theory I could support my true favorite in the poll, and shift to strategic voting in the general election if my true favorite doesn't see their polling numbers rise.
Approval voting seems like it could incentivize people to lie to pollsters though. Consider an election with a red-orange candidate, a yellow-orange candidate, and a blue candidate. Suppose all candidates have approximately equal levels of support. Imagine I support red-orange and I get a call from a pollster. I know that if I can get those who favor yellow-orange to vote for red-orange as well, red-orange has an excellent shot to win. So I lie, and tell the pollster I'm voting for blue only. The yellow-orange supporters start freaking out, and they vote for both red-orange and yellow-orange to keep blue out of office. I bullet vote for red-orange; red-orange wins in an upset where blue was the favorite. Blue supporters get angry, and declare the election a fraud, since the polls were so far off.
Have you guys thought about the added strategic dimension that polling adds?