We deserve better.

its going to be just like marijuana reform. forcibly, by the citizens county by county, state by state and it will take another 40 years

lol specifically banning RCV is on my states ballot this November, we won’t be able to do county by county in Missouri if it passes and they’ve tacked it onto some anti absentee vote nonsense so it’s probably going to pass
- Bruh they really do hate democracy dont they
- Yo, end that shit. You guys have got Approval Voting in St. Louis and it needs to spread to the rest of the state.
Start by supporting the RCV ballot initiative going on in Oregon this November. Donate and volunteer even if you're not in Oregon. If we're lucky Oregon will approve it and show everyone else both vote by mail AND RCV works perfectly fine.
https://www.oregonrcv.org/
- I normally was recommending RCV, but today someone mentioned STAR which is like RCV 2.0. The RCV works flawlessly with 2 parties, but as the number of candidates grows and they are equally viable then actually the less preferred candidate might win, because people place candidates in different order. This can cause candidates that might otherwise win, be eliminated too early.
  
  STAR essentially works like RCV, but you give candidates "stars" (1 to 5 rating) and you can have multiple candidates ranked on the same level (of you like both equally).
  
  Any idea why STAR might not be good?
We could speed things along by eliminating the Electoral College with the National Popular Vote. As Republicans lose more consecutive terms, they’ll get behind ranked-choice as an avenue for leverage.

How about just not having a winner-takes-all system?

I'm skeptical about complex voting systems, simply because they cause a lot of confusion and some people don't understand what they're voting for.

Here in Germany we get two votes for the Bundestag, it's essentially a split between district vote and federal vote. The system is pretty simple, you get two columns, one with people, one with parties. And many voters still don't understand the implications of it.

My city's council has such a stupid voting system (multiple votes, multiple districts and parties), that it took me and my friends (all having masters degrees or doctorates, one literally being a pol sci teacher) several hours and an absurd chain of local/state websites to finally find a Word(!!) document that somewhat explained the process, and we still don't really know what was happening.

My point is not that 80% of people are too stupid to understand these systems, but too lazy to look for information, and that's fine. Even the stupidest voter should be able to find and understand the system within 5min. If not, information is obscured or the system too complex.
I think something like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting would be much better for the US system.
Ah yes, the method by which the Nazi party began their rise to power
- the method which almost the entire world uses in one way or another?
  
  no it totally make sense that if a candidate wins a state by 50.1% then the votes of the 49.9% should go directly to the winner as well.
  
  the fact that you can lose the popular vote and is win an election is fucking bananas.
  
  winner takes all is extremely undemocratic.
- You are talking as if the Republican party isn't morphing into another fascist party.
- Yeah, it was the voting system that was the problem.
  
  /s

I much prefer Approval Voting, but anything is better than FPTP.

I prefer ranked choice simply because I may “approve” of two candidates in the sense they’d do a good job, but prefer one candidate over the other. Ranked choice allows me to note my preference.

Hard agree anything is better than FPTP
- It'd be quite ironic if they put this to a vote and FPTP wins because because the votes of its opponents are split between Ranked Choice and Approval Voting.
- The problem I run into is that RCV can be nonmonotonic, where increasing a candidate's ranking can cause them to do worse and vice versa. For most elections this doesn't matter because the vast majority are uncompetitive, but it's the tight races where whacky things can happen. Occasionally RCV will fail to elect the Condorcet winner, who (when they exist) is the person who wins every head-to-head matchup.
  
  I would agree that more major expression is better, except we're seeing evidence that even RCV is complicated enough to disenfranchise poor people at a disproportionate rate, something that doesn't happen under FPTP. The voting system needs to be simple enough that that doesn't happen, and we're lucky that Approval Voting happens to be very good at electing the most popular candidate. It's essentially a simultaneous approval rating poll, afterall.
Then we shall institute gladiator battles to settle all disputes. /s

Start with an end to gerrymandering

Gerrymandering will exist no matter what you do, including nonpartisan map committees, because what counts as gerrymandering is an opinion. We gotta just leap-frog that problem and move to multi-member districts.
- B-districting solves this
- What if we just did a standard federal grid system?

Vote progressive and you'll get voting system reform. And, more importantly imo, campaign finance reform.

Also vote in every local election. Even the seemingly insignificant ones like a school board election.
- Also remind all your family and friends multiple times to vote because lots of us don't even realize those elections are happening half the time

Elected nixon, elected bush, elected another bush, elected donald fucking trump, every president in between is just: well at least it's not _______

We deserve better. Do you?

We only get the endless loop of people voting out of fear or against something around these parts.

Anything that gets us out of the two-party system where either of the parties would have to agree to let people leave.

Yes, we do, but we don't always get what we deserve.

The lotion scene would've been a lot more interesting if he captured a guy down there.

Removing the other by choking it to death via atrophy of no longer being able to win is how you get the remaining party to split along conservative/progressive lines. The resulting progressive faction will be more willing to do ranked choice. If we allow the Republican party to continue to exist - or worse, win - it will remove democracy as a whole and then you'll get the opposite of ranked choice.

It's not about supporting the lesser of two evils. Period.

It's about punishing the greatest evil through every means available until it FUCKING DIES.

Progressives after the split: "Cast it into the fire! Destroy it!"

These kinds of reforms would be so much easier to implement under a monarchy or some kind of dictatorial state.

Lets make democracy better.

Have you tried dictators?
- You just need a very very very narrow definition of your "demos".
- Well golly it just takes so darn long to make systemic changes, y’know? No wonder all the Swifties, er, Lefties or whoever are so gol dang mad. It’s hard work.
I think you just gave Nathan Poe an aneurism.
I hope this is sarcastic. Because yes, one-party/dictator states CAN implement changes incredibly fast. It's why China is able to get so much infrastructure and nuclear/renewable energy installed so fast... it's just, yknow, the rest of the problems are uhhhhhhhhhhhh
- Of course. I deliberately didn’t put a /s because it’s ludicrous but it was a fun litmus test
Please go to the hospital, I think you may have suffered brain damage.
Trivially easy in fact, until they became impossible to implement when the dictator didn't step down.
- Well that wouldn’t be very helpful!