No. In America, you can do a "write in" vote whereby you can vote for anyone you want. So the problem is with the voters. If you voted for Obama, then you're partly responsible for this. The problem is people who will only vote for parties that are expensively advertised.
While it is true that you can "write in" anyone you want, the reality of all voting means that the winner is (Generally) going to be the person who is most well known - and like it or not that means campaigning aka advertising.
So in practice, this doesn't get you anywhere.
What we need is a nationwide NOTA (None of the above) vote option, wherein if the NOTA vote gets a plurality, the race must re-occur with different candidates. Like in Brewsers Millions.
This is the best that normal people can understand... unless you trick them in to being smart.
Voters, thanks to mainstream media, understand the concept of 'voting off' or expressing whom they have the most dis-approval for.
Thus get voters to construct a ranking from least to most liked; which you can invert to get the most to least liked. IRV also has poor behavior in the process for selecting whom to remove. My personal solution for that is to remove 'winners' until all that's left is a single candidate; that is the candidate that failed to win any election possible in that round and the one to drop. Re-calculate until there are the target number of candidates left and you have the set of IRV plurality winners (I wasn't even aware of the term plurality until CGPGrey's wonderful series on voting brought up the methods of voting in Robert's Rules of Order).
It's not even true in general that you can write in anyone you want. Many jurisdictions require write-in candidates to register themselves, and write-ins with any other name or text are invalid ballots.
The thing I don't get about approval voting is when do you stop voting for your second choice? It seems like every vote with approval voting is a strategic vote, whereas with IRV you just always vote for your preferred candidates in order.
Yes, favorite betrayal is possible, but it requires a very specific set of circumstances, and the only gaming of the system is people throwing their top vote to the opponent, which is very risky and requires a freakish amount of insight into the race to know if the conditions of a spoiler are even possible.
To me, strategic voting seems much more likely with approval voting than it does with IRV, and it's that strategic voting that is maintaining the two party system. I think the possibility of a possible spoiler effect under IRV is small, and that its chances of actually allowing 3rd party victories are much higher, and thus worth the risk, especially because, to me, approval voting doesn't really remove the spoiler effect, but just delays it.
I like approval voting, but IRV seems like a better solution, overall.
Also, I disagree that approval voting is much easier to understand. IRV isn't significantly more complicated than approval voting, and neither are significantly more complicated the current plurality/FPTP system.
TL;DR - In my opinion, IRV's rewards outweigh its risks and IRV > approval voting > FPTP.
>The thing I don't get about approval voting is when do you stop voting for your second choice?
I actually think splitting parties into which ones you like or dislike is a far more natural process than ranking them. Especially when you start getting more variety.
That said, I tend to prefer Range voting, since it gives people the most flexibility to actually express their relative preferences.
>Yes, favorite betrayal is possible, but it requires a very specific set of circumstances
I don't think they're that uncommon circumstances. But more importantly, even the possibility of a spoiler is enough to make people think twice about putting their actual favourite first. It's nowhere near as bad as FPTP, but there's still some pressure to choose a popular party.
It's strategic voting under first past the post that maintaining the two-party system, not strategic voting in general.
In approval voting you are always best off voting your preference. The only thing you have to decide is your cutoff for how many people you want to approve. From what I've read, people are pretty good at that intuitively.
In particular, IRV satisfies the important "majority criteria," e.g. if the majority of people vote for a candidate, that candidate should win. Approval / range voting fail this criteria. See, again, Arrow's Theorem. http://archive.fairvote.org/monotonicity/.
Approval/Range voting fail the majority criteria in that they allow a candidate who is the second preference of 90% of people to beat a candidate who is the first preference of 51% of people. Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Your link also discusses the later-no-harm criteria for Approval/Range leading to strategic voting, but all the examples I've seen for this seem to talk about giving a marginally preferred candidate an advantage in the absence of any truly disliked candidates. I think in practice, people will be far more interested in keeping disliked candidates out than furthering their marginal preferences.
Meanwhile, IRV suffers from Favourite Betrayal, which is a much more obvious incentive for strategic voting IMO. (Your link about NP-completeness of strategy only talks about STV.)
In a range voting election, you'd have a lot of people who would bullet-vote for a particular candidate (100/100 points for candidate A). Then possibly lots of other people who would have to think about how people may be bullet-voting for those candidates, and then think about how they might distribute their points so as to ensure those candidates don't win.
If I love candidate B and C, kind of like D, and hate candidate A, but all of candidate A's supporters are bullet-voting, how should I vote? It's ridiculous.
It doesn't allow voters to express their preferences without strategic voting -- it's totally baked into the process. The range voting folks have come up with various metrics that say their system is the best, but completely ignore the most obvious reasons why its flawed.
For the record, though, I'd vastly prefer any system over the current plurality elections (including range voting).
>then think about how they might distribute their points
Just to be clear, you're not imagining people have to share their vote between parties are you? Range voting means you can give every party 100 if you want to.
>If I love candidate B and C, kind of like D, and hate candidate A, but all of candidate A's supporters are bullet-voting, how should I vote?
If you really hate A so badly that you think any one of B, C or D would be vastly better, then go ahead and give them all 100. If A not getting in is that important to you then your "strategic" vote is in fact, an accurate representation of your preferences.
In a range voting election, you'd have a lot of people who would bullet-vote for a particular candidate
www.electology.org/bullet-voting
> (100/100 points for candidate A).
Score Voting (aka Range Voting) does not limit the number of votes. That's WHY it's so resistant to tactical voting. If you give Ralph Nader a "perfect 10", you can still help Gore against Bush as strongly as you want. You could even strategize to give Gore a 10 and Bush a 0.
Agreeing with aninhumer, I don't think that the majority criteria is a desirable property of a voting system if it comes at the expense of more desirable properties like monotonicity. Even if nonmonotonicity is not strategically exploitable, accidentally falling into a losing region by gaining votes would be incredibly aggravating.
I would expect approval voting to reduce the polarization of politics and allow moderate candidates who are reasonably liked by everyone to enter political office. Rather than see our laws and policies flip-flop every 4-12 years due to one or the other party taking control, maybe we would actually have politicians focus on the mutual good of society rather than the parties' individual power.
That first link is written by Warren Smith, a Princeton math PhD who's the protagonist of William Poundstone's book Gaming the Vote, and arguably the world's foremost expert on voting systems.
I really like this idea for a few reasons, though I would begin by trying to pass it at state levels.
First, it is simple to implement. Aside from the special election in the case of NOTA getting a plurality, it requires no change to the existing voting system except for the addition of a NOTA option for each position being voted on in an election.
Second, it is very easy to understand. IRV, Approval, other schemes are not that difficult to pick up once you've seen an example, but just about everyone already has experience with None Of The Above selections, and often on ballot-like forms, no less.
Third, it encourages [the segment of non-voters who abstain from voting due to feeling that there is a lack of viable candidates] to make their positions known, resulting in a better understanding of the wishes of the public.
Fourth, due to the other reasons listed above, it is very hard to argue against. What good reasons are there to NOT have this? The only place I can see a strong argument taking hold against the adoption of this measure is that a special election is required if NOTA wins, and that's a non-trivial change to the system.
In order to see this get widely implemented, I would explore the idea of starting out with NOTA being non-binding. I do not know if this is a good idea. If it starts out "toothless" (in the sense that whichever candidate gets the most votes still gets in even if the candidate is outranked by NOTA), will the realization of the public that the plurality does not approve of any candidate provide enough pressure to update it to something more powerful once it's established? Does the risk of that not being the case outweigh the benefits we get from seeing just how little approval there is for the candidates selected for us before the voting starts?
We know that public pressure is one of the best tools that citizens have to rein in their governments. I believe that starting with a narrow wedge--implementing a non-binding NOTA option at state levels--makes it more likely to be adopted in a larger number of states than otherwise. Seeing in hard, official numbers how disappointed the public is with the choices they are continually offered should be enough to enable further action. Of course if there is a strong enough public will for it, the binding law is better to have from the start. It just seems to me that there won't be enough support for something like this until there's more widespread awareness of how abysmal the current situation is.
I agree with this. My strategy as of lately has been to just write "Libertarian" in the write-in box. I realize that it will have little impact as of now. But if enough people do it, news media will start reporting this. Potential liberty minded candidates may then see an opportunity.
The liberty movement is growing as demonstrated by the success of Ron Paul's campaign in 2008 vs 2012. It just takes time.
As far as I know, most jurisdictions require write-in candidates to officially register as such, and will count yours as an invalid ballot. Literally no one will see your "message" except for the one person counting write-in ballots.
