Unfortunately, Sheldon, that is not the other system. I really wished ranked choice voting were an improvement, but it really is just makeup — it looks better, but it isn’t. It is our same system of winner-take-all and Trump would still have won (getting the most second choice votes from the wide field in 2016).
When San Francisco used ranked-choice voting for the first time, Ross Mirkarimi won in District 5. There was no incumbent and about 20 candidates vied for that spot together with him. The voters had a plethora of choices.
Long story short, ranked choice voting had to go through so many iterations of elimination that Ross Mirkarimi ended up winning the seat with about 35 percent of all votes (which was 50+ percent of the remaining votes). That is a minority report, so to speak, his ending up winning the seat. A very sad day for democracy (even though he ran as a Green Party candidate, which made it a good day for democracy; later he ended up becoming a registered Democrat to extend his career, another sad day for democracy).
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This is what ranked-choice voting does well: It turns our elections into instant run-off elections. Nothing more, nothing less.
If the elimination process goes through one, two or three iterations, then we just saved ourselves a lot of money not needing a run-off election. The result of our system is produced instantly. Other than that, it really is the same not very intelligent system that fails when one candidate takes all the oxygen out of the room when there are too many other candidates.
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Here is what happened in Germany after WW II. The Americans and the Germans sat around the table and decided to create a democracy as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. But instead of copying the 18th century model, they took it upon themselves to create a 20th century model.
The beauty is that there is no gerrymandering in the German system. It can get done, for sure, but it has no effect.
They vote in districts with a winner taking the seat, but they look at the overall outcome of all votes, too, and make modifications. So, if the Green Party won ten percent of the seats (but did not win any race), then (in short) ten percent of seats are added, so the House of Representatives ends up having 10 percent of its seats taken in by Green Party representatives.
What is really cool is that folks can vote according to their own ideals. The voter does not need to weigh which two candidates have a reasonable chance to win and pick among these two. That means that the otherwise unelectable Green Party candidate can end up winning a district, because the voters did not automatically eliminate that option.
We are short-changed because we have to eliminate options beforehand. To use the president’s words once more: That is very sad.
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We have to deal with our 18th century system because it is extremely impossible to change the system itself. But as presented in the article, there is a door (or a window if you wish) in our US Constitution. It demands the better system put in place at the local level. A perfect training ground for more professional politicians (I mean professional here as having standards).
The better system simply is proportional voting because A/ all votes translate into the outcome (and not: the majority of votes get the win) and B/ the candidates are aligned with the voters (and not: the candidates are aligned with the special interests with the deepest pockets).
We have a crummy system. We tell ourselves it is the best in the world, but that is exactly what a crummy system would end up saying, right?
What is nice about the local level is that there aren’t 100 seats on a city council. That means there aren’t going to be 15 factions fighting with each other. Most places have a handful or two handfuls of seats on the council. That’s perfect for the pure form of democracy that translates all votes across all seats.
Sheldon, I wish we had a simple solution like ranked-choice voting to improve our system. We desperately need a better system. I feel pained by all the energy wasted to implement ranked-choice voting, with language clearly acknowledging how our current system isn’t good enough, and then nothing for real is changed. I wish we would all stop lying to each other. We don’t even call it lying; we call it spin.
As long as the other believes the spin, the victory goes to the spinner.
Thank you for your reply. I hope you investigate our system (and the other system) more.
In this article, I show why proportional voting is indeed the better system.
For the US, we need to learn from Germany (how proportional voting wasn’t working out well for them, plus how they overcame that problem with our help). Basically, my proposal is to make that local level of government proportional, and see how that works out. If further adjustments are needed, then the State constitutions are the place to establish these improvement (and I am hoping for a system like Germany). The State constitutions can get changed more easily (but nothing is simple of course).
Getting a coalition government is easy in the German system. If there isn’t a deal within a month, then the two largest parties automatically have to form that new government; Merkel is the most recent result of that rule.
Lastly, the Federal level is completely out of reach. But if we have one (or two) governmental levels with the 20th/21st kind of democracy, then this may be all we need. We have to start somewhere to get ourselves out of this medieval system (which was indeed fantastic for its time).
