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Voters rejected historic election reforms across the US, despite more than $100M push (apnews.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Summary

Voters across eight states, including Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, rejected ballot measures for election reforms such as ranked choice voting (RCV) and open primaries, despite a $110 million push from advocates.

The movement, inspired by Alaska’s 2020 adoption of these reforms, failed to gain traction, with critics citing confusion and doubts over RCV’s benefits.

Some reforms succeeded locally, including in Portland, Oregon, but opposition remains strong.

top 45 comments

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 hours ago

$100M push?

Peanuts.

Musk invested $145M just to win PA for trump.

Until we have billionaires pumping billions into improving our way of life, things will only get worse.

And billionaires are never going to pump billions into improving our way of life, because they're all narcissistic sociopathic dragons who care only about continuing to enrich themselves further at the cost of our way of life.

Which means we're in late stage capitalism. In history, that usually is also the end for the democracy of those governments.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

The RCV proposition in Arizona was terrible.

It allowed lawmakers to change the number of candidates who advance to the Ranked Choice Voting stage every six years, which means they could literally force it down to two candidates anyway.

Even better, if lawmakers can’t agree on the number of advancing candidates by a deadline, the Secretary of State just gets to choose it by themselves with no oversight.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

But we can only think of entertaining progressive policy once we have RCV in all 50 states!

[–] treadful 11 points 1 day ago

In Montana it was separated into two confusing proposals. Ignoring the campaigning against it, as someone in support of RCV I had no idea that's what they were talking about without looking it up.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

Many people are too uninformed to understand why RCV benefits them. Others understand that it’s liable to upset the status quo that they like. Between ignorance and malice, it’s not surprising that RCV is a difficult sell.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

In Arizona, the RCV proposition didn't pass because it was bundled with open primaries. The bill was mainly about requiring open primaries with only a small mention of requiring ranked choice voting at the end. I would bet a lot of people here didn't even know ranked choice voting was on their ballot.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I think it is more of a difficult sell because of all the political and financial opposition. Nobody outside the US considers systems with more than two parties complicated. Instead it is pretty straightforward. You vote a party and the party gets seats accordingly to how many people voted for it. It is easier than the whole swing-state electoral college bullshit. But looking at Baseball and Imperial units it seems Americans need things to be needlessly complicated.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

On the financial front, in Alaska the RCV maintainers outspent the repealers 100:1, yet the bill to repeal vote barely failed by some 600 votes - triggering a recount.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Quite so. Same with the uniquely American obsession with acronyms. I swear to god, everything they touch gets one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Tbf, that's more online than irl. IMHO

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Nah fam, I didn't know how much of a thing it was until I went to the states. Every time there's a subject to learn in school or some new policy, it must have an acronym, bonus points if it also features a flow chart guide for dummies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

Acronyms are fun. FUBAR being the best one.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago

Disappointing. RCV is how we can try to break free of the two parties.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"RCV is too confusing" say anti-RCV politicians deliberately wording RCV ballot measures to be as confusing as possible.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

One thing the last few elections have made abundantly clear is just how fuckin dumb most Americans are.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

Like … unimaginably so. I cannot fathom the level of ignorance experienced by so many people.

[–] [email protected] 91 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

"RCV is too confusing" say people who have no problem filling out sports brackets 🙄

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Well, you just came up with a great way to sell it, since we are already basically treating politics like sports. Brackets for president!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I had this exact thought! It's a simple comparison with a subtle nod to acceptance of the somewhat-more-likely-to-be-conservative blue collar crowd.

The progressives need better messaging on literally everything. I'm only into marketing as a side interest and some of the crap the Democrats put out is infuriatingly bad--especially considering it's up against the fascist/corporatist propaganda machine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Ignorance is bliss

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Missouri got their anti-RCV proposal passed by billing it as an amendment declaring that non-citizens cannot vote. That's right, they did it by banning something that was already against the law.

Maybe the way forward for election reform is to put it as a footnote in a proposition declaring murder to be bad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The solution is to frame it in a way such that hateful idiots feel like they're punishing someone else? That sounds about right.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There's still a lot of education that needs to be done on these topics, it's all still pretty niche among the broader public.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago

Totally agree. In 2000, during the hanging chad debacle, I had a philosophy professor completely shift our class to the philosophy of voting. I found it endlessly fascinating and opened my thinking around voting. Here's some good info on the topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

We should be pushing approval voting instead, the educational barrier is way lower and both RC and approval are a load better than FPTP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

This right here is why people get confused. Cause someone always pops up and says "no we should do this whole different method instead" and the waters get muddied.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

I'm only saying this because the vote failed everywhere, clearly it's a strategy problem.

If you ask anyone on the street if they would want more moderates and parties in office, a large majority would agree, so if that's the goal, the question is, how do we get there. Ranked choice is great, but it's not optimal in either how the tallying determines a winner, or in convincing people this is better. Approval voting is clearly easier to explain and probably convince people it's better. So now that the vote has failed, we should reassess our strategy from ranked choice to approval voting.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

both... are a load better than FPTP.

That's exactly why we shouldn't quibble over them too much.

In other words, now is a good time to make the argument you're making. However, I also saw people making that sort of argument just before the election, after the decisions about what to put on the ballots had already been made, and in that context the argument come across as anti-RCV concern trolling.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

In Colorado, it was severely flawed, being a jungle election, then a RCV.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

California has rcv for senators I believe, and Adam schiff used it to advocate for the republican so that he wouldn’t have to run against Katie Porter in the actual race.

No republican will win a senate race in California, so by funding the republican campaign in the primary, he made it so he could lock in his win.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Wevhave jungle primaries, which means ya get the top two in the general. Newsome killed the RCV bill passed by the California Congress.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Ok interesting, seems similar to what Colorado was trying to pass

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I used to think RCV would make democracy much better. I now know that is not necessarily true.

I still think proportional representation does make democracy better. In a proportionally representative system, political parties are assigned seats in the legislature according to the percentage of votes they receive. So, if a party receives 30% of the votes, they get 30% of the seats. It's true that this means that often no one party has a majority, requiring multiple parties to come together and form a majority coalition (and this can be a challenge - Germany has a few examples of this not working out, one recent and one very famous), but it works well enough in most democracies.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So what would be the threshold for Senator representation split? Obviously if a state is 50/50 it would be one of each. But when would they both go to one party? 67/33?

Also, how do they determine who is at the top of the ballot for each party? The primary?

As a resident in a red state that regularly votes more than 1/3 Democratic but has 100% Republican representation in congress, I would love to have some representation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The Senate couldn't exist, because it is inherently disproportionate. The Senate would have to be abolished and the house of representatives would have to be expanded and restructured.

The US is unique. We are the only democracy that is also a federation of semi-autonomous states, each with its own constitution and somewhat independent legislature. I believe in other democracies that don't have semi-autonomous, semi-independent states, what they do is hold a national, parliamentary election in which people vote for parties, not necessarily individual candidates. Seats in parliament are then assigned to each party based on the percentage of the popular vote they receive. So, if a parliament has 100 total seats, and 25% of the people vote for a specific party, that party gets 25 seats.

The US federal house of representatives already assigns seats proportionally to each state based on population. I don't know how it would need to be restructured so that there would also be proportional representation based on political affiliation. I would have to think about that.

Edit: I guess one way it could work is the federal house would give each state a certain number of seats based on the state's population, and then each state's block of seats would be divided among the parties based on the percentage of votes they get in that state. And then representatives could join up with representatives from other states that belong to their same party. I don't know, I suppose that's one option.

The US is weird. Most other democracies have a single, national government instead of separate state and federal governments. Also, most other democracies have MUCH smaller populations than the US.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In the Dutch parliamentary system we do have a two-house structure (i.e. we have a Parliament and a Senate), while also having proportional representation.

There is a national election every four years that determines the make-up of the national parliament. The result directly proportionally determines the seat division (150 seats total).
There is also a provincial election every four years. This directly proportionally determines the seat division of the respective provincial houses.
But it also indirectly determines the make-up of the Senate. The provincial houses hold their own election and vote for the seat division of the Senate (75 seats total for 12 provinces).

It is traditionally seen that Parliament proposes, argues and passes legislation, while the Senate checks the passed legislation for constitutionality before giving it their sign of approval.
Another view is that Parliament is the direct representation of the people, while the Senate is the national representation of the provincial houses.

I think it is worth keeping in mind that an electoral system doesn't have to be exactly like the theoretically pure version. You can mix and match elements to something that would suit your situation best (for instance in terms of achievability)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

Well sure but these are the same mouth-breathing cloven-hooved dipshits that elected trump.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

I think we should start pushing approval voting instead of ranked choice. Ranked choice is easy to explain how to vote but a little complex to explain how the vote is tallied and that's what people find confusing.

Approval voting is straight forward and easy to explain, whoever gets the most approvals wins.

They both are much better than what we have.

[–] Montagge 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Voters said they want change so they get better representation by keeping things exactly the same

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Yeah there seemed to be a lot of misinformation coming from both parties against these ballot measures. Neither side of the isle wants to allow these to pass as it undermines their power. Uninformed voters that simply follow party lines were being directed to vote against this on both sides. Go figure...

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

BuT vOtInG tHiRd PaRtY iS a WaStE oF a VoTe!!! /s

Don't those people not realise that this reform could have helped move the voting system into the direction that no vote is ever wasted?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't think those are the same people saying that. People who know how the math works for third parties also know why it happens and what the solution is.

One thing that should be abundantly clear from this election is that a lot of people are badly misinformed. They have little conception that third parties even exist or if they do, they don't care.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I think a big, often-overlooked part of the problem with third-parties is that people disregard them not only because they "can't win" but also because they're invariably full of deeply-unserious lunatics that nobody wants to vote for anyway.

Think about it: because of first-past-the-post, pretty much every would-be politician who (a) actually grasps how the system works and (b) actually cares about getting into office is going to join either the Democrats or the Republicans. So who's left to join third parties? The answer is, morons that nobody wants in charge of anything, and idealogues too fanatical to moderate their platform to win support and too stubborn to care that it makes them unelectable.

In other words, there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem going on here: people need to want to vote for third-parties in order to care about RCV, and third-parties need RCV to be able to attract politicians that would give them credibility.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I'd say that's right. I've looked at the Greens, and Jill Stein in particular, and evaluated their history on their own merits. They're clowns. Shooting climate policy in the foot by historical opposition to nuclear, and having an internal fight to take homeopathy out of their healthcare policies. If we had ranked choice in my state, I'd still rate Jill Stein higher than a random Republican, but I'd be looking for so many other progressive candidates above her.

Now, I've also been looking at the Working Families Party, which isn't dumb enough to run a spoiler candidate, and they're quite clear on that. They work with Democrats hoping to get things like fusion voting and ranked choice passed. Meanwhile, run candidates where it makes sense and look for other strategic opportunities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

They really don't. They've been told it will cause problems by the only talking heads they listen to, so they believe it.