[foxglacier]

Or voters should take some civic responsibility and stop voting for corrupt politicians. Americans seem to be either unable to make their own decisions without paid advertising to direct them or they're afraid of "wasting" their vote on candidates that didn't spend enough on advertising.

[toolazytologin]

Or “politics” are too much of their identity and they always vote for “their guy” regardless of the merits. Education does not matter when the vote has nothing to so with rationality and is only rooting for a team.

Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.

[ryandrake]

Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do. They're like fucking Eagles fans. They have this weird "team loyalty" that I just don't get.

[Dylan16807]

> Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do.

This part makes enough sense.

> They're like fucking Eagles fans.

Now you've gone and implied 95% of sports fans aren't that way?? I don't understand your argument any more.

[ryandrake]

Haha every Eagles fan I know is ride or die.

[mptest]

this is just a more abstract "bootstraps" argument. schooling in this country has been systematically attacked and deconstructed, and as the burger reich's leader says, "i love the poorly educated". this is not "dum timmy votes for dum thing" it's "countless $ and effort and man hours have been devoted to making the american populace dumber" Why? look at any polling breakdown for how the educated vote vs the uneducated.

[whoooboyy]

Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.

Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.

[petralithic]

It's more that voting third party in a first-past-the-post voting scheme is systemically pointless.

[onraglanroad]

It obviously isn't since the UK, for example, has fptp for general elections and far more than two parties.

[petralithic]

Parliamentary systems are not comparable to presidential ones when it comes to voting systems.

[whoooboyy]

Parent poster said to stop voting for bad candidates. I said you would be mocked/judged/told off for doing so. And here we are.

[petralithic]

What I said is factually true, neither mocking, judging nor telling you off. If you believe saying something like, don't look at the sun or you'll hurt your eyes (and then you look at the sun and say that your eyes are burnt) is telling you off, then we have different definitions of the phrase.

[EraYaN]

Well you should mostly do that in the primaries, when you are down to two, pick the least evil one.

[ethin]

This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.

[mindslight]

It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.

Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)

[ClayShentrup]

> it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote

that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.

> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.

what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer). https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html

that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.

[mindslight]

Restating my disclaimer of "It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems"...

> ranked voting methods ... can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.

Can you clarify whether you're referring to some ranked methods (eg IRV), or all ranked methods (ie including ranked pairs) ?

> that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.

Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score) ? A quick skim of that VSE page has it talking about "utility", which I would imagine is a scalar per candidate representing "happiness" ?

The problem I have with Approval is that coming from our two-terrible-party system - do I Approve my latent terrible party or not? That choice seems purely down to strategy, compared to being able to rank them to say I completely prefer the new party/candidate over my latent terrible party, and my latent terrible party over the other latent terrible party. The dynamic also seems exacerbated knowing there will be a lot of people who continue to vote exactly as they did under plurality.

[ClayShentrup]

it's mathematically proven that all ranked methods can fail IIA. see arrow's theorem.

> Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score)

1. i did not define performance in a way that is congruent with approval/score. scores are not utilities. they are the modification of utilities via ignorance, normalization, and strategy.

2. that the correct social welfare function is just the sum of all voter utilities (the definition of "performance") is mathematically proven. https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns

> do I Approve my latent terrible party or not?

this is not a "problem". it's well understood. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

approval voting obliterates IRV ("RCV") with any mixture of strategic or honest voters, so i'm not sure why you're bringing up strategy. https://www.rangevoting.org/StratHonMix

[ClayShentrup]

i had a chance to visit arrow at his palo alto condo circa 2014. his theorem is nice and all, but it only makes sense to apply it to social welfare functions, not voting methods. yes, the correct social welfare function is just the utilitarian sum of all voters' individual utilities.

https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns

once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.

https://www.rangevoting.org/PropDiatribe