Rank choice voting is banned by state law in Missouri. Its potential for misuse and abuse is known.
So Missouri is not one of the places where it is in use. It is merely a place that appears to agree with you. One might also note that all forms of voting have a potential for misuse and abuse.
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Yes, candidates and political parties know how to exploit these factors to get their candidate elected. But hopefully elections are fair w all candidates given the same opportunities.
Manipulating votes to put unelectable candidates on the ballot is a misuse of rank choice.
Which would helpâŚhow, exactly?
The problem isnât the two-party system. The problem is that parties are weak. Thatâs why the two-party system resulted in tons of wheeling and dealing, bargaining and compromises throughout most of our historyâŚuntil we made a series of major changes that started to gut them.
We switched to mostly primaries, which weaken parties by moving candidate choice out of the hands of party leaders and institutions. We implemented campaign finance restrictions, which limited the resources of parties relative to individual candidates. Technology changed, making it easier and cheaper for individual candidates to organize and access voters directly, without having to rely on traditional institutional âgatekeepersâ like churches, unions, newspapers, and other major community organizations that helped shore up âmachineâ politics.
So our elections are far less about parties, and far more about individual candidates. Contrast that with most parliamentary systems, like those in Europe, which tend not to have primaries at all - and in which the voters have virtually no say in who the candidates are (even for major offices), and are mostly just voting for parties. For some reason, we in the U.S. decided that we didnât like the institutions of political parties - even though strong vibrant political parties are essential for representative democracy to function properly.
Parties are long-term, have multiplicities of mutable interests, and are institutionally very capable of cutting deals. Individual officeholders tend to be less so on all counts. Parties are the institutional âskeletonâ of a legislative body that allow it to act rationally, rather than as a collection of largely autonomous and independent individuals with their own narrow interests that cannot be compromised or bargained.
Ranked choice would likely make all of this worse, not better, by diminishing the power of parties even further.
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So, you think it is a good idea for voters [to] have virtually no say in who the candidates are (even for major offices)?
Good discussion, thorny topic.
The root problem is the fundamental problem of modern politics â the generation of legitimacy and sane, even good policies, from discussions, some public and some private. For a democratic polity that means the citizens themselves must have conversations/interactions that make sense to themselves and that lead to good policy.
Modern communications and advertising dollars have obliterated the long evolved patterns from forums through cracker barrel talks, and technical change seems to be happening faster than our institutions can evolve.
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I donât know. Iâm of two minds about it.
In parliamentary systems, thatâs pretty much how itâs done. The parties pick who will be the prime minister (head of government). The voters donât choose which specific individual holds that position - they choose which party(its) are in charge, and the parties pick. The same is true of the individual MPâs, in most countries.
Thatâs in obvious tension with maximizing voter control, not just which parties are in charge, but which people are in charge.
There are pros and cons to both approaches. Weâve seen the cons to an individualistic election process here in the U.S., but the pros are that voters have vastly more ability to very specifically dictate what individual holds what office. In parliamentary systems, the party is much more the focus of voter choice - which is far more conducive to bargaining, both good and bad.
It rhymes with the tension between representative democracy and direct democracy. The reason we (and most other countries) have representative democracy, where we mostly vote on elected officials and not directly on laws themselves, is to provide space for discussion and trade-offs and measuring intensity of support and a host of other benefits. The flip side to that is that the People are a step removed from the legislative pen.
If the problem that youâre trying to solve is that elected officials arenât bargaining enough, I donât think that switching to ranked-choice is going to be much help for that problem.
We also did that to ourselves, though. We adopted a number of reforms that were intended to reduce the role of political parties from significantly influencing any election but the general election. Which certainly advances some goals, but it does distort your system when you try to take the political parties out of a lot of politics. Since the road to higher political office no longer runs through party institutions (or necessarily any institutions at all) thereâs less of a need for any politicians to cultivate a lot of bargaining than there used to be, and far less of a role for those institutions to help foster inter-party bargaining.
We also decided, collectively to some degree, that we hated the sort of things that helped make bargaining work in the first place. We decided earmarks were bad, that pork-barrel politics were bad, that the business of politicians doing favors for each other in bills and appointments and the like were all bad. But if you take all the bargaining out of politics, and reduce everything to just manichean fights over first principles, then youâre not going to get much in the way of compromise.
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Are they? Most of the country votes for a party, no matter who the candidate is. The swing is in the independents, who have little (or no) party loyalty.
Ranked voting would open things up to more individuals (and parties). Right now, if you vote libertarian, you are âwastingâ your vote because they have no chance of winning. In a ranked system, you could take a chance on the off-party candidate, and if he/she doesnât win, your next choice is counted (i.e. you didnât âwasteâ it). You might actually get people you want, rather than having to settle for extremists in a bi-polar system.
Iâm sure itâs not a panacea, but it is workable within the framework of the Constitution (whereas, a parliamentary system wouldnât be).
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In general elections, perhaps - but certainly far more about individual candidates than you would find in other countries, where the parties themselves choose who will be prime minister, not the voters.
And again, our country is distinct from parliamentary systems by having such a prominent role for primaries - where candidate choice is entirely divorced from party affiliation, and is completely about the individual candidate. Indeed, most contested elections in this country are primaries - every contested general election also has at least one (and often two) contested primaries, and many of the uncontested elections have a contested primary as well.
This dynamic changes our politics. It reduces the power of the parties, which in parliamentary systems get to control candidate selection. Switching to ranked choice in general elections doesnât address it, and arguably makes it worse by weakening the existing parties further.
And the head of the party is chosen by the representatives?
It is worth remembering that even if the party selects the representative, the people can always vote for a different party. With 19+ parties as is the case in some places, there will be many cases where there is a similar party.
How the head of the party is chosen is up to the party, and varies considerably from country to country and parliamentary system. The head of government is typically chosen by vote of the Members of Parliament. It is often, but not always, the head of the party that has garnered a majority (or the largest party in whatever coalition has a majority to create a government).
Sure, but all of those folks will (typically) be chosen by their parties. Itâs not a system where anyone can throw their hat in and have a realistic chance of success - and it requires that candidates have a fair amount of strength within the parties.
There are pros and cons to this. When the parties have a huge role in gatekeeping candidates, most (but not all) candidates who win election will generally try to advance the goals of the partyâŚ.which are supported by the voters, since they voted for that party. When the parties donât have that role, many (but not all) candidates who win election will try to advance the specific issue positions they believe inâŚ.which are supported by the voters, because they voted for that candidate. Both of those are valid and good goals for an elected representative - but they are slightly different goals, and that has an effect on how politics is done and how negotiations/contested decisions are managed.
Balderdash. Anybody who has read a Top 10 list on Buzzfeed knows how it works. You choose your favorite first. If you have a second choice, you choose that one. Not difficult at all.
Please do not point to Missouri as an example of good governance, or even enlightened leadership. Itâs in the bottom half in education, infrastructure, crime, and healthcare, among other things.
And yet we elected Senators by the âparliamentary systemâ for the first 150 years of the republic (State legislatures elected them, not the populace), and changed that when it became clear how easy it was to corrupt the process. (Big money concentrated on corrupting a few State Houses, where decisions about which person would become Senator - which was more easily accomplished than on a national scale.)
Double balderdash. The problem isnât that the parties are weaker, and it isnât ranked choice voting. Itâs the tsunami of money that has been allowed to corrupt every aspect of the political process, coupled with the lifetime service that a few âannointedâ individuals have managed to carve out and the seniority system of congress, leading to a calcified democratic process in which money talks, and it talks loudest to the people in position to gum up the works.
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Balderdash back at you. Oh, not at the observation that âmoney talksâ and that the rich and powerful now have inordinate influence over the levers of power in this country. Rather, âbalderdashâ at the implicit claim that this is new. It has been ever thus. The Rockefellers and Carnegies and Astors never lacked for Congressbeings in their pockets merely because there wasnât a tsunami of money going into campaign funds and straight to the airways. The money always flowed, it just flowed in different channels.
Whatâs changed is that the money now goes straight to individual candidates, rather than flowing indirectly through institutions like political parties and Tammany Hall and union guild halls and the chamber of commerce/country club arrangements that used to be the main avenues of shaping political outcomes. That doesnât mean that Sheldon Adelson (and now Miriam) didnât have enormous power in the modern political system because of their wealth; it just means we shouldnât mourn for poor J.Paul Getty and the poor du Ponts for not being able to use their wealth to get their way in Congress. Because I hate to be the guy stripping the rose tint off everyoneâs glassesâŚ.but they did.
What weâve done, though, is vastly weakened the institutional power of political parties as conduits of that influence and power. Partially thatâs because voter influencing has been democratized, first by television and now the internet. If you donât need the local paper (or the Hearsts or Sulzbergers or whomever) or the local political machines or the local unions, but can instead just buy a ton of campaign ads, then you can bypass all the gatekeepers and gateways. Thatâs the money flow. But partly itâs because weâve adopted a bunch of rules in the last sixty years that change the relationship of parties to the political process - the shift to primaries as the sole way of picking nominees, the Watergate-era campaign finance reforms (which were intended to take money out of politics, but ended up just moving it away from parties), eliminating earmarks and pork-barrel projects, and cultural disdain for party institutions in general.
What that means is that parties are vastly weaker than they used to be - which means that many (most?) of the folks in Congress are more free agents than team players. Backbenchers who would never dare to cross Tip OâNeill or Sam Rayburn (at the cost of their seats and their political careers) can thumb their noses at the Speakers of today. In large part because the Speakers of today can neither punish those who break ranks, nor (and this is the important part) protect the ones who take hard votes. In days past, if the party was going to cut a deal on something, they could use porkbarrel goodies and their control of the political process to protect Members that were going to get crosswise with their voters. Those days are gone - and the reason why is that the power of wealth has moved out of the old-time channels and into a direct tsunami of cutting checks.
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Missouri is conservative, not very progressive. But it and midwestern states are unlikely to adopt California style policies. A very red state.
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Agreed, itâs not new. That doesnât mean that the current system is functioning as the Founders intended.
Would it be better if the money flowed through political parties? Maybe, but the root problem is the money in politics, not how itâs channeled. Full disclosure, Iâm also against political parties.
Many of the Founders warned against both wealth and political party influence on government.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016396852
One path forward is to elect candidates who arenât influenced by $$$, nor political party pressures. With government currently caught in the stranglehold of the two-party system, ranked-choice voting provides a solution.
Given that the majority of voters are independent, there are tons of voters who regularly feel like voting is a choice between getting punched in the face, or kicked in the ding-dong. Ranked-choice voting makes it easier for voters to pick a candidate they actually want.
Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is apolitical.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-conservatives-shouldnt-fear-ranked-choice-voting
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It depends on what problem youâre talking about. My comments were directed to the specific âproblemâ of why Congress doesnât function in the same way that it used to. It now spends most of the time wrapped around its own axle, unable to reach compromises or deals or negotiations on anything. Thatâs a relatively recent change (last two decades or so), and I donât believe itâs caused by the fact that there is money in politics. Itâs caused by the fact that weâve intensely weakened the political parties.
BTW, I donât think the Founders would celebrate the weakening of political parties - and I donât think we should, either. The Founders were well aware of the problem of factions - and their solution was an elegant one. Go big. Get as big as possible. If you need very large numbers of people in order to get things done, as with a national legislature instead of a local one, then it gets much harder for individual factions to dominate. And the same is true of political parties: if you have to act through a huge national coalition of your side of the aisle, then no single faction within the huge national coalition will have an easy time dominating.
Which again, is the problem. At least this specific problem. When voters get to choose a more âbespokeâ candidate, one that meets their very specific tailored issue set and not a more generic broad coalition, then you end up with a Congress full of people that are not really in a position to reach compromises on needed legislation. Instead of a lot of people elected on broad party platforms, theyâre more frequently getting elected on a âplatform of oneâ set of issues that theyâre going to pursue. The voters get candidates that are more finely tuned to what they specifically want, rather than the national average of what voters generally want - but then once those candidates get elected, they canât give their voters what they want.
Jefferson didnât want any political parties. In fact, several Founders didnât want them (but Jefferson is the only one I can name for certain). They feared political factions because of their divisive nature. But parties formed anyway, I suspect because there is strength in numbers (i.e. they were more likely to get their way on some issue).
IMO, party platforms are a problem. Forty years ago I was a Republican, but I didnât agree with several of their planks. But I had to go with them because I didnât agree -at the time- with many planks of the Democrats. I think offering voters a wider array of choices is a good thing. Itâs a lot easier to have a make or break issue (e.g. abortion) without having to sacrifice your position on stuff like strong defense.
I think the parties would have to change their ways if they had actual competition. Right now, we have primaries where the most extreme (i.e. insane) candidates rise to the top, and then in the general election you have to choose between the fascist or the communist (note: deliberately hyperbolic to make the point). I donât want the fascist or the communist.
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Yes, few, if any, FF actually wanted parties. John Adams himself believed that âa division of the republic into two great parties . . . is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.â
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/497/62/
Most soon shifted after Washingtonâs presidency, though, realizing that in the abstract they were a âdangerâ and âto be dreadedâ, but accepted and helped construct them as a practical instrument once policy and constitutional conflicts sharpened.
Pete
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