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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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That is the current situation. Presidential candidates only ever visit the biggest cities in swing states.
They already do. No candidate visits any state other than a stronghold state for funding, or a swing state. That's it. The rest of the states get ignored.
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/map-general-election-campaign-events-and-tv-ad-spending-2020-presidential-candidates
I live in Pennsylvannia. My state recieves the most attention, and every single election at least one of the candidates shows up at my town. Do you know where they don't visit? They don't visit any of the small cities in PA, let alone some place in the surrounding states. If the reason to keep the electoral college around is to prevent un-even focus from candidates, then the electoral college spectacularly fails at this goal. If instead all votes were equally regardless of location, candidates would far more often visit the cities in other states.
It's unavoidable that they'll stick to higher population regions, because that's always going to be the most effective strategy no matter the system. Since that's unavoidable, we may as well have a system that is fair.
I don't think so. The people who hate the electoral college are pretty consistent in my experience.
And for the record, I don't think we should be doing a FPTP system even if we moved away from the electoral college due to the numerous problems with FPTP. Either STAR or approval voting would be far better.
I don't doubt any of this is true. But if anything, I think it just supports my point that under our current system, candidates do not pay attention to anything other than a select few cities. So the pro electoral college argument over candidates focusing on select few cities is a moot point.
They're all better than FPTP, but ranked choice voting in a way suffers from the same sort of issues as FPTP. The spoiler effect of FPTP is still present, not nearly as bad, but still present. Because at the end of the day, ranked choice voting is basically FPTP over several rounds. If FPTP is bad, then repeating it several times isn't good.
The other thing is that ranked choice isn't as secure as STAR or approval, which are purely additive, whereas ranked choice is not. Pure addition makes it much easier to audit results, which is incredibly important. Additive results also allow us to see the results being collected in real time so to speak, which goes a long way towards trust in the system. Ranked choice just doesn't have that ability.
The other problem with ranked choice is that it doesn't really give somebody a quantitative say in how much they like/dislike candidates. I might prefer a candidate order of B, C, then E. But if I absolutely revile E, don't care either way about C, and am in love with B, the vote won't really show that. Approval has this problem as well, but it is a minor gripe to be honest.
Either way, all 3 of these will help deal with the 2 party situation. But if we have a choice, STAR is the best in my opinion.
Not far from where I'm at. The auditing of approval being easier means that I think it should be at #2, but that's a minor gripe.
We can agree that the current system is the worst option, which is enough for me.