New Hampshire Bill Could Lead To Adoption of Approval Voting 416
Okian Warrior writes "The people at FreeKeene report: 'Four Republican state representatives have sponsored a bill that would replace first-past-the-post voting with approval voting for all state offices and presidential primaries. Under this system, voters would select every candidate they approve of (regardless of party), and the candidate with the highest overall vote total wins. This reduces strategic voting, and would often make elections easier for moderate and libertarian candidates. The bill, HB240, will have a public hearing Tuesday, February 1st, with the House Election Law committee.'"
Re:Moderate and libertarian candidates .... so the (Score:1, Informative)
Left?
Well we have a Communist party.
And a Nazi party.
And the Liberal party - all of these are pro-big government and pro-maximum control by a central authority.
Re:I wonder what are housing prices like in NH... (Score:4, Informative)
...then the computer runs through every possible paring...
Because you are taking the time to think this through, I'd like to point you to the well-established research field of voting theory [wikipedia.org].
It's actually quite interesting. There are many criteria an election might hope to satisfy. Provably no voting system can satisfy even a small set of desirable criteria (see Arrow's impossibility theorem). However, in my view (and many others), the methods that consider all pairwise elections seem in some sense to be the fairest according to my own personal aesthetics. These are called Condorcet methods. They are actually even used in practice for some things, some even in the open-source community [wikipedia.org].
Re:I disapprove of Approval Voting (Score:4, Informative)
All voting system are inherently broken due to Arrow's impossibility theorem. Some are just better than others. In this case, though, any preference-based system is light years ahead of FPTP, so getting there first is a big achievement in and of itself; the details can always be ironed out later (or, you know, it might just work well enough as it is).
Re:Moderate and libertarian candidates .... so the (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
I do agree with your scenario as the most likely, that the third party candidates will still be overrun by the "safe" votes for the main two. However, there is still a small bit of hope here.
Imagine 3 candidates, R, D, and O(ther). Now, let's say R and D are neck and neck, but O had a 75% approval rating divided among both parties (I know, it's not likely, but you have to admit that would be a strong candidate). The problem is that his approval is also split fairly evenly between R and D. Under the current system, most people will not "throw away" their vote for fear that O will still not receive enough votes and the opposing party will win. With this system, the R and D population can both throw their safe votes toward their own candidates, and also throw a vote towards O. In this case, O would win, because he has a stronger following, but the people still go to vote for their safe R and D candidates to prevent the ever feared problem of splitting the voting base.
I think a condorcet voting system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method) would actually be better, because it can actually factor in degrees of approval. However, The logistics are more complicated as well as explaining it to the masses, which in some states can't even handle the current "choose one" directions.
Re:Moderate and libertarian candidates .... so the (Score:2, Informative)
1. government directed economy: check
2. centralized identification and tracking policies for citizens: check
3. newspeak style propaganda: check
This admittedly short list could describes and forms the pragmatic and operational basis of both the nazis and soviets (and america, too, more and more unfortunately). really, what is the difference? just about ALL governments claim to be for liberty and justice. very few (if any) actually get there. The grandeur of power damages all but the most wise of leadership. A modern fictional example would be the movie 'gladiator' which I'm sure was based off previous works. It's a classic story that describes the concept that, given sufficent time, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those that should lead are the ones who can truly do it out of duty without getting off on it. These people are vanishingly rare.
It is already a good idea to consider moving to NH (Score:4, Informative)
I would not give up on this too soon either. Last session (before the last election where a large number of pro-freedom reps were elected), NH tossed out a years old arbitrary ban on various kinds of knives. This session, within days of swearing in the new reps, they overturned a ban on firearms in the statehouse.
There is already no income tax, no sales tax, no seatbelt law, no helmet law. $100 per year salary for state reps. No 'offices' or staff for the reps.
There is also a proposed bill going through this year to require the state government to prefer open standards/open source software.
Recommend googling the freestate project.
Re:Awesome if it works (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a propaganda technique, it's an inevitable fact of our voting system. If you vote for your favorite who has little support and, as a result, your least-favorite candidate wins instead of your second-favorite candidate, your "smart" choice has just caused a worse outcome for you than the "dumb" one. Even in cases where a third party candidate is polling well, unless they're polling well evenly across big-two party lines and there's some way for all the voters to know how everyone else is going to vote (not in polls, but when they actually get in the booth) it's still hard to say that voting for the "safe" but less desirable candidate is anything but the best play in a broken game.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. The thing is, this voting is more expressive than FPP. Allow me to use the infamous Gore/Bush/Nader choice to illustrate.
With FPP, assuming you like Nader best, Gore second best, and Bush worst. You can either vote for Nader, or vote for Gore. If you know/assume that Nader will not win, you vote for Gore, but if you assume that Nader could win, you vote for him.
Now suppose you bet Nader could win, and you're wrong. Since you had no way of also expressing your preference for Gore over Bush, your vote is now meaningless, except as information about Nader's level of support.
If on the other hand, you bet Nader couldn't win, and voted for Gore, then even though you bet correctly, there's still a loss -- now the information about third-party support is missing, because you couldn't express that in your vote. (This is one reason third-parties aren't successful -- not only the direct loss of votes due to stategic voting, but the lack of information on real support among real voters means third parties can't build momentum, can't assess their numbers and effectively form a coalition behind a single candidate, etc.)
Range voting or Score voting (two names for the same thing) is the most expressive possible -- you assign a score on a discrete or continuous scale from 0 to 1 (or 0 to 10, 0 to 100, etc. -- same thing in principle) to each candidate, each candidate's total is summed, and the candidate with the highest aggregate score wins. (Or for multi-winner elections, the top n candidates win). You can express your degree of support for each candidate precisely, and the totals will show it. Also, there'll be no races like 1980, when a third-party _should_ have won (i.e. the majority of voters preferred Anderson to both main-party candidates, but couldn't express that preference without risking a win by their least-preferred candidate), though those do seem to be fairly rare. (Of course, since a more expressive system lets third parties know where they stand and form effective coalitions, they'll become more common, and candidates will become less "not-the-other-team" (for main parties) or single-issue (for third parties) and more representative of the people's actual will.)
Approval voting is a simple variant of range voting where the range is discretized all the way to one bit -- a simple yes/no on each candidate. This does cause a loss of expressiveness, but it's still way more expressive than the existing system, and better than most alternative systems. In fact, it's nearly equivalent to range voting in practice, because the best strategy for range voting (yes, basically all voting systems have a strategy better than absolute honesty, and range voting is no exception) is to exaggerate preferences (better than FPP, where the best strategy is usually to lie about preferences between a major party and a minor party) by listing all candidates in order of preference, pick a dividing line based on expectations of how the rest of the voters will vote, and give maximum score to all candidates above and minimum to all voters below. Of course, approval voting forces the scores to the limit for you, by removing all intermediate values, making the best strategy only a matter of where you draw the line in your honestly ordered list.
To answer your specific scenario:
Yeah, if most voters on both sides are willing to choose the same third party over the "other team", and it's as you say "a toss-up between the two big parties" (i.e. no consensus in the populace between them), most sane people with their heads out of their asses would say having that third party win is the best outcome. Now if everyone's choosing all third parties over the other team, then they're drawing their approval line way too low, and failing at strategic voting. They'll probably learn from that, and be a little more circumspect about which third party they support in the next election -- getting a fairer result.
Honestly, your complai