Summary
Voters across eight states, including Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, rejected ballot measures for election reforms such as ranked choice voting (RCV) and open primaries, despite a $110 million push from advocates.
The movement, inspired by Alaska’s 2020 adoption of these reforms, failed to gain traction, with critics citing confusion and doubts over RCV’s benefits.
Some reforms succeeded locally, including in Portland, Oregon, but opposition remains strong.
“RCV is too confusing” say anti-RCV politicians deliberately wording RCV ballot measures to be as confusing as possible.
One thing the last few elections have made abundantly clear is just how fuckin dumb most Americans are.
Like … unimaginably so. I cannot fathom the level of ignorance experienced by so many people.
“RCV is too confusing” say people who have no problem filling out sports brackets 🙄
Well, you just came up with a great way to sell it, since we are already basically treating politics like sports. Brackets for president!
I had this exact thought! It’s a simple comparison with a subtle nod to acceptance of the somewhat-more-likely-to-be-conservative blue collar crowd.
The progressives need better messaging on literally everything. I’m only into marketing as a side interest and some of the crap the Democrats put out is infuriatingly bad–especially considering it’s up against the fascist/corporatist propaganda machine.
Ignorance is bliss
But we can only think of entertaining progressive policy once we have RCV in all 50 states!
Missouri got their anti-RCV proposal passed by billing it as an amendment declaring that non-citizens cannot vote. That’s right, they did it by banning something that was already against the law.
Maybe the way forward for election reform is to put it as a footnote in a proposition declaring murder to be bad.
The solution is to frame it in a way such that hateful idiots feel like they’re punishing someone else? That sounds about right.
In Montana it was separated into two confusing proposals. Ignoring the campaigning against it, as someone in support of RCV I had no idea that’s what they were talking about without looking it up.
$100M push?
Peanuts.
Musk invested $145M just to win PA for trump.
Until we have billionaires pumping billions into improving our way of life, things will only get worse.
And billionaires are never going to pump billions into improving our way of life, because they’re all narcissistic sociopathic dragons who care only about continuing to enrich themselves further at the cost of our way of life.
Which means we’re in late stage capitalism. In history, that usually is also the end for the democracy of those governments.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.
Many people are too uninformed to understand why RCV benefits them. Others understand that it’s liable to upset the status quo that they like. Between ignorance and malice, it’s not surprising that RCV is a difficult sell.
I think it is more of a difficult sell because of all the political and financial opposition. Nobody outside the US considers systems with more than two parties complicated. Instead it is pretty straightforward. You vote a party and the party gets seats accordingly to how many people voted for it. It is easier than the whole swing-state electoral college bullshit. But looking at Baseball and Imperial units it seems Americans need things to be needlessly complicated.
Quite so. Same with the uniquely American obsession with acronyms. I swear to god, everything they touch gets one.
Tbf, that’s more online than irl. IMHO
Nah fam, I didn’t know how much of a thing it was until I went to the states. Every time there’s a subject to learn in school or some new policy, it must have an acronym, bonus points if it also features a flow chart guide for dummies.
Acronyms are fun. FUBAR being the best one.
On the financial front, in Alaska the RCV maintainers outspent the repealers 100:1, yet the bill to repeal vote barely failed by some 600 votes - triggering a recount.
In Arizona, the RCV proposition didn’t pass because it was bundled with open primaries. The bill was mainly about requiring open primaries with only a small mention of requiring ranked choice voting at the end. I would bet a lot of people here didn’t even know ranked choice voting was on their ballot.
Disappointing. RCV is how we can try to break free of the two parties.
There’s still a lot of education that needs to be done on these topics, it’s all still pretty niche among the broader public.
Totally agree. In 2000, during the hanging chad debacle, I had a philosophy professor completely shift our class to the philosophy of voting. I found it endlessly fascinating and opened my thinking around voting. Here’s some good info on the topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/.
We should be pushing approval voting instead, the educational barrier is way lower and both RC and approval are a load better than FPTP.
both… are a load better than FPTP.
That’s exactly why we shouldn’t quibble over them too much.
In other words, now is a good time to make the argument you’re making. However, I also saw people making that sort of argument just before the election, after the decisions about what to put on the ballots had already been made, and in that context the argument come across as anti-RCV concern trolling.
This right here is why people get confused. Cause someone always pops up and says “no we should do this whole different method instead” and the waters get muddied.
I’m only saying this because the vote failed everywhere, clearly it’s a strategy problem.
If you ask anyone on the street if they would want more moderates and parties in office, a large majority would agree, so if that’s the goal, the question is, how do we get there. Ranked choice is great, but it’s not optimal in either how the tallying determines a winner, or in convincing people this is better. Approval voting is clearly easier to explain and probably convince people it’s better. So now that the vote has failed, we should reassess our strategy from ranked choice to approval voting.
The RCV proposition in Arizona was terrible.
It allowed lawmakers to change the number of candidates who advance to the Ranked Choice Voting stage every six years, which means they could literally force it down to two candidates anyway.
Even better, if lawmakers can’t agree on the number of advancing candidates by a deadline, the Secretary of State just gets to choose it by themselves with no oversight.
BuT vOtInG tHiRd PaRtY iS a WaStE oF a VoTe!!! /s
Don’t those people not realise that this reform could have helped move the voting system into the direction that no vote is ever wasted?
I don’t think those are the same people saying that. People who know how the math works for third parties also know why it happens and what the solution is.
One thing that should be abundantly clear from this election is that a lot of people are badly misinformed. They have little conception that third parties even exist or if they do, they don’t care.
I think a big, often-overlooked part of the problem with third-parties is that people disregard them not only because they “can’t win” but also because they’re invariably full of deeply-unserious lunatics that nobody wants to vote for anyway.
Think about it: because of first-past-the-post, pretty much every would-be politician who (a) actually grasps how the system works and (b) actually cares about getting into office is going to join either the Democrats or the Republicans. So who’s left to join third parties? The answer is, morons that nobody wants in charge of anything, and idealogues too fanatical to moderate their platform to win support and too stubborn to care that it makes them unelectable.
In other words, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem going on here: people need to want to vote for third-parties in order to care about RCV, and third-parties need RCV to be able to attract politicians that would give them credibility.
Yeah, I’d say that’s right. I’ve looked at the Greens, and Jill Stein in particular, and evaluated their history on their own merits. They’re clowns. Shooting climate policy in the foot by historical opposition to nuclear, and having an internal fight to take homeopathy out of their healthcare policies. If we had ranked choice in my state, I’d still rate Jill Stein higher than a random Republican, but I’d be looking for so many other progressive candidates above her.
Now, I’ve also been looking at the Working Families Party, which isn’t dumb enough to run a spoiler candidate, and they’re quite clear on that. They work with Democrats hoping to get things like fusion voting and ranked choice passed. Meanwhile, run candidates where it makes sense and look for other strategic opportunities.
They really don’t. They’ve been told it will cause problems by the only talking heads they listen to, so they believe it.
In Colorado, it was severely flawed, being a jungle election, then a RCV.
I think we should start pushing approval voting instead of ranked choice. Ranked choice is easy to explain how to vote but a little complex to explain how the vote is tallied and that’s what people find confusing.
Approval voting is straight forward and easy to explain, whoever gets the most approvals wins.
They both are much better than what we have.
Yeah there seemed to be a lot of misinformation coming from both parties against these ballot measures. Neither side of the isle wants to allow these to pass as it undermines their power. Uninformed voters that simply follow party lines were being directed to vote against this on both sides. Go figure…
California has rcv for senators I believe, and Adam schiff used it to advocate for the republican so that he wouldn’t have to run against Katie Porter in the actual race.
No republican will win a senate race in California, so by funding the republican campaign in the primary, he made it so he could lock in his win.
Wevhave jungle primaries, which means ya get the top two in the general. Newsome killed the RCV bill passed by the California Congress.
Ok interesting, seems similar to what Colorado was trying to pass
