I remember this guy
and he has an interesting point. It just took him 27 years to get around to making it.
Posted: September 29th, 2007 under National Interest.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Karl
Time: 30 September 2007, 9:18 pm
Are you kidding me? The voters in South Florida find it incomprehensible to punch a hole in a ballot form in order to vote for a single candidate as it is. Does anyone really believe they would ever figure out how to successfully rank their votes for multiple candidates?
Comment from Birdy
Time: 2 October 2007, 7:46 pm
Um, are you suggesting those old Jewish ladies didn’t intend to vote for Buchanan? I resent that. As a Buchananite.
As far as the point Anderson makes, I actually think it mitigates the problem you’re speaking of: people have to take the time to rank candidates. A 1 is a 1, a 2 is a 2, etc. It’s not like they could go back after the fact and say “No, teach, that T is an F.”
Comment from Karl
Time: 4 October 2007, 11:53 am
I think we’d all admit that punching a hole in a piece of cardboard next to the name of a candidate is easier than assigning a weighting to multiple candidates. I don’t see how Anderson’s idea mitigates the problem of representation at all. It makes the ballot much more complicated and the outcome of an election less clear. (Who tabulates the weighted rankings of the candidates? Would be a point system? Do you have to rank all the candidates or just those you’d like to see elected? One could imagine a voter in the booth saying, “I’m not going to vote for Hillary at all whether 1st, 4th or 17th place!” and leaving her ranking blank. What do you do with that? Is that now an invalid ballot? Do we presume that unranked candidates are given the lowest ranking? What if more than one candidate for a particular office is unranked? Which gets the lowest ranking and which the second lowest? Who decides?)
The proposal that the Californians are pushing actually would be much simpler and surer than that proposed by Anderson. Simply split the electoral votes of the state by Congressional district and leave the voting procedure the same. Each Congressional District would direct its elector to cast his vote based on the outcome of the voting in that district. Sure, there will still be people who find it confusing to punch a hole in the cardboard next to the name of their favored candidate (I’m looking at you Miami-Dade), but really it’s hard to imagine how that procedure could be made simpler.
Unless, of course, we just let trained party supervisors cast their votes for them.
Pingback from Indiana Political Review » Follow-up to Birdy’s IRV Post
Time: 6 October 2007, 10:40 am
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