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.'"
Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
Change for the better, no matter who you support. This can only let people have more direct say in their elected officials.
I disapprove of Approval Voting (Score:3, Interesting)
Approval Voting is a poor choice in comparison to the Schulze Method. Please stop advocating for a broken method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_with_other_preferential_single-winner_election_methods [wikipedia.org]
Re:Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, this is a good step forward. However, contrary to the summary, it doesn't eliminate the need for strategic voting. With approval voting you can take the safe route and cast a token vote for a third party and the lesser of two evils. However, if everyone does that then the third party candidates will never win. So at some point you need to decide to only vote for the third party, with the risk that the greater of the two evils may win as a result. You need to gauge the chances of the third party winning when deciding how to vote.
Thus the need for strategic voting is merely deferred until third parties become more successful. This is still good, though, because it shows the real amount of support for third parties, and gives them more opportunity to build momentum in their campaigns over the years. Furthermore, I personally prefer for strategy to be the determining factor in corner cases, rather than the random outcomes that occur with IRV in the same circumstances.
The real problem with our voting system is the fact that there is only a single winner for each area. Suppose that 20% of people in a city support the Greens, %40 Republicans and %40 Democrats. Unless nearly all those greens live in a single voting district, they will never have a plurality in any district, and thus never get a single seat in the city council despite the fact that they should have 2/10 in all fairness. It would be much better to draw the lines such that there are two or three winners for each district. If you did that than even first past the fence voting would be tolerable.
Re:Moderate and libertarian candidates .... so the (Score:5, Interesting)
None of the listed countries are even left of center. The Scandinavian countries are some of the closest to that line, but what really separates them is the gap on the Authoritarian-Libertarian between them and the rest of the pack. If the broad range of European parties is similar to the ones for the 2007 Irish election [politicalcompass.org] there certainly is more choice available, but your governments as a whole tend to be quite similar to the U.S. There are also several far-left groups that get even less media coverage than the Green party. Many states still have candidates that run under the Socialist party and there are a number of different anarchist parties, some of which don't choose to participate in the system. You almost never hear about any of these on the news.
I can see how you might come away with your impression if you watched Fox news, where almost anything is lambasted for being "socialist" regardless of whether it has anything to do with socialism. The other American news networks aren't really any better about promoting third party candidates or policies, possibly due to the vicious circle that only effectively allows for a two-party system. I don't follow European politics so I have no way of knowing how much media coverage some of the smaller parties manage to garner, but I don't expect it's as much as the major parties get. The only reason the Libertarian party has been getting any coverage is because it got lumped in with the Tea Party, to which I think several Libertarians would object.
Re:Awesome if it works (Score:5, Interesting)
With approval voting, all those people could have voted for Anderson and also their second-favorite, which ever that was. Anderson would have gotten the largest number of votes, and would have won.
There are probably lots more cases where this would have been true, but we don't know because the pollsters didn't record the information.
That weird concept of "throwing away your vote" when the person you voted for doesn't win is probably one of the biggest things wrong with our voting system. Being persuaded to vote for someone other than the candidate you prefer is what's really "throwing away your vote". But it seems that most of the American public (and probably most of the rest of humanity) is dumb enough to fall for this propaganda technique.
A Dangerous, Slppery Slope (Score:2, Interesting)
Anytime a Republican (especially when there's more than one of them) proposes a modification to election, you should immediately scrutinize it to death.
Republicans, and often Democrats too, don't do anything that isn't immediately advantageous to them and their own.
If you're going to modify elections, try direct popular vote for once. None of that "Well, your state only gets ___ votes so your vote didn't count" bullshit.
Re:Awesome if it works (Score:5, Interesting)
New Hampshire is already probably the best place to field a 3rd-party candidate. They have the greatest number of state representatives per capita of any state in the US (and, I think, the greatest number overall). It means that you actually can talk to every voter in your district, if you like.
That's probably why these guys [freestateproject.org] want to locate there.
Re:A Dangerous, Slppery Slope (Score:5, Interesting)