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Most Canadians who plan on voting for the Liberal party are more motivated to stop the Conservatives from winning the election rather than endorsing the party’s vision and leader, according to a new poll released on Monday.
Ballot reform, for fuck’s sake.
Approval Voting is where you check every name you like. Most votes wins. It’s genuinely that simple, and there’s no good reason what-so-ever it’s not the global default.
Wow. It’s hard to find a voting system I like less than FPTP, but you’ve found it! This only makes sense over STV if we don’t have computers.
STV only makes sense for multi-winner elections. It fundamentally does not pick the best candidate - just the first who can scrape together sufficient support. A person can be literally everyone’s second choice and still lose.
Approval is a straight improvement over FPTP - there is no good reason, at all, to prefer FPTP. It completely eliminates the way similar candidates cannibalize each other’s votes. It minimizes self-defeating efforts to be “strategic” by ranking no-chance buttheads higher, or only giving your preferred frontrunner half a vote.
If you’re gonna do ranked ballots to pick one candidate then use a Condorcet method.
And this type of disagreement on what sort of system to move to is among the reasons the lukewarm effort Trudeau attempted fizzled out pretty much immediately.
Can there be negative votes? So that not voting matters too
Nope.
What you’re looking for is called Score Voting. Approval is just yes-or-meh. It is the simplest form of Score, and yet, it avoids a lot of self-defeating behaviors, has less reported regret than other systems, and somehow matches Condorcet results pretty reliably.
Ennnh, I feel like ranked choice would be better.
Ranked Choice is an objectively mediocre use of ranked ballots. A candidate can be everyone’s second choice, and they’re guaranteed to lose. They’d be eliminated immediately because RCV only counts top votes. You really want a Condorcet method like Ranked Pairs.
Consider the following election:
45% of people vote Alice > Bill > Charles.
35% of people vote Charles > Bill > Alice.
20% of people vote Bill > Charles > Alice.
FPTP says Alice wins, despite 55% of people preferring anyone else. Obviously terrible. Right?
RCV eliminates Bill and says Charles wins… despite 65% of people preferring Bill.
Condorcet says Alice v. Bill goes to Bill and Bill v. Charles goes to Bill so Bill wins.
As he should.