thoughts on election day (not about candidates)

[cellio]

Voting reforms I would like to see (unlikely as they may be):

1. No "vote straight party" options. The right to vote is important and was hard-won; it is not too much to require that you actually vote for candidates.

2. All voting is write-in. If you can't bother to learn, or write down, some approximation of the names of your chosen candidates, why are you voting for them? All reasonable permutations of spelling accepted (to be determined in advance for each candidate). Nice side bonus: it might reduce negative campaigning, which repeats the opposition candidate's name all over the place...

3. No handing out of campaign literature at the polls. Signs are fine (at distances specified by law), but no hand-outs that subvert #2 and create a waste problem.

The goal of all three: a more-informed electorate. When asked who you voted for you should be able to say something more specific than "the Democrat". It might take a little longer to vote and a little longer to count the results, but isn't it worth it?

And finally:

4. Ranked voting, so that people can vote for perceived dark horses without feeling they've implicitly voted for the greater evil among the front-runners. (You see this all the time -- "I'd like to vote for X, but the bad guy is ahead so I need to vote for the less-bad guy who could actually win instead". So other parties get few votes and the cycle continues.) There are merits to both the Worldcon-style "Australian ballot" (do Australians actually vote that way?), where you keep eliminating the lowest vote-getters until a majority emerges, and point tallies, where top position is worth N points, next on N-1, and so on, and most points wins. Either scheme is better than what we do now.

Now that would be an enpowered electorate!

Comments

[sethg]

(1) I’ve never seen straight-party options on ballots in Boston, Cambridge, or Somerville, MA. I assume these were established in cities with more powerful political machines.

(2) No. This is how elections used to be run. Then cronies of whichever party was in charge of vote-counting would look for any excuse to disqualify written-in votes for the opposition, which led the parties to take out newspaper ads with preprinted ballots... and then finally reformers came up with the brilliant idea of preprinting everyone’s name on the ballot itself. A democratic election should simply take the measure of the peoples’ will, not make them jump through hoops to prove their worthiness to vote.

(2a) On the other hand, the blogger Matthew Yglesias has long argued that American elections simply have too many positions on the ballot: it would be better to have the few offices that everyone actually pays attention to be elected and have the rest be appointed.

(3) In Massachusetts, people handing out literature have to stay a certain distance away from the polling place. Is that not the rule in Pennsylvania?

(4) For multi-member constituencies, the technical term is single transferable vote, and it is indeed used in some Australian states, as well as in the People’s Republic of Cambridge. For single-member consistencies, the equivalent of STV is instant-runoff. I love these systems but I despair of them catching on in this nerd-hating country.

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that we are about to institute instant runoff voting in Mayoral elections here in Portland. We voted about it today, actually. We'll see how it works on a small scale.

The Maine Gov's race had five candidates - a Dem, a Tea Party R, and three independents (one Green, two true unenrolled). IRV would have been handy here, let me tell you, as we're all frantically trying to figure out how to strategically vote to keep the tea party guy out.

[cellio]

(1) I’ve never seen straight-party options on ballots in Boston, Cambridge, or Somerville, MA. I assume these were established in cities with more powerful political machines.

Wow. I have never not seen this. I have also never seen a paper ballot, except absentee.

(2a) On the other hand, the blogger Matthew Yglesias has long argued that American elections simply have too many positions on the ballot: it would be better to have the few offices that everyone actually pays attention to be elected and have the rest be appointed.

I agree with him, though maybe for a different reason. Yes, there's too much stuff to wade through sometimes (not today for me -- only four races), but more to the point, some of the stuff we vote for is either stupid (registrar of wills? really?) or ought to involve expertise and a perspective that we the people don't have (judges).

(3) In Massachusetts, people handing out literature have to stay a certain distance away from the polling place. Is that not the rule in Pennsylvania?

Yes, but it's measured from the room where the voting machines are. For me, the walkway from the street to the polls is longer than the mandated distance.

Today, for the first time in my experience, there was nobody handing out literature. (There were signs.) I was surprised at how refreshing that was; in past years the pamphlets ended up on the street or in the trash, but not in recycling bins (which were not placed in clear view).

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

I don't ever recall seeing straight-party options on a CA ballot either. I was actually shocked to see it when I voted in PA.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

Single transferable vote seems to be gradually catching on. Slowly, but I haven't been seeing it get reversed once it manages to get in place. Nobody really likes the gameplay that naturally attaches to just using the largest plurality, especially if you see a lot of races with more than two or three realistic candidates. (Or at least nobody is willing to admit to liking the gameplay in front of voters.) The fact that STV can (usually) be accurately described as Instant Runoff, and people understand and trust a runoff to have a "fair" result, makes it one of the easier alternatives to push through. Really, the biggest challenge is usually trying to explain why Borda Counts are not just a different way of getting the same thing.