What, majority rule?
Page apparently cannot grasp the concept of how it works…
Not suprising really…
I really believe this is what would help third parties do better in the US.
LePage should feel lucky to be term-limited out. Wouldn’t win with this style of voting. Can still say he wasn’t thrown out of office by a landslide.
Unless his supporters could mark him as their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice. Is that allowed?
RCV won’t help third parties at all.
But it will keep them from being spoilers.
Likely they’d just cast the 1st and leave the others blank.
People voting for Dem candidate number two would have to put LePage in as their number 2 for him to get extra votes in a less than 50% scenario.
I disagree. I believe if people are free to list a third party as their first choice and a major party candidate as their second choice they will do so.
I believe it would also help with some party unity. People that really want to vote third party could do so without being a spoiler and the rest of us wouldn’t have as much reason to bash on them.
EDITED: I don’t guess I disagree, I disagree. Need to stop waffling so much.
People who vote third party are, ipso facto, spoilers.
Our unique system of government is why we have a two-party duopoly, and on the whole it’s served us well.
Voting third party is an exercise in vanity and complete disregard for the best interests of the Republic.
Voting third party is what gave us Trump.
Voting third party is selfish, ignorant, stupid, vain, and dangerous.
I agree with that assessment. I’m saying I believe RCV could help fix the instances where our system hasn’t served us well. If the consequences of voting third party were mitigated we wouldn’t have Trump today. I try to be a realist, I’m sure RCV isn’t all unicorns and rainbows but it does seem it would help.
If we had RCV and everyone that voted for Stein listed Clinton as their second choice and Clinton won because of that, she would know she only won with their votes. Implementing RCV would settle the “we would have won if only we had a true progressive” calls to bed because we could see who voted for the alleged more moderate candidate and who voted for the alleged more progressive one.
Please help me understand how you see it differently?
I don’t see it differently—except that I cannot see how RCV would help third parties.
I would prefer this system to the “jungle primary” system that we have here in California. It is too easy here for the majority party to vote themselves off of the fall ballot by splitting votes among a.number of primary candidates from the same party, while the opposition is relatively unified around one or two.
Yesterday I got into a long winded and off topic discussion with @jonney_5 about voting third party. I went off on the consequences of it regarding the Supreme Court.
In that conversation jonney_5 mentioned that he (guessing because of name) voted for Bernie in the primary and chose Clinton in the general specifically because he didn’t want to be a spoiler. I’m not saying this is how it would have played out but if RCV was in place nationally he could have chosen Green party 1st and DNC 2nd. He still wouldn’t have been a spoiler and the Green party would have gained a 1st choice vote they wouldn’t have otherwise had. I believe that would help third parties, at least short term. Long term it might hurt them if the major parties tried to absorb the positions that kept them out of first place, but I can’t theorize out that far.
What a lovely little masturbatory fantasy.
This is great. Surprised it was only 55-44, though.
It could if there were at-large districts with multiple reps chosen.
Nah, I have much better fantasies for masturbation.
But there aren’t, and there won’t be.
We have ranked voting in municipal elections in SF, it’s intricate and not easy to grasp straight away, but I’ve become a believer. But it’s a completely different concept than a jungle primary, which by the way both parties hated. It appeared for a while there would be major upsets but there weren’t. We’ll probably see efforts to repeal it
A third party candidate is never going to win a presidential election, if in fact this is what’s being discussed. They’ll always be spoilers. 270 EC votes are need to win, and a third party is never going to reach that. They’ll just damage the D or the R (Nader and later Perot).