Comment on Min wage in most states is so sad
BillyClark@piefed.social 22 hours agoThere are also several proposals of random voting that have a lot of good things about them. In one system, you pick a random ballot out of all ballots, and whoever that person voted for wins for all positions.
Or, you can do it per elected position. Take all of the votes for each elected position and pick a random vote.
One advantage of random ballots is that no elected official is safe. A candidate who gets 60% of the vote can lose to a candidate who got 20% of the vote.
Why is this good?
Well, for one thing, it would be much harder to gerrymander. Gerrymandering generally means you have one party win most districts by a tiny amount, and the other party wins very few districts by a large amount. This strategy simply doesn’t work with random ballots.
Another benefit is that politicians would be incentivized to get as many votes as possible, far beyond 50%. Even a politician who gets 90% of the vote would lose 1 in 10 elections. So, politicians would work for everybody’s vote, not just for the slim majority’s vote.
It has other advantages beyond that. Mostly in the realm of the fairness of votes. You vote feels completely fair. It’s just as likely that your vote will decide the winner as anybody else’s vote.
One big disadvantage is that there might be an extremely popular politician, who has 99% of the vote, and who still loses. This can be mitigated a bit by keeping terms short. The politician could come back in a couple of years.
Another disadvantage is that it is very difficult to recount the ballots. You basically just pick another random ballot and all of the winners might change. And related, it’s more difficult to detect cheating after the fact. Like, what if the ballot wasn’t completely random?
Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
Seems like that would cause massive voter dissatisfaction and less people to vote. Not many vote now because they feel like their vote doesn’t count
BillyClark@piefed.social 18 hours ago
Literally exactly the opposite of what you said. I addressed those exact two points in the comment you replied to as being strengths of random ballot.
The most obvious specific benefits of random ballot to the voter are less voter dissatisfaction and feeling more like your vote counts.
Less dissatisfaction because politicians will try to appeal to every voter. They don’t want to leave it up to chance.
More like your vote counts because your vote has an equal chance of choosing the winner as anybody else’s vote. It doesn’t matter how anybody else votes.
If you want to say that the opposite will happen, then you not only need to give specific reasons, but you should also know that there is already a lot of research on these types of elections. That’s why my comment seemed so informed, while yours didn’t.
Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Your comment makes you sound like an ass.
There are many thing wrong with it off the top of my head
Having someone with 90% support lose to some racist nazi seems like a shit system
BillyClark@piefed.social 8 hours ago
You sound like much more of an ass. You obviously first responded without actually reading my comment. Wasting everyone’s time instead of simply reading the comment you were responding to that had that info in it.
And now you can’t even defend your previous points. You have to move the goalposts and bring up new points, half of which, again, I already addressed in that first comment you didn’t read. I’ll address your points and then I am done with you.
I’m done with you but if you try to argue things in the future, how about doing the absolute minimum and at least read what you’re arguing against? Other ideas: Read a tiny bit of a related Wikipedia article. Double check your arguments before submitting them.