Yes, it was stolen, however they were only able to do that because the margins were close. Had the green voters instead voted for the candidate closest to them that had a chance (Gore), then it would have mattered.

You say 3rd party is irrelevant

No I didn’t. I said the introduction of an irrelevant candidate (meaning one that did not win) should have no effect on the outcome of an election.

I looked up exact numbers from 2020) more right 3rd party doesn’t prove it’s more than the left…. If there are only 2 relevant parties then… right goes to right, left goes to left. Shock

If we look at 2008 the left actually had 1.16x more than the right on 3rd party votes, and still won by 7% (10x the 3rd party votes on the left) where as 2016 the right had 3x the lefts 3rd party votes (2016 was a big third party year at ~3% right vs ~1% left. Who would guess 2 bad candidates leaves a huge 3rd party.) and then in 2020 the right had 4x the lefts third party votes.

As I already explained, that statistic is meaningless, as it doesn’t say anything about how much overlap and therefore vote spoiling is taking place. I’ll demonstrate:

• Voters 0 through 40 like the green party
• Voters 30 through 230 like the democratic party
• Voters 220 through 410 prefer the republican party
• Voters 400 through 510 prefer the libertarian party.

That means green has 40 potential votes, democrat has 200 potential votes, republican has 190 potential votes, and libertarian has 100 potential votes.

There is double the number of 3rd party voters on the right than the left. But it doesn’t matter, because the dems overlap with 10 voters of the green party. And the repubs overlap with 10 voters of the libertarian party. They’ll more or less cancel each other out despite there being way more right wing 3rd party votes.

Unless you have data to show how much overlap there is, this statistic is meaningless.

It should be encouraged.

Not in a FPTP system, because that leads to the spoiler effect.

It’s a fucking democracy.

The United States is a failed democracy by any reasonable measure.

it’s not a thing that happens in reality if it were you’d point to actual data

I already explained why this is a terrible goalpost. But even under this terrible goalpost you’re still not correct.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect

See the section under “Notable unintentional spoilers”

Additionally the 2000 election:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader_2000_presidential_campaign

not randomly generated test cases where the hypothesis works assuming everyone has to vote and is going to vote.

That’s already accounted for. The gray dots are non voters. Including non voters doesn’t actually change the math, because the math is the overlap of circles. It is already only accounting for the subset of people who are voters.

Again, 6x as many third party votes on the right. Spoiler effect ain’t shit to the left.

On its own that statistic is meaningless, as it doesn’t tell you how much overlap there is, and therefore how much spoiling there is. And regardless of which side, the spoiler effect is a symptom of a terrible voting system. The entrance of an irrelevant candidate should not sway the results of an election at all.

Additionally, everything is looking like it will be a very close race, in which case every bit of the spoiler effect matters, even if more of it is on the right, which you haven’t established.

The overlap exists yes but the DNC has not moved left much in 12 years leaving progressives pretty disenfranchised

I don’t like it either. But my point stands, there is an alternative choice.

The problem here is the spoiler effect, the system in which we elect representatives. It is in large part what allows the doupoly to remain uncompetitive.

The spoiler effect is at best a bad hypothesis

No, it’s well understood, and very clearly exists. Here is an example using randomly generated voters ans candidates:

Election report for election "Plurality 2 Candidates"
Total people: 1047

Kruger - 112 votes - WINNER
Sahl - 111 votes

Election report for election "Plurality 3 Candidates"
Total people: 1047

Sahl - 109 votes - WINNER
Kruger - 93 votes
Maikol - 91 votes

The problem is that these are in effect venn diagrams. There will always be overlap, and that’s the problem. That’s what leads to election results being changed by the entrance of an irrelevant candidate (the spoiler effect).

and has never been proven to effect actual votes.

That’s because the spoiler effect most easily happens in races that are already close, because we don’t do much actual real life testing with actual elections because of the uncountable number of variables, and because doing it the python data science way is significantly more meaningful because of the aforementioned number of variables problem.

People voting third party just would not vote if there was no third party option.

If that’s really true, then this whole idea about the democratic party trying to earn the votes of green voters is bunk. Either there is no overlap, in which case it’s bunk. Or there is overlap, in which case we have a spoiler effect.

I’m not seeing any non-voters in these types of threads.

But yeah, non voters are a bigger problem.

A vote for Green Party/PSL/etc. is better than the alternative for those voting third party: not voting at all.

That’s not the only alternative. There is overlap in the spheres of voters of the green party and democratic party.

IF the DNC actually wanted those votes it would court those votes.

The issue is the spoiler effect which is a result of the overlap.

the difference was smaller than the margin in California

That’s arbitrary. The same is probably true of Florida/Texas combined.

The whole point is that the power of a vote is independent of location.

This is exactly the thing I’ve been looking for. It saves everything as a sqlite db, and has csv export options. So you’re not fucked over if you need to switch to something else. It’s compatible for linux/windows.

And the import options seem pretty good too.

Congrats, you’ve made me spend the whole day switching everything over to that lol.

The only real issue is that one of my banks deals with more than one type of currency. So I’ve had to write a custom script to handle that. But all in all, this is a massive upgrade for me. Thank you for this recommendation.

If we don’t test for hurricanes, the problem will go away. Don’t look up.

I am a little disappointed that they didn’t include approval as one of the examples.

But still a fantastic video.

The real issue is low info voters aren’t going to have a nuanced opinion like. It will be 0 or 10.

Yeah. For the reason I think each candidate should be given one page to explain their policy. And that page should be printed out and available to all voters.

For mail in voters it should be included with their ballot.

Far too often I’ve voted in local elections and tried to research the candidate just to find no information on any of them. It’s infuriating trying to make a choice when it’s impossible to know anything.

We are wasting our efforts arguing over the details of a voting system when voting reform isn’t even on the table.

Agreed. But we can dream.

and replace it with the election being won based primarily on turnout in California

No, it would replace it with a majority FPTP country wide system. Californians are a minority of the country. They do not get sole control, nor would they under a popular vote system.

California was larger than their margin nationally.

But not all of that margin comes from California, and not all of Californians vote blue.

Where you live should have no effect on how much of a voice you have in the federal government. Everybody’s vote should be counted, and counted equally, because we’re all made equally. The current system completely fails at that.

I can see that happening, which is why I think approval is the best of them all.

And with that said, so long as not all the votes are given equal scores, their votes would still matter even if they don’t believe in 5 star perfection.

And IIRC, there is nothing actually stopping a STAR system from using a 1 to 10 point scale instead of 5, which would further help with that issue.

Yes and no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

The NPVIC may work to get around the electoral college without amending the constitution. It would still be FPTP which wouldn’t be great. But it would at a minimum be an improvement, because it would do away with swing states, red voters stuck in blue states, and blue voters stuck in red states.

I’d take RCV over nothing, but STAR and approval are significantly better like the other user said.

Some reasons for approval

• Addition is the only math involved. So it is extremely easy to get live results during counting. It makes auditing votes extremely easy.
• It is dead simple to understand, so the least amount of voters will be confused by it.

A longer form explanation of some of the other stuff:

https://dividedwefall.org/star-and-approval-voting/

Not at all, it’s just what I’m personally familiar with.

A dual USB C/USB A drive is always nice.

It makes transferring files from phone to phone or from phone to PC significantly nicer.

Shoutout to LocalSend if a purely software approach is applicable. Fills the same role very nicely, and is free.

I can press any button I like on the console without looking, while knowing what button is.

I will never prefer anything else.