Idea Capitalism

Have you ever noticed that people think capitalism and the free market are the solution to everything?  Health care, education, energy - all solved by unregulated competition.  While I don't believe that the free market is the solution to all of society's problems, it does work very well for ideas.

Think about times you have been faced with a problem.   Do you stop at two ideas for a solution?  Of course not.  You brainstorm as many ideas as you can.  Then you ask for more ideas from other people.  After all, the more ideas, the better chance at finding the best solution. 

Successful companies don't have board meetings where the CEO looks at everybody and says, "I want two ideas and then not another word."  The more ideas, the more competition for the best idea.  More competition, the better the solution.  Idea Capitalism - the best idea survives, the rest are discarded.

Except in our politics.  In our politics, we relegate ourselves to two ideas.  Consequently, we end up with bad ideas, or at least not the best one.  It's why the system is broken.

With ranked choice voting, we get more candidates.  More candidates, more ideas, more competition, better solutions.  Idea capitalism.

The two parties are terrible

Is there anything worse than the two political parties?  Far left vs. far right.  One extreme stance countered by another extreme stance?  Why is it like this?  Where are the normal people that drift to the middle?  You know, like most of the people in this country.  How many times have you asked: where are the people like me?

One thing is for sure - people like you aren't running for office.  And many of them aren't even voting.  

Why?  Because to run you have to swear your allegiance to one of the two political parties.  And then you have to make it through one of their primaries.  And who votes in primaries?  Only the hardest of hard core voters, and usually the most extreme in terms of political views.  But if a candidate chooses not to sign on with one party or the other, they are sunk. 

And here's the funny part, everybody has to pay for primaries.  Despite the fact that the two parties have billions of dollars and despite the fact that a small fraction of voters vote in primaries, we the taxpayers have to pay for this foolishness, and the inevitable runoffs.  What a racket.  How much do primaries cost taxpayers?  A ton.

http://www.openprimaries.org/taxpayer_costs_of_closed_primaries

Ranked choice voting ends all of this primary nonsense and, with any luck, political parties too.  One election.  No primaries.  No runoffs.  Put all the candidates on the ballot and let the voters vote.

And maybe some normal people will run for office if they don't have to pick one terrible side over the other.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Why the current system is a failure

So what is the problem we are trying to solve with ranked choice voting?  It's called Duverger's Law, but more on that in a minute.

I am assuming that if you are reading this blog, you think there may be a problem with our current political system.  Most people seem to complain that there is no one good to vote for on the ballot.  

It's just the same old far right vs. far left, they're both terrible, third parties can't win, my person lost in the primary, everybody is a crook, I'd vote if there was someone worth voting for, politicians suck, bowl of creamy awfulness.  And you're right.  These people we are stuck voting for, with rare exception, are terrible.  

And the way we vote just promotes the terribleness.  So how does ranked choice voting solve it and why is the current method so terrible?

Unfortunately, I can only explain complicated topics with sports metaphors.  If I can't make a sports analogy, I'm lost.  It's some kind of brain malfunction.  So here is why the way we vote is so awful.

Imagine your favorite college football team and imagine they are terrible.  Now imagine they have been terrible for years - like haven't won a game in ten years terrible.  So how do they fix it?

Well first all of the college uppity ups come together to talk about it and throw out ideas.  Fire the head coach.  Build better facilities.  Fire the assistant coaches.  Move to a lesser league and play lesser competition.  And then somebody suggests ending the program altogether.  

Realizing they can only do one of these, the uppity ups decide to put it to a vote.  Twenty uppity ups cast their ballots.

Fire the head coach - 4

Build better facilities - 5

Fire the assistant coaches - 2

Move to a lesser league - 3

End the program - 6

And well, I guess your favorite team will never play another game.  That's depressing.  

"But wait," one of the uppity ups says, "Fourteen of us still want to field a team.  Why do the six that want to end the program get to out-vote us?"

Good question, but that's how it works.  Under our current system, the minority can outvote the majority.  Want proof?

The 1992 presidential election was a three-person race - Clinton, Bush, and Perot.   While Clinton prevailed in the electoral college, he struggled in certain states.  (For an electoral college discussion, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States))  He even struggled in states he won.  

In 1992, the State of Nevada elected Clinton, but it was close:

Clinton    37.36%

Bush       34.73%

Perot       26.19%

Because Clinton received the most votes, Nevada's four electoral votes went to Clinton.  Pretty crazy when you think about it.  The State voted 62.64% against Clinton, but he won.  Does that seem right?

Of course not.  

The problem is the rule - "most votes wins."  Unless a ballot only consists of two candidates, "most votes wins" will usually lead to the odd result of a winner whom more than half of the electorate voted against. The idea behind elections is for the people to speak and majority rule.  How can majority rule when the candidate that wins is not the first choice of over half the people?  It doesn't!

The "most votes wins" rule leads us to the reason most of us hate politics - political parties.

https://rcv-sc.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-two-parties-are-terrible.html

Oh, I almost forgot.  Here is some nerdspeak about Duverger's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

How it works

I will go ahead and warn you, this is where opponents will argue that ranked choice voting is too complicated.  Don't listen to them.  If you made it through third grade math, you can understand what I am about to show you.

Let's look at a hypothetical election with six candidates:

Alice

Bob

Charlie

Darla

Ed

Frank

In this hypothetical election, each voter is allowed to rank their top five choices.  199 voters cast ballots.  The votes are counted based on each ballot's first choice.

Alice         34 first place votes

Bob          25 first place votes

Charlie     20 first place votes

Darla        45 first place votes

Ed             18 first place votes

Frank        57 first place votes

Although Frank received the most first place votes, his percentage is just under 29% - hardly a majority.  Because no one has accrued over 50% of the vote, the election continues.

This is where ranked choice voting gets the alternate name of instant runoff.  In a perfect world, where voters had the time to go to the polls multiple times, we would eliminate the last place candidate and hold another election with the remaining five, and then repeat this process until we had a winner.  But we can't expect people to vote that many times.  

With ranked choice voting, we only have to vote one time because every ballot already has their second, third, fourth, and fifth choices built right in.  It becomes an instant runoff.

In our hypothetical, Ed would be eliminated as the last place candidate.  But all of Ed's voters still have a say in the election.  Under ranked choice, all of the ballots which listed Ed as the first choice would then be assigned to the candidate listed second under Ed.

For example, let's say you voted for Ed as your first choice and your ballot looked like this:

1. Ed

2. Charlie

3. Darla

4. Alice

5. Bob

Although your first choice of Ed would be eliminated, your ballot continues to have a say in the election because your vote will now be counted for Charlie.

As it turns out, you are not alone in your Ed-Charlie preference as every Ed-first voter ranked Charlie second.  In round two of our hypothetical election, all of the Ed-first ballots are assigned to Charlie as all of these ballots have Charlie listed second.  Maybe Ed and Charlie were similar candidates with the same ideas about taxes, or some other popular position.

Alice         34 first place votes

Bob          25 first place votes

Charlie     20 first place votes + Ed's 18 ballots

Darla        45 first place votes

Ed             18 first place votes   these votes transfer to Charlie 

Frank        57 first place votes

Now the vote count looks like this:

Alice      34 votes

Bob        25 votes

Charlie   38 votes

Darla      45 votes

Frank      57 votes

Because no candidate has achieved over 50% of the vote, we perform another round of elimination.  This time, Bob is eliminated as the last place candidate.  Bob's supporters are equally split in this election as to their second choice between Alice and Darla.  Transferring Bob's 25 ballots will give us this result:

Alice      34 votes

Bob        25 votes   13 votes transferred to Darla and 12 transferred to Alice 

Charlie   38 votes

Darla      45 votes

Frank      57 votes

After two rounds of elimination, the race looks like this:

Alice        46

Charlie    38

Darla       58

Frank       57

Because no candidate has hit the magic percentage, the runoffs continue.  Next to be eliminated is Charlie.  A few Charlie voters had Frank next, a few more had Alice, but more than half had Darla as their next choice.

Wait, what about your ballot from earlier:

1. Ed

2. Charlie

3. Darla

4. Alice

5. Frank

Originally your ballot was with Ed, but he was eliminated.  Now your second choice of Charlie is about to be eliminated, but your ballot lives on and is transferred to Darla.

Alice        46

Charlie      38   20 votes to Darla, 12 votes to Alice, 6 votes to Frank

Darla       58

Frank       57

And now the election stands like this:

Alice        58

Darla       78

Frank       63

Still no majority winner, so another elimination.  Next is Alice.  Almost all of Alice supporters liked Darla as their next choice, with a handful selecting Frank.  

Alice          58     45 votes to Darla, 13 to Frank

Darla       78

Frank       63

And now the election stands like this:

Darla       123

Frank       76

And we have a winner:  Darla with over 61% of the vote.  Hey, your third choice won.  Just for a second, go back to your hypothetical 2016 ranked presidential ballot and imagine if your third place choice had won.

If you like pictures, here's a video about how ranked choice voting works:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5SLQXNpzsk

Notice our first round leader, Frank, couldn't must muster enough second and third place votes to win the election.  Apparently, most of the voters in this election, like you, weren't very happy with Frank and did not include him in their ballots or ranked him very low.  Darla, on the other hand, appealed to a larger group of people, and benefited from being voters' second and third choice.  The candidate with the broader appeal won - how crazy is that?

"But wait", a skeptic says from the back, "why is this so much better than what we do now?"

Ok, I'll tell you.  https://rcv-sc.blogspot.com/2017/11/why-current-system-is-failure.html

Ranking is intuitive

It's called ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting and it's been around for a while.  Other countries use it.  Cities in the United States use it.  The State of Maine might be using it for all of its state-wide elections.  Even the Academy Awards use it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

So how does it work?  Easily.

Instead of voting for just one person, you rank multiple candidates.  For example, under ranked choice voting, a presidential ballot could look like this:

1.  John Kasich

2.  Michael Bloomberg

3.  Jeb Bush

4.  Gary Johnson

5.  Bernie Sanders

Or some other combination.  

Try it yourself.  Go back to that experimental ballot we discussed earlier and rank five candidates, or just four, or three, or two, whatever.  Put them in order from your favorite to least favorite.  Ok.  That's your ballot.  You just voted under ranked choice voting. How easy was that?  Really easy.

After all, you rank everything else.  Before you go to a restaurant, you rank what you want to eat in case the restaurant is out of your first choice.  You rank sports teams.  You rank movies you want to see.  You can't go five minutes on the internet without a "ten best" list popping up. You rank everything - it's how our brains work.  So why not rank our politicians?

With ranked choice voting, we can.  And it's way better than this archaic voting method we use now.  

How we vote now is like playing football with leather helmets.  It's like playing golf with a wooden shafted clubs.  It's like using a road map instead of GPS.  It's outdated.

With ranked choice voting, we can express our full preference of the candidates rather than just picking one person.  So what do we do with all of these ballots?  We count them.

https://rcv-sc.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-it-works.html

A new way to vote

Change is difficult.  Think about all the times you tried to convince someone to do something they have never done before.  It is pretty much impossible.

Election reform is no different.  Convincing people there is a better way to vote is a monstrous challenge.  What makes election reform even more difficult is that most American voters do not have experience with any other voting method.  This leaves reformers with the task of trying to convince people to do something they have never done before.

Imagine explaining the electric automobile engine to people that have never seen an automobile or electricity.  That is the predicament of election reformers.

Before people will expend the energy to understand election reform, they first must see what election reform looks like.  So, before going to all the trouble of explaining how election reform works, let's see what it looks like.

Imagine walking into the voting booth on November 8, 2016, and seeing a ballot that looked like this:

Donald Trump         Ted Cruz                     John Kasich               Marco Rubio

Ben Carson             Jeb Bush                    Rand Paul                  Chris Christie

Hillary Clinton          Bernie Sanders           Martin O'Malley         Jim Webb

Mike Huckabee       Carly Fiorina               Jim Gilmore                Rick Santorum

Lincoln Chafee        Lawrence Lessig         Jill Stein                     Gary Johnson

Rick Perry               Scott Walker               Bobby Jindal              Lindsay Graham

George Pataki         Michael Bloomberg   

Yeah, that's right.  That's all of them.  And maybe throw in Mark Cuban, The Rock, and Oprah if you want.  It doesn't matter.  Pick your top 100.  They can all appear on one ballot under election reform.

Just think - you might actually find somebody to vote for that you really like; somebody that holds the same political positions as you do.  How novel would that be?  You might actually want to go vote.

So how does this work?  Like this...

https://rcv-sc.blogspot.com/2017/11/ranking-is-intuitive.html