New Hampshire Bill Proposed to Switch State to Approval Voting
New Hampshire Bill Proposed to Switch State to Approval Voting
If you live in New Hampshire, I suggest you call your state legislators to support this bill. Approval Voting is a very small change that goes a long way! If you don't live in New Hampshire, send this to someone who does!
This is not a good choice. It's not like we haven't known about approval voting. (Vote for as many candidates as you want, largest number wins.) It's that it's just our current system with extra steps for the same outcome. Ranked Choice Voting solves the psychological dilemma of making sure the bad guy doesn't get elected while actually holding the reserve choice in reserve.
I also find the assertion that RCV is difficult to understand a bit condescending. You get X number of choices, (we'll say 3) and your number 1 stays in until they're knocked out by having the least number of votes. Then your ballot switches to your number 2 and so on. So you could safely vote Bernie and Biden knowing Biden can't just win by being the safety candidate anymore.
What the nice looking page doesn't tell you is that in approval voting that's been done in the US voters largely still voted for a single candidate. And RCV is well understood and liked in the jurisdictions that already use it. Over all approval voting favors the current major parties and RCV does not.
Edit - just adding to this to say that the site linked, the center for election science is riddled with GOP propaganda once you get far enough down the rabbit hole. Please don't let them sucker you.
RCV fails the Sincere Favorite Criterion. People claim that it's safe to vote honestly under RCV, but that's actually not true. Sometimes you're better-off by demoting your favorite or even not voting at all This stems from RCV's non-monotonicity problem, where increasing support for a candidate can cause them to do worse (or vice versa). This is an unacceptable failure.
If you want to see some of the whacky results RCV can produce, play around with this spacial election simulation tool. I'm not kidding when I say this is the first result I got, which I set up in literally five seconds while blind to the RCV calculation. The green candidate has three completely separate win regions and they're not even inside any of them. When green is obviously the most popular candidate, they lose. That's completely unacceptable.
I'm not sure what you're on about with approval voting having extra steps compared to choose one. If anything, RCV is the one with extra steps. Even in the previous link, RCV is noticably slower to calculate.
Approval is used in both Fargo and St. Louis. The number of votes people tend to cast depends on how many candidates are running. The 2021 St. Louis primary had 4 candidates and voters averaged 1.56 votes cast. Since it would be moronic to vote for all 4 candidates, a likely vote distribution would have been something like 50% 1 vote, 40% 2 votes, 10% 3 votes. The 2022 Fargo election had similar results, with elections averaging 1.6 and 3 votes per ballot. In large fields, you can get some very high number of votes.
It's popular, it's accurate, it's simple as hell.
2 places with most people still voting for one person is not the good news you want it to be.
Also I went to your site to play with the colors and it's possible to fuck up any of the types in just a few seconds. It's literally click and drag. And yes we all know RCV results aren't done as fast because you have to do the rounds. That's not an actual problem, only a GOP propaganda complaint.
Also, I might look at some more of what you source if it wasn't the same site so often. Slick sites like these are trying to sell you on something. They may believe it's for the best but it's still a sales pitch.
Speaking of which I just watched the Center for Election Science video you gave me because I hate myself. And sure enough it's the GOP propaganda that tries to treat Palin and Begich as a coalition. However if that was true, Palin would have won. In reality enough of Begich's voters ranked Peltola as number 2 to give her the win. They also assume Palin's lost voters (to give Begich the first round pass) would have voted Begich or stayed home. These are wild assumptions, and were thoroughly debunked at the time.
That's the system working as designed. And I'm pretty comfortable in stating that this site is not acting in good faith.
Ranked Choice is objectively worse because it breaks down when there's a popular third party, meaning it doesn't really solve the spoiler effect. Basically, your secondary vote won't count until your primary is knocked out, and your #2 could very well be the most popular candidate (i.e. maybe a ton of people have the same #2, but their #1 outlives the #2, so the #2 drops out first).
Approval voting is great because there cannot be a spoiler effect (candidate with the most votes wins). However, the third party candidate probably won't win unless they draw heavily from both sides. What you'll likely end up with is a lot of moderate winners, which isn't the worst thing in the world imo.
STAR voting is even better because it takes preference into account, just like RCV, but without missing votes. So every candidate you vote for will get that vote counted, regardless of what position you put them in. This means popular third parties will have a much better chance because they don't need to outlast the major party candidates to get counted, they just need a lot of votes.
I highly recommend looking at a few comparisons online. I've found a few great YouTube videos, but I don't want to accidentally bias things by pointing to a biased source, so go look for yourself. My personal preference is:
- STAR voting
- Approval voting - very close second
- RCV
But all of them are better than FPTP, so I'll vote for whichever gets on the ballot.
That's not true. I literally just described how the spoiler effect occurs in approval voting. And if the votes for number two remain locked behind number one in RCV then number 2 wasn't the most popular candidate. Number 1 was. Number 2 is ranked lower for a reason. That's the entire point of RCV.
Star is just approval voting with an extra round. RCV works, is in use, and is popular where it's in use.
Is that the same as Rank Choice??
Approval voting is basically just letting you vote for multiple candidates. Rather than saying “I want this one,” you’re saying “I approve of these candidates.”
No, it's better. There is a comparison in OP's link. (rank choice is called Instant Runoff Voting)
I'm not sure it is though. In ranked choice voting I can safely hedge my bet as my second or third choice. In approval voting I can't do that because I risk electing my second or third choice over my first choice.
Theoretically it works better because you only vote for candidates you approved of. But that's never been how human psychology works. If all of the Democrats tick Biden's name just to make sure then you've essentially brought us back to current method with extra steps. Ranked Choice is the method to go to.