cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21917446
Ballot in question:
Mayor:
District 1:
Jesus Christ people are fucking stupid... How hard is this to understand??
Rhetorical question of course. The country is very stupid. Just today my coworker said "see Trump is our next president and the taxes already went down!" (he was referring to the interest rate decrease from the federal reserve...)
I have no idea what party these people belong to. It's not listed on the sheet. Their policy positions aren't shown. Their endorsements aren't shown. Nobody knows who the fuck any of these people are.
What you need Ranked Choice Voting for is Congress and the Presidency. Local elections also need to be partisan. Otherwise how the fuck do you know where any of the candidates even generally stand on the issues?
Local candidates usually have websites, do interviews with local papers, and are suuuper excited to talk to potential voters, so people could look at any of that?
The city or county will probably have a thing called a website where you can read about all of those things for each candidate.
Yeah, researching candidates is great and all, but like they didn't exactly set themselves up for success with this ballot design.
It kinda sucks ass. :/
It's less understanding/stupidity and more an issue with laziness/desire. I have no doubt that 99% of people who actually did vote selected their first rank choice and say eff it to the rest of the rankings. Too much effort and time to complete.
I think I'd still file that under stupid.
I really hope mail ballots become the norm. It was absolutely wonderful to be able to take the time to look people/propositions I didn't know up while I had the ballot there. That won't help with laziness though. Can't help lazy. :/
Just a note on mail ballots. Some can often abuse it by coercing their spouses to vote a particular way.
It's not super hard to understand the concept, but the visual display of this implementation is objectively horrifying. No line or column delineation, just a grid of bubbles. I literally look at Excel sheets for a living and this makes my head hurt trying to keep track of what bubble is going where, I don't blame voters for giving up on it.
Yeah that’s odd. How could it be better though and still be paper? Limit you to two votes?
In Australia, which has Ranked Choice Voting, you number the candidates from 1 to the max candidates. For Senate races, you can vote for the party, letting the party decide the down ballot representatives. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work
I believe in this process, the ballots are human counted, but the country has less than the population of California, so it probably doesn't take too long. Scaling it up for the backwards US system would be harder, but not impossible to improve.
It would be better to just give the voter a set of 6 lines, top to bottom, with rank 1 at top and rank 6 at bottom. That is the easiest to visualize and understand, and that's also how almost all of the campaign information about RCV has shown it... Then have some way to identify each candidate to put on each line that's not just hand writing the name. That I'm not 100% sure how to do. My engineer solution says create a lookup table with letters or numbers next to each candidate, but that could easily get confused with the rank in which to put them.
Here's an engineer's solution: raise the threshold for the number of signatures required to get on the ballot, and don't let someone sign a petition for more than one candidate for a given race.
don’t let someone sign a petition for more than one candidate for a given race.
This would be so much overhead work and also defeat the purpose of Ranked Choice Voting. This basically moves the First Past the Post earlier in the process, which will exclude candidates
As somebody said in another comment, there were 19 candidates to choose from for mayor alone, and then 16-30 candidates for each district. That's up to 50 candidates to research to fill out a ballot, in combination with the poor formatting of these ballots. You've got 30 names with 6 bubbles next to every single one of them that you have to follow across to fill out your 6 choices. I've seen better formatted scantron test sheets.
If this had been the size of a normal primary election or something - around 3-6 candidates or something - I think people would've found it pretty easy to understand.
"Mission accomplished" 🛩️🪂🛳️
The story buries the lede: there were 19 candidates on the ballot for mayor and 16-30 for each city council district. Several of the experts cited speculate that the number of candidates overwhelmed voters.
I always go over a sample ballot in advance and research each candidate. I would not have liked to do so for that election; local elections are difficult to research in general with many candidates getting minimal press and some not even bothering to put up websites.
It's the paradox of choice. With more options, people become more likely to not choose because it's overwhelming.
Odd implementation of ranked choice. Probably too many choices without party affiliation listed for voters that didn't come into the booth having already researched the choices. Sad because this will probably get used to say the whole concept is bad.
No voting booths here in Oregon. We get our ballots mailed to us along with a voter's guide book with a page for each candidate. I've never seen anywhere near that many candidates before, though.
It was a lot because this was the first election with our new system of government. It should settle down next time.
A selection of up to 30 candidates for a ranked choice does sound daunting. Yet despite that 80% of those that voted did complete those sections. That doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Edit: mentioned city council specifically. Changed to more generic phrasing.
Ranked Choice Voting is the way forward.
But really? Do we really have to implement learning programs for this shit or something?
Yes, actually. RCV is complicated enough that it causes poor NYC voters to submit invalid ballots at a higher rate than their rich and counterparts, something that doesn't happen with "choose one." Still, RCV is good, but Approval Voting is better. Under Approval, an invalid ballot is impossible unless you put in illegal markings, which would invalidate a ballot under any method.
Can you tell more about approval voting? I haven’t heard of it
You're given a list of candidates, and you can select however many of them you approve of being in office. Votes are then tallied, and whoever has the highest approval total is who gets voted in.
Oh fascinating! Thank you
Approval is good and should be used to move to either STAR or 3-2-1. RCV is barely better than Plurality and this ballot is just one example of how RCV implementations can cause issues.
It doesn't matter. The people willing to learn about it will do so on their own.
But really? Do we really have to implement learning programs for this shit or something?
Yes. Every time something new is introduced, people have to learn the new thing. Not everyone is as informed as you or I. Most people don't care that much and have never considered alternative voting techniques.
Those pictures are brutal. You need to run some kind of preliminary if you're going to have that many candidates over all. This isn't an RCV failing it's a failure to narrow the field with things like signature requirements.
How many out of 5 chose a city councilor during the last election when no ranked choice voting was available? If you can't provide that data then shush up.
Last election doesn't apply because this is the first election with a new system of government for the city.
There are 4 districts, the top 3 vote getters in each district get elected.
Is this a new measure for Portland? I'm guessing people didn't know about it? The link doesn't really give details.
The measure was for state-wide ranked choice, it was defeated.
It was implemented at the city level for this election for mayor and city council.
Well hopefully it continues and this incident doesn't make the city reverse it. Thanks for the added context.
I think the less confusing alternative is a top two non partisan primary and a 1v1 general election.
Most of my fellow Americans are too stupid use understand how to fill out a ranked choice ballot.
I guess we see why ranked choice balloting was defeated everywhere except D.C. this year...
I mean I dont think thats so bad. But I bet that makes the average Americans eyes explode.
My neighbor state of Idaho is actively trying to stop it by saying it's "confusing".
Alaskan here - we've had RCV since 2020, and this year there was a ballot measure to remove it... Can't have shit in this country 😒. Being too "confusing" has been the only argument against it I've heard (AKA, no actual substantial argument against it.) Oh, and I guess that we elected a Democrat for House Rep because of it. Definitely can't have that.
When it comes right down to it, that’s the difference between the Republican platform and the Democratic platform — Democrats say “here’s a bunch of options, please inform yourself and rank these according to what you think is best, and we’ll do what the majority wants” and Republicans say “all these rules and regulations are too confusing for you. Vote for us and we’ll get rid of the confusing stuff and make all the decisions in black and white terms so you can get back to living your life.”
That’s the real reason why Republicans did so well this time around.
I can give you a bunch of arguments against it. You can just go look at my history if you want a bunch of sources. Not really possible to boil it down to a short and sweet answer sadly, but in general there are much better voting methods and ones that vastly fewer problems. RCV was invented before we had a lot of data on elections and how people vote and we’ve learned a lot since then. RCV is almost always a bad choice if you’re trying to implement a new system. Either go with approval for simplicity, or STAR or 3-2-1 if you want a very good election system with all of the benefits of RCV and none of the drawbacks.
Oh absolutely, I did not mean to imply RCV is the end-all-be-all. STAR is my preferred voting system, but if it's RCV vs pure plurality , I'd much rather have RCV.
These extremist patriots can't be bothered to fill out a couple of circles in the name of democracy. It doesn't feel cool.
Lol people see this be like "AAAAHHHH FUCK I TOOK ENOUGH TESTS IN SCHOOL I DONT WANNA SEE THIS AGAIN" and yeet it into a fire.
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