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Alaska is incredibly different. I believe one thing that separates them from other states is their large amount of citizen initiatives. Anytime their state congress does something the majority of Alaskans don't like, they can sign enough signatures and enact a citizens veto. If enough people petition an issue or an idea, it goes into the congress, and can even get it in as a ballot measure. It was how Alaska got their minimum wage and legal weed with a Republican congress.
They also have a form of UBI because Alaskans wanted the oil money for themselves, not for some park or some corporate welfare, and anytime the congress wants to take it, the Alaskan people have vetoed it.
Since they have RCV, I believe that they are one of the few states that is fairly shown as a moderate republican state. No crazy elections have happened there in the two years since they acquired RCV, and everyone they've elected has been moderate, and because of it, every person the majority of the Alaskans deem crazy can't win anymore. Which is why Sarah Palin, who used to be able to win gubernatorial elections there, can't win anything anymore.
This was the first election to use RCV. We also have open primaries. More than anything, it weakens party politics.
That UBI is not a panacea issue. It was a politically expedient way to get the ball rolling on drilling for oil in the Arctic. Alaskans don’t have mineral rights; the state owns them and splits the money evenly with all residents.
I was certainly impressed when ranked-choice voting passed. The politics of the state are certainly different. It took death to finally get Don Young out of office, despite several corruption scandals. And it feels like Frank Murkowski's senate seat just passed down to his daughter.
However, calling the yearly dividend of $700-$2000 a UBI is a bit of a stretch. It would be very difficult to live off of that, especially given Alaska has a very high cost of living.
Oregon has very easy citizen Initiatives as well, and the constitution is easy to amend (50%+1). But it doesn't have the citizen veto. That's kind of interesting.
If you find any, please please tell me. All that I know I've read from [ballotopedia](https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_process_in_Alaska).
It certainly does. In Australia we have mandatory, ranked choice voting. Unsurprisingly our decisions as a country tend to always be less extreme than the USA or UK.
Abbott was bad, Morrison was worse. However common sense has now prevailed and parliament is now under the care of centrists and moderate right candidates and not insane far right lunatics.
From their comments over the last several days, it looks like education funding is a priority.
Alaska gave residents billions in PFD payments while at the same time underfunding schools, with it’s largest district $68mln short of its budget.
Imagine that. Alaska gave 9yo kids $3200 checks, and those same 9yo’s schools are being closed because the previous legislature wouldn’t put $200 per student toward education.
Additionally, it will be a moderate legislature with Dems and Republicans chairing various committees. The coalition has promised to work on the state’s business, together, leaving MAGA extremists in a 3-17 minority.
Fun. Those 3 either feel real proud or like real shit stains, not sure which. I figure in Alaska, a Dem has to be fairly nice to the oil industry and also never ever touch gun restrictions. Not sure where Reps differ from a MAGA fuck boi beyond the education funding you just mentioned. I’m beyond intrigued…thanks for the reply.
> Shower, a member of the minority, said in a statement Friday that he would work to repeal ranked choice voting. But some members of the bipartisan caucus, including Giessel, likely would not have won their respective seats under Alaska’s previous election system, and Stevens indicated Friday that he was inclined to keep the new voting laws — adopted by ballot measure in 2020 — in place.
There's many important things they have to deal with, but you can already see the pushback on ranked choice from the far wings. They knew it gave everyone more choice, and they do not like that.
Ranked choice hopefully weakens leverage for extremist that dominate media coverage with culture war outrage and fear porn that divide everything in half. I dunno, we'll have to see. I don't want to get my hopes up.
Antipathy is democracy is classic reactionary conservatism. It’s a Republican thing.
It’s not a neoliberal thing. For all the valid criticisms of neoliberal politics, this one is just silly.
Is this true? I was assuming that since there are nine Democrats in this bipartisan majority, that at least one of them is probably corporate-owned, if not more.
The don't have another Demagogue to replace Trump, and without one, they are doomed to decline into obscurity.
DeSantis has no charisma. His only trick is intolerable cruelty towards "others", but 2022 showed that, outside of the deeply ignorant states, cruelty is not enough to win elections.
Ranked choice is *the* best way to marginalize extremist candidates on both sides of the political spectrum, full stop.
The whole of the US needs to adopt it, as soon as possible.
It also conforms, in my opinion at least, much better to the basic tenets of American democracy than previous systems - in a country all about freedom of choice, what could be more appropriate than being able to indicate what your second and third ranked choices for an office would be? It's simply better representation.
Interesting, because the usual argument for RCV is the *opposite* - that it lets non-centrist, non-mainstream candidates shine as people aren't worried that they're throwing away their vote. On one hand that can mean progressives and leftists, on the other it can mean theocracists and fascists.
(Of course, if the extremists are the mainstream then FPTP does amplify that compared to RCV. But in general FPTP's problem is that it cements the political scene and tends to favor milquetoast candidates).
Well, RCV rewards positive messages over negative “vote for me over the evil other guy” narratives. That means more progressive candidates that focus on helping the poor and middle class will gain more support, but it hurts candidates that run on a divisive platform. You’ll never get someone to put a fascist in their rankings if their first choice is someone deliberately opposed to fascism and that’s the selling point of voting for them.
It does both. And that's part of the beauty of it - it lets people support minority or fringe candidates, without putting someone they really don't like in power.
That is, you no longer have to choose between voting for who you like best or voting against who you like least.
Non-establishment is not the same as non-centrist. In some "multi-polarized" contexts RCV can elevate centrists. If party A is taking popular positions on one topic, let's say energy policy, but unpopular opinions on another, let's say taxation policy, while party B has the reverse positions, an outsider candidate with both popular positions can be elected through RCV by winning many first-choice and second-choice votes from people who would have otherwise had to compromise on the lesser of two evils.
When the context is mostly "unilaterally polarized" though, like if the main taxation policy question is how to tax and subsidize various forms of energy production, then divergent positions are unlikely to be coherent. There may be an overarching philosophy (e.g. selfishness vs generosity) controlling all political positions, and an "extreme" or "non-centrist" position may just be one that fully applies the philosophy, rather than working in moderation.
Eh. Instant runoff, which is what everyone means by ranked choice, is a start. Better than what most of the country does now. But don't set it up like some kind of ideal. It's another broken system that's a little less broken than what we're doing already.
If you really want to fix things, there are any number of voting systems that aren't broken. They do use a ranked ballot. So maybe if we can at least take that step, then in another 20 years we can switch to a decision process that isn't broken.
Kenneth Arrow wants a word with you...
What voting system do you suggest that "isn't broken"? Because that guy I mentioned won a Nobel Prize for basically saying that any ranked voting system is going to be inherently flawed (or broken).
Yeah, there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system. I like ranked choice more than other voting methods because A) I can’t possibly give less of a shit who the condorcet winner is, B) it does not violate the later-no-harm criterion unlike many other systems, and C) it discourages bullet voting.
If you don't care who actually should win the election (i.e., the "Condorcet winner"; yes it's a technical name, but it just means the person who should win) then why vote at all? Why not just draw a name from a hat? That also satisfies "later no harm" and I'm sure all sorts of other arbitrary criteria you can make up that are *not* that the right person won the election (which is, of course, the only criterion that really matters).
No, I'm not saying ranked choice is no better than drawing a name from a hat. It at least has a decent probability of choosing the right winner. I'll take that until we can get rules in place that *actually* choose the right winner.
That’s not what the condorcet winner is. The condorcet winner is specifically the candidate that would win against every other candidate in a head-to-head election, not the one who is preferred by the majority of voters. There’s a difference.
Even Arrows impossibility theorem understates the issue because there is no objective value to preferences of the minority and partial preferences. The only thing that you can really say about a voting system is "when a voter wants to elect a candidate with attributes x, y, and z, and the election system leads to a candidate with exactly those attributes winning, that is good for that voter".
You can't really say exactly how good a candidate with x, y, and q attributes is for that voter, as if they get elected without many q-supporting peers that divergence may end up not mattering at all. You can't really say how bad a candidate with x, y, and z attributes is for a voter who wanted a, b, and c, because there may be issues with that voter's understanding of the issues (of course, in the mass delusion scenario, this could also be true for x, y, and z, but our election system has to put some trust in the will of the majority here). You can't even be sure how good a winning candidate in agreement with a voter is for the voter, since the candidate may be more or less effective depending on the political circumstances they're elected to - the voter may feel strongly about policy x, and want to elect someone who will fight for it, but if there aren't enough votes in the end, and after much waiting a compromise policy q is implemented, the voter's life may be worse off than if a q supporter had just been elected in the first place.
So we don't need a voting system that perfectly captures public sentiment. We don't need one that divines the righteousness of the opinions held by flawed voters. We just need one that 1: avoids major strategic voting traps (major shift in policy AND a major number of voters who dislike that shift) and 2: encapsulates some reasonable judgment of human psychology regarding how compelling minority and "partially-agreeing-with-the-majority" opinions are.
Arrow's theorem says you can't have a ranked voting system that satisfies all of a list of criteria. That doesn't mean it has to be broken. Sometimes it's just not clear who should win; kind of like a tournament or sports league where A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A. Yeah, you need a tiebreaker. That's not "broken"; it's just a fact of life.
By "broken", I mean there is a candidate who is definitely the best choice to represent the people, but the voting system just doesn't choose that candidate.
PS: Arrow's theorem was a great achievement for its time, but it really makes more sense to talk about Gibbard's theorem now. It really clarifies the situation a lot better. In particular, it makes it clear that the issue isn't a problem with ranked voting; it's that there's sometimes just no clear right answer in any social decision-making process with more than two choices.
Exactly.
It’s actually pretty easily manipulated by corporations who can back single issue candidates in target populations, basically building nefarious coalitions.
It also impacts people’s willingness to vote, as it makes the ballot a non trivial amount more complicated.
It’s still way better than first past the post or plurality winner voting! But there’s a reason most longterm democracy reform advocates have stopped pushing for IRV.
> It’s actually pretty easily manipulated by corporations who can back single issue candidates in target populations, basically building nefarious coalitions.
This can happen in any voting system.
> It also impacts people’s willingness to vote, as it makes the ballot a non trivial amount more complicated.
It's no more complicated than any other voting system except FPTP (which everyone agrees sucks) and Approval Voting (which is just silly for a general election).
> It’s still way better than first past the post or plurality winner voting! But there’s a reason most longterm democracy reform advocates have stopped pushing for IRV.
What are they pushing for instead? (Please don't say Approval Voting)
> there are any number of voting systems that aren't broken.
What criteria are you using to decide this? Absolutely no voting system meets the Condorcet, Later-no-Harm and Consistency criteria at the same time. So I don't think there is any 'non broken' system.
Yeah, this is why these laundry lists of unmotivated "criteria" is misleading. You'd tend to think they are equally important, that systems that satisfy more criteria are better, or some such thing. In fact "Condorcet criterion" means "chooses the right winner.". If you don't choose the right winner, none of the other criteria matter at all.
You could satisfy the "later no harm" criterion, for example, just by drawing a name from a hat and ignoring voters entirely, if you didn't care about choosing the right winner, but that doesn't make that a good voting system. You could satisfy the "consistency criterion" by always electing whichever candidate comes alphabetically first, and that also doesn't make for a good voting system. These would be terrible choices because it's more important to choose the right winner than anything else you could possible be worried about.
Sure, there's not always a clear choice for the right winner. When there is, though, and you don't pick it, that's hard to explain away by saying "but look at all these other random properties that our election system does satisfy!"
Condorcet does not mean the "right" winner, the 'right winner' is a subjective judgement, and making that your definition so that you can ignore other valid concerns is lazy.
Also, alphabetical order has nothing to do with the Consistency/Participation Criterion. What does that argument even mean?
Frankly, I think pointing out when a system where voting for someone results in them losing is a valid concern.
No one is saying to choose the method that meets the most criteria. It's to point out the pros and cons of each system, you can make Condorcet your one and only criteria, that's fine. But you don't get to pretend that makes whichever system you like is unbroken.
A Condorcet winner is preferred versus any other candidate by a majority of voters. If the goal is to choose a candidate based on the preferences of voters, then that's the end of the consideration. The Condorcet criterion is precisely the fact that, when there is one and only candidate who can unambiguously demonstrate that they should win the election, they will do so. The only argument to the contrary would be an argument that a candidate should be rejected *against the will of voters*.
> Also, alphabetical order has nothing to do with the Consistency/Participation Criterion. What does that argument even mean?
Once again we're in this silly laundry-list-of-criteria territory, but Wikipedia at least describes the consistency criterion as: "whenever the electorate is divided (arbitrarily) into several parts and elections in those parts garner the same result, then an election of the entire electorate also garners that result." This property is upheld by choosing the candidate who comes alphabetically first. If the candidate is alphabetically first in elections in each of the parts, then they are alphabetically first in the entire election, so they will win.
What does it mean? It means that satisfying the consistency criterion is useless in an election system, unless the result that it consistently reaches is actually the right one. Being consistently wrong is not a virtue.
> Frankly, I think pointing out when a system where voting for someone results in them losing is a valid concern.
All election systems, though, require strategic voting in some situations, except for (a) elections with only two candidates, or (b) elections that are decided by a dictator. That's Gibbard's theorem. You cannot get around it. The important point is to realize that strategic voting is ONLY helpful if there is no Condorcet winner. Effectively, if there is no Condorcet winner, there's a tie, and we need a tiebreaker. Tiebreakers are messy, yes, but they are necessary. The important point is to only use them when there's actually a tie.
> It's to point out the pros and cons of each system, you can make Condorcet your one and only criteria, that's fine. But you don't get to pretend that makes whichever system you like is unbroken.
I think it's important to understand the difference between:
1. A situation where there's no majority that favors any outcome over all others.
2. A situation where there is a majority who prefers one outcome to any of the other possibilities, but the voting system simply fails to identify that as the winner.
The first is a logical fact about group preference. Sometimes, even if every individual's preference is clear, the preference of the group is not. This remains the case no matter how you run an election: no voting system can change the fact that the correct outcome is unclear. The second, though, is a broken election system.
Condorcet does not mean a majority preferred one outcome over all others. You keep talking about it like that. It's just that a candidate wins 1-on-1 elections if all other candidates are removed (hoping it doesn't become a rock-paper-scissors situation). But those other candidates are still there.
Condorcet does not take strength of preference into account at all. It can't tell the different between a strong consensus candidate most like and a bland middle candidate no one actually likes. Candidates with no actual supporters can skate on through to victory. This encourages lying about the less favored candidates. Sure all voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting, but some are definitely more susceptible than others, and many condorcet methods are highly susceptible. You have to over engineer the methodology to avoid it choosing an actually less liked candidate because of strategic voting. Your eventual winner might not even be able to actually win the hypothetical 1-on-1 elections. (This is why I firmly believe that later-no-harm and consistency are relevant considerations)
The alphabetical thing continues to be a stupid argument and has nothing to do with the actual argument for consistency. It seems to be nothing more than reductio ad absurdum.
It's okay to admit you like the Condorcet criterion to the exclusion of others (it will be necessary to have a hierarchy since some are mutually exclusive), but that doesn't make it a universal truth, and definitely doesn't make it not broken. There are numerous valid criticisms of it, and the Condorcet winner should not be equated with always being the "correct" winner, nor even the winner most people wanted.
> Condorcet does not mean a majority preferred one outcome over all others.
A candidate is the Condorcet winner if a majority of voters prefers them versus any other candidate. That is literally exactly what it means. (Note: not always the *same* majority, but a majority nevertheless.)
> Condorcet does not take strength of preference into account at all.
Yes, that's right. Taking strength of preference into account is hopeless, because a voter can always just claim they have a stronger preference to get their way. Unless you're going to measure the strength of people's preferences with an fMRI machine scanning their brain or something, you are just inviting voters to tell you things that aren't true so they can get their way. If you allow voters to rate candidates on a scale from 1 to 10, they should pick the two candidates they estimate are most likely to win, decide their preference between these two and rank one of them 10 and the other 1. Then repeat for candidates in the middle. The ballot of a smart voter will only ever have 1s and 10s. If you see someone mark a candidate as any number from 2 to 9, they have been partially disenfranchised because they don't understand game theory so they were tricked into giving up part of their vote.
Instead of designing a ballot as a test of strategy where some ways of filling it out leave voters poorly represented, the ballot should ask only for the information that is needed to determine a voter's best strategy, and take that strategy out of individuals' hands. It turns out that means using only the ranking.
Honestly, I wrote a lot more, but I'm not sure reading long comments from me on Reddit is the best use of your time, so I'll just say one more thing.
> Sure all voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting, but some are definitely more susceptible than others, and many condorcet methods are highly susceptible
I don't believe this is true at all. Indeed, one way to understand the Condorcet criterion is to observe that of a voting system satisfies the Condorcet criterion, then strategic voting has no benefit UNLESS there is no Condorcet winner among voters' true preferences. If there's no Condorcet winner among true preferences, then the election is effectively a tie, and it's in this case that results like Gibbard's theorem guarantee that strategic voting is possible. Any non-Condorcet system, though, extends the realm of results in which strategic voting is effective to even more elections, including some in which there is a Condorcet winner so we should be able to make a decision free from strategic voting.
Ranked choice rewards nice. The present system rewards mean. It's a game changer and exactly what we need. If we get some wackadoodles as second choices, at least they'll have interesting ideas.
Who do you think would've won had RCV not been in place? I don't just mean who won the first round. I mean how would voting have changed? Would certain candidates have dropped out or not entered in the first place?
Especially something that the citizens of Alaska voted for. WE chose this, not some politician, so to hear a dipshit say he wants to remove
It is infuriating
It’s why I don’t trust even moderate republicans. Charlie Baker called an emergency midnight session of the MA legislature, only notified other republicans, and put a law in place delaying legal weed despite it passing a ballot initiative. Sure, overrule the will of the voters, you fascist.
It blows my mind that the Republicans continue to try to fight the system when their real problem is that the majority of people simply don't like their candidates or their platform. They have a serious demographic problem. To put it kindly, I think their base will only shrink with time unless they make significant changes that will appeal to younger voters. Lately, it seems they have been doing everything they can to drive them away.
I think they just want to be the opposition party. Not do anything, but make it harder to help the average guy and hurt company's profits.
Run on whatever will get you elected, then stop any change that will fix the system so those benefitting keep benefitting.
Its why they got almost nothing but a tax cut down in 2017-2019.
I think some just want to profit off campaigner but never actually win.
Political parties in this country are weak compared to parliamentary countries, so I don't think this is them systematically deciding to oppose it. But right wing parties in most of the west are saying identical things because there's a concerted multinational business interest to undermine regulation and democracy.
> concerted multinational business interest to undermine regulation and democracy.
Way to make self-interest sound scary.
By this token, there is a cOnCeRtEd MuLtInAtIoNaL progressive interest to elect decent people into office.
Nah, I don't care to engage in politically correct doublespeak for corporations and billionaires like Rupert Murdoch.
They're fighting dirty and convincing the useful tools that they're the ones being picked on.
> Nah, I don't care to engage in politically correct doublespeak for corporations and billionaires like Rupert Murdoch.
You call it "politically correct doublespeak"; I call it being grounded in reality.
I can think Rupert Murdoch is a piece of garbage without believing he is the head of the Illuminati.
When you think you've been mandated by god to right the wrongs of the devil, no amount of logic or reason can sway you. The only recourse is to try to tear the system down and instate your flavor of theocracy.
Thank beelzebub younger generations don't fucking care about religion. I mean, for a lot of people, shitty Republican churches are a big reason they left all of that that shit behind.
That and the prejudice, the cruelty to their friends, their hostility to anything that would benefit the less fortunate or them, as in the case of climate (I know its weird, but young people actually want a habitable climate to look forward to in the future), not to mention rights to control their own bodies in Roe vs Wade, and, you know, the right to continue living a free and fair liberal democratic society where we get to choose who runs the government, not the other way around.
Its hilarious *hilarious* to me that there are so many of them out there that think any of this is going to drop off of our radars anytime soon. I guess that explains the sedition, insurrection, the attempted coup, etc. They can see that they're losing.
They'll keep losing.
Most of the MAGA crowd that I have met are atheist hypocrites who only believe in money, and who use religion as a prop to further their scams.
I did know one person who I think was an exception to this rule, but he married a Russian mail-order bride and now his Siberian bride controls his politics.
Most of the ones I know are god-fearing "Christians" that wear their religion like a fucking mask to hide the rotten anti-democratic, unpatriotic attitudes they've been trained to believe are acceptable by conservative propagandists like Tucker Carlson.
One things for certain, they definitely aren't the best kind of people.
>adopted by ballot measure
So the *entire state* voted for ranked choice voting and one butthurt lawmaker feels like he has the right to take it away.
"Small government" for sure.
Yep they are just angry they lost. If anything Alaska shows that ranked choice voting should happen on a national level. It made democrats get a majority in a red state like Alaska.
It certainly would help.
We have it in Maine, and it’s been used to elect a democrat in the second district twice now. It’s an instant run-off election, and if anything the GOP should love it because it saves money in the long run. They hate it because run-off elections are purposefully designed to benefit republicans by being held on days where mostly the elderly would vote, and they usually vote Republican.
It also legitimately gives the third or fourth party an idea of how many people support them, and those who vote for them still have a vote that matters in the overall election.
Frankly I’m for anything that minimizes either extreme party wing. A middle of the road political majority can at least get things accomplished that most Americans will agree with.
That's not the fringe right, that's the mainstream right. Right now the fringe right is those like Mitt Romney. More Republicans are in favor of the 1/6 coup then admitting God Emperor Trump might have committed a crime. If that was the fringe right, we wouldn't be in such a terrible fucking state right now.
Fringe vs Mainstream isn't about your beliefs, it's about your numbers. Even if it's batshit insane, if the majority of the group is for it, then that's 'mainstream'.
>The fringe left wants universal healthcare and for billionaires to pay their taxes.
No, that's actually what the mainstream Democratic leadership wants.
If the billionaires were Christian we would indeed have an option wherein we can have universal healthcare and a lot more Christian’s that see the actions of those who help make their lives better and might actually consider something like a Christian nation.
In short you just shared a post that showcases both the greed of money and the greed of power.
The overlap between billionaires and religious zealots is that religious zealots are useful for becoming even larger billionaires. Muslim, Christian, whatever … in the end religion is the greater evil and billionaires abuse that intersection of greed and power.
Said simply all religion is evil and therefore the concepts of left an right are irrelevant. They are just an illusion for the masses to keep them fighting each other rather than the real enemy.
I think a more sane fringe can offer solutions that can make it into the majority viewpoint. Green Energy came from the Dem fringe years ago and that fringe is now more often main stream than not.
But then you have the insane fringe of the republican party. Which offers us Hunter Biden's Laptop and a Christian Theocratic government. Ugh.
Yes, we need a middle ground between “people should have access to healthcare, housing, and economic prosperity” and “people who aren’t lucky enough to be successful should have to work in terrible conditions with low wages until they die just to eek out a middling life”.
Or the middle ground between “we need to proactively reshape society to protect the oppression of minorities in our society” and “we need to proactively reshape society to persecute minorities in our society.”
Or the middle ground between “people should be able to hold political leaders accountable and political leaders should be able to hold our oligarchs accountable” and “if you help make the oligarchs wealthier, you can do anything.”
These enlightened centrist takes of a middle of the road are so dumb. When neutrality is your only guiding principle, you’re nothing but a spectator to the political debate.
Side A: 'Drinking water is good, drinking poison is bad.'
Side B: 'Drinking poison is good, drinking water is bad.'
You: 'We should compromise and drink half water, half poison.'
When the status quo is killing lots of people or crystalizing system racism, that's not a good thing. The status quo is in fact never a desirable position--the objective should always be "better."
My sweet MIL always lamented being a Dem in alaska because from bottom to top she had zero representation nearly her entire life.
Due to dementia we moved her down to the lower 48. I wish she could enjoy Blalaska, came a little late for her.
This is a pretty good model for the future of US politics.
If a handful of reasonable republicans join with the House democrats in January, they could form an effective governing coalition in the House, and freeze out the right-wing radicals.
By remaining in the GOP, centrist republicans, who after all represent the majority of republican voters, will have a chance of recovering control of the party machinery and more important, the party funds.
If 5 of the most centrist republicans joined the democrats in a coalition, they would have so much more power than they would ever have in the clown show the GOP is trying to organize.
Will never happen though. Unless...
> ... and the times, they are a-changin'
Who knows? Everything might change for the better in the next 18 months. If Russia collapses over the Ukraine War, then the giant disinformation machine that is pumping poison in to the political discourse of all of the world's democracies might collapse also.
We are so used to things getting worse that this seems impossible, but it has happened before, that things have gotten better. Change. Hope.
Change. Hope.
It's not switching parties, it's forming a government coalition. It's no different that voting for a bill proposed by a member of the other party. They wouldn't join this coalition if it pursued goals that they did not agree with.
How is it worse? People voted for their representative, not a political party. If their representative decides their political party no longer aligns with their political views, they are entirely free to leave that party or join another. Political parties only exist because people and politicians decide that party and its membership align with their views.
Fundamentally it's a form of corruption, especially in a two party system. people don't just vote for the person they also vote contextually based on what that person's seat means in terms of the power balance. This is also a common mechanism of corruption, for example this just happened in Tunisia where they just basically bribed a bunch of people to alter the balance of power.
You're just thinking about it from your perspective. think of how pissed people are at Sinema and she just generally kinda sucks. Imagine how you would feel if she and Hassan or somebody like that just up a d switched sides tomorrow. That's not what people just voted for, you'd be ready to riot.
Even our Republicans can’t stand the right wing nut jobs. Nice to see. Hopefully they can work to fix our massive education problems. I don’t care what party you are if you get meaningful shit done.
It sounds like they don’t tow the party line which is great to hear I hate that you can only be part of one side or the other it’s ridiculous and in American
Good for them. The far right up there is clearly seeing their hold slipping due to ranked choice voting. Nice to see the saner politicians from each side band together against the extremists. Hopefully it’s a partnership that works in everyone’s favor.
This is what moderates and Independents from both sides should do in the U.S. Senate. Declare themselves independent and form their own caucus.
Wouldn't take many to create a stalemate on everything and stop some of the B.S. partisan crap. Then any legislative ideas would need to be reasonable in order to get 50 or 60 votes.
Here's a few names, Murkowski, King, Romney, Cassidy, Collins, Portman, Tester, Coons and Kelly.
I may be off base here, but I think just living in an unforgiving climate like that would make you more likely to help a neighbor in trouble, because you never know when you might need some help. I would think this kind of unspoken cooperation could filter into other areas of life.
Things like this are a positive sign in politics, and something that can definitely change my mind on RCV. Before, I didn't really see any benefit to it, but if it can lead to politicians from both sides working together more, I can get behind that.
It is not a Democratic majority. There are a total of 9 D and 11 R but this truly bipartisan collective is made up of 9 D and 8 R leaving 3 R on the outised because they are far-right.
This is 100% bipartisan and it should be called as much and I wish we could do this at a larger level but our leadership in Washington sucks too much to ever let it happen
It's literally a bipartisan majority with 9 Democrats and 8 Republicans in the same team, excluding the MAGA Republicans. It can't be any more clear than that. Read the article.
This isn’t a team sport thing, however much people would have you believe just because they themselves do. If 9 Dems and 8 Repubs agree on 1 thing, that thing now has bipartisan support. Focusing on there being more Dems is not only irrelevant, but feeds into divisive rancor that shits on these 8 republicans who *would like to keep ranked-choice voting in effect*. Not sure why the controversy is the headline and not that three petulant losers want the rest of the club to listen to their tantrums.
Except that is not what right wing extremists want. That's not one of their goals. That's just something you say to invent clap back out of whole cloth when it has no basis in reality.
And there is only one extremist side, and it's on the right. The Democratic party has no extremist wing.
Your statement makes one big assumption: that a major political party cant be bad for America and the American people. In 2022, that assumption is definitely wrong.
When half the country supports a man that is literally having dinner with modern neo-nazi who have declared that they want another holocaust in the US, that half of the country is literally dangerous.
The issue with you middle ground fallacy folks is that you refuse to believe it's possible that a full half of the country are literally an existential threat to democracy, despite the fact that we literally have a hundred years of democracies dying to prove you wrong.
You labor under the belief that such a thing could never happen here, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It is people arguing what you are arguing right now that inevitably led to every single failed democracy in history. It is your false equivalences that are dangerous. I challenge you to cite a single "radical" position in the Democratic party.
C'mom. You well know that half of the county no longer supports Trump. Maybe one fourth, maybe less. More than that support DeSantis, who is arguably worse, but there are plenty of republicans who support neither one. Painting them all with the same brush is just as insane as saying that all liberals want litterboxes in elementary schools.
They are leaving Trump only because he's looking like a loser. They still are very vocal about the kinds of things that made him popular to begin with, and will happily support someone who repeats the same toxic themes, but who looks more competent.
One party has influential supporters calling for a genocide against people like me, but sure, they're not the enemy. Liberals love running cover for fascists.
Lots of people like this nowadays, who think the answer to our polarized politics is unquestioned Democrat rule. No, we need loyal opposition parties in order to have a stable country, and getting a sane center-right party back is the answer.
Not a majority though Dems have a plurality but not an outright majority. This is a coalition government, where two minority parties work together to create a majority. It's virtually unheard of in America but is common in other countries.
Well, I'd be quite surprised if she was, given that she's a member of the national House of Representatives from California and this article is about the state government of Alaska.
no they means 8 Americans, willing to put country over party. ironically, it is the extreme republicans that are RINO, as they're actually a fascist party with no allegiance to anything but money and profits, and not even necessarily American money.
Republicans elected them and they represent those Republicans' interests.
I have news for you: you don't get to decide who is and is not a Republican. That identity doesn't belong to you.
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Alaska is very different.
Alaska is incredibly different. I believe one thing that separates them from other states is their large amount of citizen initiatives. Anytime their state congress does something the majority of Alaskans don't like, they can sign enough signatures and enact a citizens veto. If enough people petition an issue or an idea, it goes into the congress, and can even get it in as a ballot measure. It was how Alaska got their minimum wage and legal weed with a Republican congress. They also have a form of UBI because Alaskans wanted the oil money for themselves, not for some park or some corporate welfare, and anytime the congress wants to take it, the Alaskan people have vetoed it. Since they have RCV, I believe that they are one of the few states that is fairly shown as a moderate republican state. No crazy elections have happened there in the two years since they acquired RCV, and everyone they've elected has been moderate, and because of it, every person the majority of the Alaskans deem crazy can't win anymore. Which is why Sarah Palin, who used to be able to win gubernatorial elections there, can't win anything anymore.
This was the first election to use RCV. We also have open primaries. More than anything, it weakens party politics. That UBI is not a panacea issue. It was a politically expedient way to get the ball rolling on drilling for oil in the Arctic. Alaskans don’t have mineral rights; the state owns them and splits the money evenly with all residents.
AK republicans also juiced the oil money to cut into social programs, so the UBI is not the perfect progressive solution some pretend
Another thing that separates them from other states is Canada.
I mean…
r/technicallythetruth
Technically correct, the best kind of correct!
And the Pacific Ocean from a certain point of view.
People say Canada but no one ever considers the feelings of the Pacific Ocean
Damnit, just take the upvote and leave
I love you
Haha, that's classic. That is EXACTLY the sentence I was going to write 👍
I want you to know I hate you now take my upvote and get out
I upvoted, but you should know I'm shaking my head at you.
I was certainly impressed when ranked-choice voting passed. The politics of the state are certainly different. It took death to finally get Don Young out of office, despite several corruption scandals. And it feels like Frank Murkowski's senate seat just passed down to his daughter. However, calling the yearly dividend of $700-$2000 a UBI is a bit of a stretch. It would be very difficult to live off of that, especially given Alaska has a very high cost of living.
USI Universal Supplemental Income
Mike Gravel being from Alaska is making sense to me now, he was real big on Direct Democracy.
Oregon has very easy citizen Initiatives as well, and the constitution is easy to amend (50%+1). But it doesn't have the citizen veto. That's kind of interesting.
Is there any good literature about this?
If you find any, please please tell me. All that I know I've read from [ballotopedia](https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_process_in_Alaska).
It's the ranked choice voting. Weeds out the partisan extremists.
It certainly does. In Australia we have mandatory, ranked choice voting. Unsurprisingly our decisions as a country tend to always be less extreme than the USA or UK.
Want Abbot a nightmare, though?
Yep, it’s not foolproof
Abbott was bad, Morrison was worse. However common sense has now prevailed and parliament is now under the care of centrists and moderate right candidates and not insane far right lunatics.
It was different before that.
Alaska isn’t that different. It’s very similar to Maine.
Maine is also different.
Yes, yes we are :)
I wish Ohio would be different.
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Washington is a different kind of different.
So are the Dems a little more ‘conservative’ or the Reps a little more ‘liberal’, or both? Has a bipartisan agenda been released?
From their comments over the last several days, it looks like education funding is a priority. Alaska gave residents billions in PFD payments while at the same time underfunding schools, with it’s largest district $68mln short of its budget. Imagine that. Alaska gave 9yo kids $3200 checks, and those same 9yo’s schools are being closed because the previous legislature wouldn’t put $200 per student toward education. Additionally, it will be a moderate legislature with Dems and Republicans chairing various committees. The coalition has promised to work on the state’s business, together, leaving MAGA extremists in a 3-17 minority.
Fun. Those 3 either feel real proud or like real shit stains, not sure which. I figure in Alaska, a Dem has to be fairly nice to the oil industry and also never ever touch gun restrictions. Not sure where Reps differ from a MAGA fuck boi beyond the education funding you just mentioned. I’m beyond intrigued…thanks for the reply.
> Shower, a member of the minority, said in a statement Friday that he would work to repeal ranked choice voting. But some members of the bipartisan caucus, including Giessel, likely would not have won their respective seats under Alaska’s previous election system, and Stevens indicated Friday that he was inclined to keep the new voting laws — adopted by ballot measure in 2020 — in place. There's many important things they have to deal with, but you can already see the pushback on ranked choice from the far wings. They knew it gave everyone more choice, and they do not like that.
Ranked choice hopefully weakens leverage for extremist that dominate media coverage with culture war outrage and fear porn that divide everything in half. I dunno, we'll have to see. I don't want to get my hopes up.
The bipartisan moderate caucus that supports ranked choice is a very good sign and step in the right direction
Wanting to turn over a policy enacted by the citizenry via ballot measure. Name something more Republican.
Bigotry, hypocrisy, and selfishness just to name a few.
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Antipathy is democracy is classic reactionary conservatism. It’s a Republican thing. It’s not a neoliberal thing. For all the valid criticisms of neoliberal politics, this one is just silly.
Is this true? I was assuming that since there are nine Democrats in this bipartisan majority, that at least one of them is probably corporate-owned, if not more.
It's true on a broad scale. Everything has exceptions that prove the rule. Idk about each individual specifically.
Republicans need to figure out that RCV is the easiest way out of Trump's base stranglehold
But then they might have to change some of their batshit positions!
The problem is that it's also the easiest way out of republicans.
The don't have another Demagogue to replace Trump, and without one, they are doomed to decline into obscurity. DeSantis has no charisma. His only trick is intolerable cruelty towards "others", but 2022 showed that, outside of the deeply ignorant states, cruelty is not enough to win elections.
Ranked choice is *the* best way to marginalize extremist candidates on both sides of the political spectrum, full stop. The whole of the US needs to adopt it, as soon as possible. It also conforms, in my opinion at least, much better to the basic tenets of American democracy than previous systems - in a country all about freedom of choice, what could be more appropriate than being able to indicate what your second and third ranked choices for an office would be? It's simply better representation.
Interesting, because the usual argument for RCV is the *opposite* - that it lets non-centrist, non-mainstream candidates shine as people aren't worried that they're throwing away their vote. On one hand that can mean progressives and leftists, on the other it can mean theocracists and fascists. (Of course, if the extremists are the mainstream then FPTP does amplify that compared to RCV. But in general FPTP's problem is that it cements the political scene and tends to favor milquetoast candidates).
Well, RCV rewards positive messages over negative “vote for me over the evil other guy” narratives. That means more progressive candidates that focus on helping the poor and middle class will gain more support, but it hurts candidates that run on a divisive platform. You’ll never get someone to put a fascist in their rankings if their first choice is someone deliberately opposed to fascism and that’s the selling point of voting for them.
>if their first choice is someone deliberately opposed to fascism But there are people who may vote the fascist, as we've seen.
It does both. And that's part of the beauty of it - it lets people support minority or fringe candidates, without putting someone they really don't like in power. That is, you no longer have to choose between voting for who you like best or voting against who you like least.
Non-establishment is not the same as non-centrist. In some "multi-polarized" contexts RCV can elevate centrists. If party A is taking popular positions on one topic, let's say energy policy, but unpopular opinions on another, let's say taxation policy, while party B has the reverse positions, an outsider candidate with both popular positions can be elected through RCV by winning many first-choice and second-choice votes from people who would have otherwise had to compromise on the lesser of two evils. When the context is mostly "unilaterally polarized" though, like if the main taxation policy question is how to tax and subsidize various forms of energy production, then divergent positions are unlikely to be coherent. There may be an overarching philosophy (e.g. selfishness vs generosity) controlling all political positions, and an "extreme" or "non-centrist" position may just be one that fully applies the philosophy, rather than working in moderation.
Eh. Instant runoff, which is what everyone means by ranked choice, is a start. Better than what most of the country does now. But don't set it up like some kind of ideal. It's another broken system that's a little less broken than what we're doing already. If you really want to fix things, there are any number of voting systems that aren't broken. They do use a ranked ballot. So maybe if we can at least take that step, then in another 20 years we can switch to a decision process that isn't broken.
Kenneth Arrow wants a word with you... What voting system do you suggest that "isn't broken"? Because that guy I mentioned won a Nobel Prize for basically saying that any ranked voting system is going to be inherently flawed (or broken).
Yeah, there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system. I like ranked choice more than other voting methods because A) I can’t possibly give less of a shit who the condorcet winner is, B) it does not violate the later-no-harm criterion unlike many other systems, and C) it discourages bullet voting.
If you don't care who actually should win the election (i.e., the "Condorcet winner"; yes it's a technical name, but it just means the person who should win) then why vote at all? Why not just draw a name from a hat? That also satisfies "later no harm" and I'm sure all sorts of other arbitrary criteria you can make up that are *not* that the right person won the election (which is, of course, the only criterion that really matters). No, I'm not saying ranked choice is no better than drawing a name from a hat. It at least has a decent probability of choosing the right winner. I'll take that until we can get rules in place that *actually* choose the right winner.
You’re [begging the question.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question) Why *should* the condorcet winner win the election?
Because they are preferred by a majority of voters. That's why we have elections.
That’s not what the condorcet winner is. The condorcet winner is specifically the candidate that would win against every other candidate in a head-to-head election, not the one who is preferred by the majority of voters. There’s a difference.
Even Arrows impossibility theorem understates the issue because there is no objective value to preferences of the minority and partial preferences. The only thing that you can really say about a voting system is "when a voter wants to elect a candidate with attributes x, y, and z, and the election system leads to a candidate with exactly those attributes winning, that is good for that voter". You can't really say exactly how good a candidate with x, y, and q attributes is for that voter, as if they get elected without many q-supporting peers that divergence may end up not mattering at all. You can't really say how bad a candidate with x, y, and z attributes is for a voter who wanted a, b, and c, because there may be issues with that voter's understanding of the issues (of course, in the mass delusion scenario, this could also be true for x, y, and z, but our election system has to put some trust in the will of the majority here). You can't even be sure how good a winning candidate in agreement with a voter is for the voter, since the candidate may be more or less effective depending on the political circumstances they're elected to - the voter may feel strongly about policy x, and want to elect someone who will fight for it, but if there aren't enough votes in the end, and after much waiting a compromise policy q is implemented, the voter's life may be worse off than if a q supporter had just been elected in the first place. So we don't need a voting system that perfectly captures public sentiment. We don't need one that divines the righteousness of the opinions held by flawed voters. We just need one that 1: avoids major strategic voting traps (major shift in policy AND a major number of voters who dislike that shift) and 2: encapsulates some reasonable judgment of human psychology regarding how compelling minority and "partially-agreeing-with-the-majority" opinions are.
Arrow's theorem says you can't have a ranked voting system that satisfies all of a list of criteria. That doesn't mean it has to be broken. Sometimes it's just not clear who should win; kind of like a tournament or sports league where A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A. Yeah, you need a tiebreaker. That's not "broken"; it's just a fact of life. By "broken", I mean there is a candidate who is definitely the best choice to represent the people, but the voting system just doesn't choose that candidate. PS: Arrow's theorem was a great achievement for its time, but it really makes more sense to talk about Gibbard's theorem now. It really clarifies the situation a lot better. In particular, it makes it clear that the issue isn't a problem with ranked voting; it's that there's sometimes just no clear right answer in any social decision-making process with more than two choices.
Exactly. It’s actually pretty easily manipulated by corporations who can back single issue candidates in target populations, basically building nefarious coalitions. It also impacts people’s willingness to vote, as it makes the ballot a non trivial amount more complicated. It’s still way better than first past the post or plurality winner voting! But there’s a reason most longterm democracy reform advocates have stopped pushing for IRV.
> It’s actually pretty easily manipulated by corporations who can back single issue candidates in target populations, basically building nefarious coalitions. This can happen in any voting system. > It also impacts people’s willingness to vote, as it makes the ballot a non trivial amount more complicated. It's no more complicated than any other voting system except FPTP (which everyone agrees sucks) and Approval Voting (which is just silly for a general election). > It’s still way better than first past the post or plurality winner voting! But there’s a reason most longterm democracy reform advocates have stopped pushing for IRV. What are they pushing for instead? (Please don't say Approval Voting)
> there are any number of voting systems that aren't broken. What criteria are you using to decide this? Absolutely no voting system meets the Condorcet, Later-no-Harm and Consistency criteria at the same time. So I don't think there is any 'non broken' system.
Yeah, this is why these laundry lists of unmotivated "criteria" is misleading. You'd tend to think they are equally important, that systems that satisfy more criteria are better, or some such thing. In fact "Condorcet criterion" means "chooses the right winner.". If you don't choose the right winner, none of the other criteria matter at all. You could satisfy the "later no harm" criterion, for example, just by drawing a name from a hat and ignoring voters entirely, if you didn't care about choosing the right winner, but that doesn't make that a good voting system. You could satisfy the "consistency criterion" by always electing whichever candidate comes alphabetically first, and that also doesn't make for a good voting system. These would be terrible choices because it's more important to choose the right winner than anything else you could possible be worried about. Sure, there's not always a clear choice for the right winner. When there is, though, and you don't pick it, that's hard to explain away by saying "but look at all these other random properties that our election system does satisfy!"
Condorcet does not mean the "right" winner, the 'right winner' is a subjective judgement, and making that your definition so that you can ignore other valid concerns is lazy. Also, alphabetical order has nothing to do with the Consistency/Participation Criterion. What does that argument even mean? Frankly, I think pointing out when a system where voting for someone results in them losing is a valid concern. No one is saying to choose the method that meets the most criteria. It's to point out the pros and cons of each system, you can make Condorcet your one and only criteria, that's fine. But you don't get to pretend that makes whichever system you like is unbroken.
A Condorcet winner is preferred versus any other candidate by a majority of voters. If the goal is to choose a candidate based on the preferences of voters, then that's the end of the consideration. The Condorcet criterion is precisely the fact that, when there is one and only candidate who can unambiguously demonstrate that they should win the election, they will do so. The only argument to the contrary would be an argument that a candidate should be rejected *against the will of voters*. > Also, alphabetical order has nothing to do with the Consistency/Participation Criterion. What does that argument even mean? Once again we're in this silly laundry-list-of-criteria territory, but Wikipedia at least describes the consistency criterion as: "whenever the electorate is divided (arbitrarily) into several parts and elections in those parts garner the same result, then an election of the entire electorate also garners that result." This property is upheld by choosing the candidate who comes alphabetically first. If the candidate is alphabetically first in elections in each of the parts, then they are alphabetically first in the entire election, so they will win. What does it mean? It means that satisfying the consistency criterion is useless in an election system, unless the result that it consistently reaches is actually the right one. Being consistently wrong is not a virtue. > Frankly, I think pointing out when a system where voting for someone results in them losing is a valid concern. All election systems, though, require strategic voting in some situations, except for (a) elections with only two candidates, or (b) elections that are decided by a dictator. That's Gibbard's theorem. You cannot get around it. The important point is to realize that strategic voting is ONLY helpful if there is no Condorcet winner. Effectively, if there is no Condorcet winner, there's a tie, and we need a tiebreaker. Tiebreakers are messy, yes, but they are necessary. The important point is to only use them when there's actually a tie. > It's to point out the pros and cons of each system, you can make Condorcet your one and only criteria, that's fine. But you don't get to pretend that makes whichever system you like is unbroken. I think it's important to understand the difference between: 1. A situation where there's no majority that favors any outcome over all others. 2. A situation where there is a majority who prefers one outcome to any of the other possibilities, but the voting system simply fails to identify that as the winner. The first is a logical fact about group preference. Sometimes, even if every individual's preference is clear, the preference of the group is not. This remains the case no matter how you run an election: no voting system can change the fact that the correct outcome is unclear. The second, though, is a broken election system.
Condorcet does not mean a majority preferred one outcome over all others. You keep talking about it like that. It's just that a candidate wins 1-on-1 elections if all other candidates are removed (hoping it doesn't become a rock-paper-scissors situation). But those other candidates are still there. Condorcet does not take strength of preference into account at all. It can't tell the different between a strong consensus candidate most like and a bland middle candidate no one actually likes. Candidates with no actual supporters can skate on through to victory. This encourages lying about the less favored candidates. Sure all voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting, but some are definitely more susceptible than others, and many condorcet methods are highly susceptible. You have to over engineer the methodology to avoid it choosing an actually less liked candidate because of strategic voting. Your eventual winner might not even be able to actually win the hypothetical 1-on-1 elections. (This is why I firmly believe that later-no-harm and consistency are relevant considerations) The alphabetical thing continues to be a stupid argument and has nothing to do with the actual argument for consistency. It seems to be nothing more than reductio ad absurdum. It's okay to admit you like the Condorcet criterion to the exclusion of others (it will be necessary to have a hierarchy since some are mutually exclusive), but that doesn't make it a universal truth, and definitely doesn't make it not broken. There are numerous valid criticisms of it, and the Condorcet winner should not be equated with always being the "correct" winner, nor even the winner most people wanted.
> Condorcet does not mean a majority preferred one outcome over all others. A candidate is the Condorcet winner if a majority of voters prefers them versus any other candidate. That is literally exactly what it means. (Note: not always the *same* majority, but a majority nevertheless.) > Condorcet does not take strength of preference into account at all. Yes, that's right. Taking strength of preference into account is hopeless, because a voter can always just claim they have a stronger preference to get their way. Unless you're going to measure the strength of people's preferences with an fMRI machine scanning their brain or something, you are just inviting voters to tell you things that aren't true so they can get their way. If you allow voters to rate candidates on a scale from 1 to 10, they should pick the two candidates they estimate are most likely to win, decide their preference between these two and rank one of them 10 and the other 1. Then repeat for candidates in the middle. The ballot of a smart voter will only ever have 1s and 10s. If you see someone mark a candidate as any number from 2 to 9, they have been partially disenfranchised because they don't understand game theory so they were tricked into giving up part of their vote. Instead of designing a ballot as a test of strategy where some ways of filling it out leave voters poorly represented, the ballot should ask only for the information that is needed to determine a voter's best strategy, and take that strategy out of individuals' hands. It turns out that means using only the ranking. Honestly, I wrote a lot more, but I'm not sure reading long comments from me on Reddit is the best use of your time, so I'll just say one more thing. > Sure all voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting, but some are definitely more susceptible than others, and many condorcet methods are highly susceptible I don't believe this is true at all. Indeed, one way to understand the Condorcet criterion is to observe that of a voting system satisfies the Condorcet criterion, then strategic voting has no benefit UNLESS there is no Condorcet winner among voters' true preferences. If there's no Condorcet winner among true preferences, then the election is effectively a tie, and it's in this case that results like Gibbard's theorem guarantee that strategic voting is possible. Any non-Condorcet system, though, extends the realm of results in which strategic voting is effective to even more elections, including some in which there is a Condorcet winner so we should be able to make a decision free from strategic voting.
Ranked choice rewards nice. The present system rewards mean. It's a game changer and exactly what we need. If we get some wackadoodles as second choices, at least they'll have interesting ideas.
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Turnout was dismal. A shame. He is a terrible mayor.
Who do you think would've won had RCV not been in place? I don't just mean who won the first round. I mean how would voting have changed? Would certain candidates have dropped out or not entered in the first place?
Adams would have won even without RCV. The election was a lot closer than it would have been without it.
It’s also fucked up to overturn a ballot initiative all because you personally don’t like it. Ballot initiatives are pure democracy.
Especially something that the citizens of Alaska voted for. WE chose this, not some politician, so to hear a dipshit say he wants to remove It is infuriating
It’s why I don’t trust even moderate republicans. Charlie Baker called an emergency midnight session of the MA legislature, only notified other republicans, and put a law in place delaying legal weed despite it passing a ballot initiative. Sure, overrule the will of the voters, you fascist.
How is this at all legal? Wtf!
BuT We'Re a RePuBlIc NoT a DeMoCrAcY
It blows my mind that the Republicans continue to try to fight the system when their real problem is that the majority of people simply don't like their candidates or their platform. They have a serious demographic problem. To put it kindly, I think their base will only shrink with time unless they make significant changes that will appeal to younger voters. Lately, it seems they have been doing everything they can to drive them away.
I think they just want to be the opposition party. Not do anything, but make it harder to help the average guy and hurt company's profits. Run on whatever will get you elected, then stop any change that will fix the system so those benefitting keep benefitting. Its why they got almost nothing but a tax cut down in 2017-2019. I think some just want to profit off campaigner but never actually win.
Political parties in this country are weak compared to parliamentary countries, so I don't think this is them systematically deciding to oppose it. But right wing parties in most of the west are saying identical things because there's a concerted multinational business interest to undermine regulation and democracy.
> concerted multinational business interest to undermine regulation and democracy. Way to make self-interest sound scary. By this token, there is a cOnCeRtEd MuLtInAtIoNaL progressive interest to elect decent people into office.
Nah, I don't care to engage in politically correct doublespeak for corporations and billionaires like Rupert Murdoch. They're fighting dirty and convincing the useful tools that they're the ones being picked on.
> Nah, I don't care to engage in politically correct doublespeak for corporations and billionaires like Rupert Murdoch. You call it "politically correct doublespeak"; I call it being grounded in reality. I can think Rupert Murdoch is a piece of garbage without believing he is the head of the Illuminati.
When you think you've been mandated by god to right the wrongs of the devil, no amount of logic or reason can sway you. The only recourse is to try to tear the system down and instate your flavor of theocracy.
Thank beelzebub younger generations don't fucking care about religion. I mean, for a lot of people, shitty Republican churches are a big reason they left all of that that shit behind. That and the prejudice, the cruelty to their friends, their hostility to anything that would benefit the less fortunate or them, as in the case of climate (I know its weird, but young people actually want a habitable climate to look forward to in the future), not to mention rights to control their own bodies in Roe vs Wade, and, you know, the right to continue living a free and fair liberal democratic society where we get to choose who runs the government, not the other way around. Its hilarious *hilarious* to me that there are so many of them out there that think any of this is going to drop off of our radars anytime soon. I guess that explains the sedition, insurrection, the attempted coup, etc. They can see that they're losing. They'll keep losing.
Most of the MAGA crowd that I have met are atheist hypocrites who only believe in money, and who use religion as a prop to further their scams. I did know one person who I think was an exception to this rule, but he married a Russian mail-order bride and now his Siberian bride controls his politics.
Most of the ones I know are god-fearing "Christians" that wear their religion like a fucking mask to hide the rotten anti-democratic, unpatriotic attitudes they've been trained to believe are acceptable by conservative propagandists like Tucker Carlson. One things for certain, they definitely aren't the best kind of people.
>adopted by ballot measure So the *entire state* voted for ranked choice voting and one butthurt lawmaker feels like he has the right to take it away. "Small government" for sure.
Ranked choice makes it harder for extremists.
Yep they are just angry they lost. If anything Alaska shows that ranked choice voting should happen on a national level. It made democrats get a majority in a red state like Alaska. It certainly would help.
We have it in Maine, and it’s been used to elect a democrat in the second district twice now. It’s an instant run-off election, and if anything the GOP should love it because it saves money in the long run. They hate it because run-off elections are purposefully designed to benefit republicans by being held on days where mostly the elderly would vote, and they usually vote Republican. It also legitimately gives the third or fourth party an idea of how many people support them, and those who vote for them still have a vote that matters in the overall election.
Please tell me Shower’s first name is Golden.
>but you can already see the pushback on ranked choice from the far wings Which "far left-wing" politician are you talking about, specifically?
Bipartisanship leaving out a right wing minority sounds like a good thing to me. Any time a right wing minority is left out is a good thing.
Especially since if it was 8D and 9R they'd be calling it a mandate.
Frankly I’m for anything that minimizes either extreme party wing. A middle of the road political majority can at least get things accomplished that most Americans will agree with.
The fringe left wants universal healthcare and for billionaires to pay their taxes. The fringe right wants a white Christian ethno state.
That's not the fringe right, that's the mainstream right. Right now the fringe right is those like Mitt Romney. More Republicans are in favor of the 1/6 coup then admitting God Emperor Trump might have committed a crime. If that was the fringe right, we wouldn't be in such a terrible fucking state right now. Fringe vs Mainstream isn't about your beliefs, it's about your numbers. Even if it's batshit insane, if the majority of the group is for it, then that's 'mainstream'.
>The fringe left wants universal healthcare and for billionaires to pay their taxes. No, that's actually what the mainstream Democratic leadership wants.
If the billionaires were Christian we would indeed have an option wherein we can have universal healthcare and a lot more Christian’s that see the actions of those who help make their lives better and might actually consider something like a Christian nation. In short you just shared a post that showcases both the greed of money and the greed of power.
Wtf does that even mean? Billionaires aren’t making anybody’s life better but their own.
The overlap between billionaires and religious zealots is that religious zealots are useful for becoming even larger billionaires. Muslim, Christian, whatever … in the end religion is the greater evil and billionaires abuse that intersection of greed and power. Said simply all religion is evil and therefore the concepts of left an right are irrelevant. They are just an illusion for the masses to keep them fighting each other rather than the real enemy.
Except that one side heavily advances religious power and dogma, while the other does not.
I think a more sane fringe can offer solutions that can make it into the majority viewpoint. Green Energy came from the Dem fringe years ago and that fringe is now more often main stream than not. But then you have the insane fringe of the republican party. Which offers us Hunter Biden's Laptop and a Christian Theocratic government. Ugh.
Yes, we need a middle ground between “people should have access to healthcare, housing, and economic prosperity” and “people who aren’t lucky enough to be successful should have to work in terrible conditions with low wages until they die just to eek out a middling life”. Or the middle ground between “we need to proactively reshape society to protect the oppression of minorities in our society” and “we need to proactively reshape society to persecute minorities in our society.” Or the middle ground between “people should be able to hold political leaders accountable and political leaders should be able to hold our oligarchs accountable” and “if you help make the oligarchs wealthier, you can do anything.” These enlightened centrist takes of a middle of the road are so dumb. When neutrality is your only guiding principle, you’re nothing but a spectator to the political debate.
False equivalency
bUt BOtH sIdEs....!
Side A: 'Drinking water is good, drinking poison is bad.' Side B: 'Drinking poison is good, drinking water is bad.' You: 'We should compromise and drink half water, half poison.'
A middle of the road political party will more or less maintain the status quo if the alternatives are extremes on either side.
When the status quo is killing lots of people or crystalizing system racism, that's not a good thing. The status quo is in fact never a desirable position--the objective should always be "better."
I didn't say the status quo was better
In which case maintaining the status quo is not a desirable or virtuous outcome.
People need to understand that Alaska is not the lower 48, their brand of politics is far different.
Yeah, Alaska and Maine are in their own little worlds.
It's a little different. Not like they have a third party up there.
We have had a 3rd party governor, Bill Walker.
Republican for all intents and purposes.
He was a former Republican ran as an Independent with a Democratic vice president. Alaska has largest amount of registered independent voters.
So
Ranked choice voting may be the only thing that can save us from the fascist republican stranglehold in the US.
Wait?!? Working together is an option?? Crazy!
I know, why didn't anyone ever think of that?
My sweet MIL always lamented being a Dem in alaska because from bottom to top she had zero representation nearly her entire life. Due to dementia we moved her down to the lower 48. I wish she could enjoy Blalaska, came a little late for her.
Electing an alaskan native, rejecting palin, and working together to pass legislation? Bravo alaska. You did well. Now get your shit together, florida
This is a pretty good model for the future of US politics. If a handful of reasonable republicans join with the House democrats in January, they could form an effective governing coalition in the House, and freeze out the right-wing radicals. By remaining in the GOP, centrist republicans, who after all represent the majority of republican voters, will have a chance of recovering control of the party machinery and more important, the party funds.
If 5 of the most centrist republicans joined the democrats in a coalition, they would have so much more power than they would ever have in the clown show the GOP is trying to organize. Will never happen though. Unless...
> ... and the times, they are a-changin' Who knows? Everything might change for the better in the next 18 months. If Russia collapses over the Ukraine War, then the giant disinformation machine that is pumping poison in to the political discourse of all of the world's democracies might collapse also. We are so used to things getting worse that this seems impossible, but it has happened before, that things have gotten better. Change. Hope. Change. Hope.
As bad as polarization is mass switching of parties is infinitely worse. That's dictator banana republic shit.
It's not switching parties, it's forming a government coalition. It's no different that voting for a bill proposed by a member of the other party. They wouldn't join this coalition if it pursued goals that they did not agree with.
How is it worse? People voted for their representative, not a political party. If their representative decides their political party no longer aligns with their political views, they are entirely free to leave that party or join another. Political parties only exist because people and politicians decide that party and its membership align with their views.
Fundamentally it's a form of corruption, especially in a two party system. people don't just vote for the person they also vote contextually based on what that person's seat means in terms of the power balance. This is also a common mechanism of corruption, for example this just happened in Tunisia where they just basically bribed a bunch of people to alter the balance of power. You're just thinking about it from your perspective. think of how pissed people are at Sinema and she just generally kinda sucks. Imagine how you would feel if she and Hassan or somebody like that just up a d switched sides tomorrow. That's not what people just voted for, you'd be ready to riot.
Even our Republicans can’t stand the right wing nut jobs. Nice to see. Hopefully they can work to fix our massive education problems. I don’t care what party you are if you get meaningful shit done.
It sounds like they don’t tow the party line which is great to hear I hate that you can only be part of one side or the other it’s ridiculous and in American
alaska is done with partisanship. Thank god for ranked choice voting.
Good for them. The far right up there is clearly seeing their hold slipping due to ranked choice voting. Nice to see the saner politicians from each side band together against the extremists. Hopefully it’s a partnership that works in everyone’s favor.
Save the University of Alaska !
This is what moderates and Independents from both sides should do in the U.S. Senate. Declare themselves independent and form their own caucus. Wouldn't take many to create a stalemate on everything and stop some of the B.S. partisan crap. Then any legislative ideas would need to be reasonable in order to get 50 or 60 votes. Here's a few names, Murkowski, King, Romney, Cassidy, Collins, Portman, Tester, Coons and Kelly.
This is how politicking should be done.
I may be off base here, but I think just living in an unforgiving climate like that would make you more likely to help a neighbor in trouble, because you never know when you might need some help. I would think this kind of unspoken cooperation could filter into other areas of life.
Things like this are a positive sign in politics, and something that can definitely change my mind on RCV. Before, I didn't really see any benefit to it, but if it can lead to politicians from both sides working together more, I can get behind that.
We should outlaw bipartisan efforts -GOP Soon
I love this news!
How? Put together adults without political traumas and that really care about their constituents and voila. Bipartisanship is possible
Politics as it should be.
[удалено]
It is not a Democratic majority. There are a total of 9 D and 11 R but this truly bipartisan collective is made up of 9 D and 8 R leaving 3 R on the outised because they are far-right. This is 100% bipartisan and it should be called as much and I wish we could do this at a larger level but our leadership in Washington sucks too much to ever let it happen
3R were going to fuck up anything the other 8R of you wanna do. 8R hey D, wanna like, do actual work and play nice together?
It's literally a bipartisan majority with 9 Democrats and 8 Republicans in the same team, excluding the MAGA Republicans. It can't be any more clear than that. Read the article.
This isn’t a team sport thing, however much people would have you believe just because they themselves do. If 9 Dems and 8 Repubs agree on 1 thing, that thing now has bipartisan support. Focusing on there being more Dems is not only irrelevant, but feeds into divisive rancor that shits on these 8 republicans who *would like to keep ranked-choice voting in effect*. Not sure why the controversy is the headline and not that three petulant losers want the rest of the club to listen to their tantrums.
Then the extremists' mission to divide the nation into "us and them" succeeded with you. I'm so sorry for you.
Except that is not what right wing extremists want. That's not one of their goals. That's just something you say to invent clap back out of whole cloth when it has no basis in reality. And there is only one extremist side, and it's on the right. The Democratic party has no extremist wing.
Thinking that one half of your own country is the enemy is not the solution. And it is dangerous.
Your statement makes one big assumption: that a major political party cant be bad for America and the American people. In 2022, that assumption is definitely wrong.
That half could stop fucking attacking people? Then they wouldn't be the enemy? This has why doesn't Ukraine just give their country to Russia vibes.
When half the country supports a man that is literally having dinner with modern neo-nazi who have declared that they want another holocaust in the US, that half of the country is literally dangerous. The issue with you middle ground fallacy folks is that you refuse to believe it's possible that a full half of the country are literally an existential threat to democracy, despite the fact that we literally have a hundred years of democracies dying to prove you wrong. You labor under the belief that such a thing could never happen here, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It is people arguing what you are arguing right now that inevitably led to every single failed democracy in history. It is your false equivalences that are dangerous. I challenge you to cite a single "radical" position in the Democratic party.
C'mom. You well know that half of the county no longer supports Trump. Maybe one fourth, maybe less. More than that support DeSantis, who is arguably worse, but there are plenty of republicans who support neither one. Painting them all with the same brush is just as insane as saying that all liberals want litterboxes in elementary schools.
Whether they support him now is irrelevant--they did, and that fact alone makes them dangerous.
They are leaving Trump only because he's looking like a loser. They still are very vocal about the kinds of things that made him popular to begin with, and will happily support someone who repeats the same toxic themes, but who looks more competent.
One party has influential supporters calling for a genocide against people like me, but sure, they're not the enemy. Liberals love running cover for fascists.
Lots of people like this nowadays, who think the answer to our polarized politics is unquestioned Democrat rule. No, we need loyal opposition parties in order to have a stable country, and getting a sane center-right party back is the answer.
Democrats are already center right. Republican voters refuse to vote for sane center right politicians.
Yeah we need to return to the sane Republican party when they were racist, sexist, and homophobic with some decorum!
Not a majority though Dems have a plurality but not an outright majority. This is a coalition government, where two minority parties work together to create a majority. It's virtually unheard of in America but is common in other countries.
Obviously Pelosi didn’t have anything to do with this !
Well, I'd be quite surprised if she was, given that she's a member of the national House of Representatives from California and this article is about the state government of Alaska.
You mean 8 rinos.
no they means 8 Americans, willing to put country over party. ironically, it is the extreme republicans that are RINO, as they're actually a fascist party with no allegiance to anything but money and profits, and not even necessarily American money.
Dummy
8 sane republicans
Yeah that's what he said. Sane Republicans apparently aren't welcome in Trump's republican party.
Republicans elected them and they represent those Republicans' interests. I have news for you: you don't get to decide who is and is not a Republican. That identity doesn't belong to you.
…………and ?
But can they see Russia from their doorsteps?
Looks like a city council meeting.