Not a fan of SPAV, in part for the same reasons I’m not a fan of STAR:
- It doesn’t eliminate strategic voting. For example, imagine you support two candidates for a multi-seat election. Under straight AV you vote for both of them because there’s literally no incentive to do otherwise. Under SPAV, you might decide that since one of those candidates is much more popular and thus a foregone conclusion to win that you should avoid voting for them so the value of your vote for the other isn’t reduced. Too many doing this can cause negative effects, like strategic voting in other methods.
- You can’t tell me how my vote will actually be counted until every other vote is counted, because how the ballot will be measured in the end depends on every other ballot as depending on how everyone else voted your votes for some candidates may be worth less than your votes for other candidates. Straight AV doesn’t have this problem, your vote is exactly what is says on the ballot and is counted exactly as it is on the ballot. The extra math also makes it more complicated to explain to voters en masse, which is a problem with other systems that have transferable votes.
I get that the goal is apparently to make every state elect a split legislature/congressmen by making so that if any seats are even vaguely competitive the parties will essentially be forced to take turns.
Xande@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
Start with reforming the ways your elections are held. To the rest of the world it seems like a 250 years old system to keep those with money in power. I thought the american revolution was held to get lost of a king and his henchmen?
Liz@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
You’re going to have to get more specific if you want a response beyond “yeah man, it is 250 years old.”
Xande@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
First, there is this pony express solution called the electoral college. Second, a prove of US citizenship should be all you need to vote. No registering, no voter lists… Going to the nearest ballot with your ID should suffice. Third. Of course you also should have a law that demands people register as a habitant of a village, city, township so they are in the respective “voters”-register. Forth. Make Gerrymandering impossible.
Seriously, there are so many countries that have a working system. Take a peek and ise what’s working for others. Don’t be like Germany, where working solutions are getting dismissed in favor of half baked shit some incompetent party friends suggest and that in the end take 5 times more time to work and cost 4 times more (a.k.a. filling those party friends coffers)
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
He’s probably talking about the electoral college, and likely supports abolishing it in favor of a direct election which would mostly just shift the epmhasis away from the largest states that are close to flipping over to emphasizing a handful of the largest cities.
There’s actually a bill that’s made the rounds to several states that makes it so that once enough states (read a number equaling half plus 1 electoral votes) pass a similar law they will all switch over to assigning their electors based on the national popular vote rather than what they’re state does. Unsurprisingly, California and New York jumped on this, as did some smaller solid blue states that are willing to hitch their wagon to “whatever California wants” going forward, but it’s probably never going to actually take effect because if it could get to that point because if it could then we wouldn’t be worrying about the GOP winning another election for the foreseeable future.
Or they aren’t a fan of House apportionment. Or both. Though electoral college apportionment and house apportionment are related, so…
If they’re from the EU, I’d have a question for them: Do you feel like Germany isn’t given remotely enough power by the EU parliament, or that Malta has ridiculously too much to throw around? Because it’s literally the same problem - if you try to represent people with a fixed number of seats apportioned between territories, and you try to minimize the mean difference in voters/representative, and there are a couple of territories that just blow the curve on each end that’s what happens.
Still think merging the Dakotas and creating Montoming (merging Montana and Wyoming) is a good idea… Maybe go whole hog and if your state gets one House seat and is adjacent to a state with one House seat, you get merged to be one state from here on out. Where multiple options present, join the ones with the largest shared land border. Repeat until no examples remain, recalculate House seats and do it again if necessary. It probably won’t help California much just because of how much CA blows the population curve, but it would likely push the states with the worst population/representative ratio up by one. Should probably pull out the math and see.