In our lifetimes we have seen real improvements in voting systems. Washington has a successful vote by mail system as do other states.
It’s not hard to find examples in living memory of seismic shifts in law, even at a national level. Look at gay rights and weed legalization for example. The status quo would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
Change comes from the bottom. Municipalities across the nation are implementing ranked choice. Get involved locally and prove your ideas work. The rest of us will take notice.
I agree that apathy is a huge part of the problem, but I also think our two party system is a major issue. We need something like ranked choice voting to open things up a bit and allow challengers to at least threaten the mainstream parties. Otherwise sometimes there's just no good choice.
I didn't mean to misunderstand your point, but I think it is not that clearly made in the original post, and now that you've said it clearly, I think it's a little irrelevant to the bigger question of governance and social change.
You're raising legitimate complaints about the brokenness of our voting system, and I agree. I'd like to see other voting systems put into place at local/state levels, with an eye toward implementing them nationally; something like range voting, or one of the other "pick your favorites" voting schemes.
Where I get the biggest sense of frustration in your post, it's the sense that we can't do much with our votes, e.g. when you said "the odds are against any form of profound change" and "I personally find voting to be not worth one's time".
Well, yeah, a vote on its own isn't enough to make the change you want to see. You do have to get involved, if people aren't already organized at getting your ideas out there, to get it to the level of being voted on.
My pot legalization example, I voted on that, but I know people who were involved in the GOTV efforts, the initiative process, the whole nine yards. But the whole years-long campaign culminated in a vote, the final test of "does the public buy our argument?"
Tell them about how it isn't even worth bothering to vote.
The first point I feel like reinforces my point more than disproves it. Both sides clearly see the issues but won't actually reform while they benefit.
Ranked choice also has only been implemented in a few cases and generally by a ballot initiative (getting around the party structures somewhat).
To be fair systems do change but in general they use their power to resist it tooth and nail until change is inevitable and they collapse.
You don't get a lot of chances to change the voting system. Tacoma, WA changed to IRV for a while, but it didn't make any difference in who got elected, then they threw it out a few years later. Good luck getting a better system in place now.
I haven't voted for the winner since 1996. As I don't see my own views or those of the major political parties changing any time soon, my voice is largely ignored in the current system.
And it will likely continue to be ignored until the following happen:
1. Abolish gerrymandering in favor of a strictly algorithmic approach to redistricting that cannot take into account voting data from prior elections or current party affiliations.
2. Abolish first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting, probably using approval voting and some means of apportioning representation that is proportional to approvals.
3. Alter ballot access laws such that no party gets preferential treatment, and the burden is low enough overall that those people wishing to participate in politics are able to do so without quitting their day jobs.
I was not trying to suggest defeatism, just sick of hearing voting in the current system as a reasonable response to anything. Not saying don't vote, just saying stop suggesting it's the way to fix specific problems. Voting probably won't fix most problems.
Absolutely, one of the big systemic changes we need to effect is a switch to ranked choice voting. There are several other significant changes to the US's voting system that would also be needed. Things like a complete elimination of voting machines, and honestly a full switch to vote-by-mail would probably help.
Of course, the voting system in this country isn't even the biggest problem, some how. Things need to change before next election, not in a few election cycles.
Monkeying around with various knobs and switches to make marginal changes with how government is run and how people are represented is not going to change the fact that large swaths of the population have ideas and values that are fundamentally incompatible with other swaths of the population.
People either need to change their beliefs, society needs to be re-structured so these differences cause less problems or one side needs to subjugate the other.
The first option will probably take a couple generations seeing as politics has taken on some societal functions formerly performed by religion. We have no clear path to implementing the second option. Historically we did it by putting power with the states and not the feds but our current ideological divides run along mostly economic class lines and not regional ones. The third option is not one people want but it kind of becomes the default if there's no other path to go down (which is more than a little ironic, considering the topic at hand) and it has a high risk of going very, very poorly.
That said, I can see ranked choice voting being a huge improvement to state and local elections in one party states where you basically can't run as the other party without taking a huge hit right off the bat which disadvantages moderate candidates who want to challenge incumbents.
Real change is not meant to happen in the US system, unless it is pushed forward by the handful of very powerful special interests that hold the reigns, and that is by design.
Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.
I understand and agree with the thoughts behind your argument. My city, Saint Paul, implemented ranked choice voting a couple years ago and I'm thrilled about it. Stay active, not bitter.
But at the end of the day what matters is who gets out to vote. Your state's outcome was decided not by fate, but by people who vote. Count yourself among them.
Yeah, I think a change in how the voting process works, including something like point based voting would do wonders to shake things up. The problem I've seen is that most people have no idea how to begin to contribute to making a change like that happen without getting into politics themselves, and doing that successfully seems to require getting completely entangled in the existing way things are done. Anyone have any suggestions besides donating to various advocacy groups?
Exactly. Or maybe the day before, but the key being an extremely simple solution to a core piece of the problem. Even if apathy were low and engagement was high, it seems like a lot of effort for any given person to know when and where they are up to bat for voting and what they're voting on.
Our current voting system is a conservative wet dream. It's designed so that you're voting against every other party, so you're not trying to advance a platform, but rather trying to prevent the onset of a worse one.
It's not our voting system that needs to be radically changed. It's the extent to which we rely on representatives to hold power for us. It's the 21st century; why don't we have tools to collaboratively write legislation?
I'm co-leading this initiative. It's democracy, not politics: a simple, non-partisan, candidate-neutral change that leads to far more representative[1] winners.
If anyone would like to invest time or money to make this happen, please contact us or donate here: https://SeattleApproves.org/
the end result is that any system electing a leader over many different groups cannot rely on simply majority votes as it tips the power to coastal city areas which tend to be major population centers simply because of commerce.
now where voting like that proposed in the article is a good idea is state and local governments where the effect is not so out sized.
people always want change when they don't get their way and worse when some get their way they ignore the fact that nothing they supposedly supported happens, they are just merely happy they won. oddly or worse there are those just happy the other person lost and could care less who they themselves vote for
How would that be different than what we have now?
I think there are things that would be incremental improvements (like having more members in the House of Representatives) and maybe better districts, but most elections have the candidates crafting a message based at least partly on what they hear from people and pretty high desire to get reelected (so they have to at least appear to follow through on their message).
There's a lot of things I see people proposing that end up boiling down to wishing that others would 'vote better'. That's a tough problem to solve.
In our lifetimes we have seen real improvements in voting systems. Washington has a successful vote by mail system as do other states.
It’s not hard to find examples in living memory of seismic shifts in law, even at a national level. Look at gay rights and weed legalization for example. The status quo would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
Change comes from the bottom. Municipalities across the nation are implementing ranked choice. Get involved locally and prove your ideas work. The rest of us will take notice.
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