- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
Democratic activists are looking to overhaul the party’s presidential primary process with ranked-choice voting.
Proponents of the idea have privately met with Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and other leading party officials who want to see ranked-choice voting in action for 2028. Those behind the push include Representative Jamie Raskin, the nonprofit Fairvote Action, and Joe Biden pollster Celinda Lake.
Axios reports that ranked-choice supporters told a DNC breakfast meeting in D.C. that they believe it would unify and strengthen the party, prevent votes from being “wasted” after candidates withdraw, and encourage candidates to build coalitions. The publication quotes DNC members as being divided on the issue, with some being open and others thinking that it is best left to state parties.
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Could we also make it so primaries don’t take six months? I’ve never voted in a presidential primary where my vote affected the outcome at all because every state I’ve lived in was late in the schedule.
Then what is the media going to talk about for 6 months?
Don’t get me started on the electoral-media complex that makes our elections too damn long.
If we’re making impossible demands on the system I’d also include 60 day election cycles. No political advertising or campaigning more than two months before the election.
But I’m a bad American who hates the GDP.
It all comes down to the political parties. Which is partly why our elections suck so much.
You’d think either party would want the chance to talk about their candidate for an extra few months. But maybe they’re worried familiarity breeds contempt.
Same here, it’s such bullshit. Then people scold me when I complain as if I didn’t go to the primaries when typically it’s the primary that doesn’t come to me. How dare I not go vote for someone who already conceded, I must be what’s wrong with democracy.
Six months? I think you mean a year and a half.
Oh but don’t you want to know first which Democrat places like Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas would like? You know, those bastions of democracy.
/s, like it’s needed lol.
They stagger primaries to manufacture the party choice for their chosen candidate
I just want to point out that Ranked-Choice Voting was on the ballot in Colorado in 2024. It ultimately failed because it was opposed by both parties. I was surprised, because I talked through the issues with a friend who considered herself “very progressive” she mentioned she was against Ranked-Choice Voting because her Democratic Voting Guide recommended voting against it.
From https://tsscolorado.com/colorado-voters-easily-reject-ranked-choice-voting/
…it angered both Democratic and Republican party leaders and drew opposition from prominent Democratic backers, including a plethora of unions, progressive groups and some environmental organizations.
If you blindly follow a Democratic Voting Guide, you’re not “very progressive.” Probably not even “kind of progressive.”
This shouldn’t be that surprising, RCV will completely topple the establishment politics apple cart. When people are no longer forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, they can instead choose someone who’s a halfway decent human being who will represent them instead of corpo pac donors. It would be absolutely transformative to roll this out nationally.
The problem with the two party system, is the only thing they’ll always agree on is that it should remain a two party system.
We had the same issue in the UK. We had the choice of something else and it was dismissed as “too complicated” and “too expensive”.
So instead most of us have their votes thrown out locally, and then most of the rest have them thrown out nationally.
You mean one party system.
It has already passed in Alexandria VA for the 2024 elections and the DNC sued to prevent it from being implemented. They kept rcv option off the ballot in DC.
Even if it were implemented across the country no capitalist politician would be ranked on my ballot
It was combined with a top 4 jungle primary that was not ranked choice, which was why a lot of people who might have voted for it otherwise voted against it. It looked like a way to implement ranked choice while creating a system where less moderate candidates would be eliminated in the primary.
Happened in Massachusetts in 2020 too. Absolutely insane that people don’t realize how much better RCV is
It really does show that 1) People in general aren’t very smart. Most people won’t do some basic research to see what they’re voting for. And 2) Most people are just going to vote how their party tells them.
ABOUT FUCKING TIME
Jesus fuck finally.
This is how we get rid of the one party system.
Crazy idea. What if the Democratic primary was actually a democracy? Let the candidate who wins the most states with an electoral weight be the candidate.
Make them open. Make then count. Make them accountable.
Good news!
The voting members of the DNC agreed with you 8 months ago when they elected a chair with a decade long track record of fair primaries and then putting the full weight of the party behind every candidate in the general.
We’re also very unlikely to see a push to consolidate behind a “winner” after only a handful of states vote.
I don’t think the current DNC chair has ever weighed in on any primary. Even for Mamdani he waited till the day after the primary. And Martin loves Mamdani almost as much as trump does.
So we can expect neutrality till the very last state reports their primary result.
So they plan to kill super delegates?
Super delegates only vote in the second round. That’s been on the books since 2020. Sure, it doesn’t remove them entirely, but you just need to have the majority of pledged delegates for it to not matter.
There was a rule vote in 2024, the same time Martin got elected, that changed some stuff. So I’m assuming Martin didn’t want to immediately override them when it won’t matter for years.
But ideally I’d want to see the removal of all delegates, supes and normies.
Straight popular vote in the primary, 1:1 representation, and the candidate is just the person the most Dems want to vote for.
Straight popular vote for a candidate is a great way to almost guarantee losses for the electoral college.
Huh?
I thought you wanted representation…
But you don’t want actual 1:1 representation?
I’ll never guess it, you’re going to have to share what “moderate” level of representation you believe is ideal. And obviously people are going to question why you believe more representation than that would be a negative
You need a way to ensure the presidental candidate is popular across many states, because that’s part of the election. Straight popular vote can easily skew to a candidate that wins a few states by a large margin, but ultimately loses the election.
What hypothetical candidate would win all of a large state like Cali by a huge margin but lose to a Republican in enough smaller states that they lose the general?
Like, you know the EC is relatively proportional like the House, it’s not set up like the Senate…
The first step to get the voting fixed shouldn’t be ranked voting. It should be getting rid of winner takes it all. If a party gets 40% of the votes, and there are 10 representatives, it should get 4 of them, not 0.
What would happens is Dem states will do proportional allocation, republican states would stick with winner take all, and you end up with a permanent republican presidency.
States run elections, states also get to decide how to allocate their electors.
Anything short of a constitutional amendment will not work.
This is talking about the Democratic Primary. What you’re saying is definitely true if we were changing the allocation of Electoral College votes for the general election – for that, we need Congress to pass an Amendment (or maybe a regular law would suffice?)
Amendment. Or as the other comment alluded to, interstate compact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
That probably requires congrsssional approval. And even then, that last until the supreme court strikes it down. Or even if it doesn’t gwt struck down, its unclear if the next congress have the ability to revoke the previous session of congress’s approval of the interstate compact.
So many shenanigans.
the electoral college experiment should be abandoned. It clearly didn’t serve the function it was intended to serve when it was implemented 200 years ago.
It actually largely has. It both reduced the numbers of people who needed to ride horses around to figure out the winner, and it helped keep power consolidated with the powerful.
A good chunk of our early democratic institutions were designed with a lot of influence by people who didn’t entirely trust their constituency and wanted to keep things from being too democratic. So you have several options for elected officials to disregard voters in most matters, and the president has the power to say “nah” to legislation.
Okay, but the entire idea was to allow the electors to basically go against the will of the people, if the people are a bunch of idiots and elect a despot wannabe. And when a despot wannabe actually got elected, the electors didn’t go against the idiot electorate.
Well, they didn’t specifically feel concern for them electing a despot. They were concerned simply that they might pick wrong from the viewpoint of those with political power at the time. They weren’t specifically afraid of a despot or demagogue, but someone who would either threaten the political elites wellbeing, or loosing support from the “less populous” slave states. A system that gives disproportionate weight to smaller states to buy their support while also giving themselves more influence over a check on the legislature and one of the branches of power is what they went with.
They weren’t afraid of Trump, they were concerned about Lincoln.
Now all electors are party loyalists chosen by their party, nobody aint doing any faithless defection.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Democrats will ratfuck progressives under any ruleset.
Interesting given that in the recent past the Democratic Party opposed implementing RCV 👀.
I’m still betting they oppose it. They’re just not in power right now. The second they have a majority again all RCV initiative stops. Maybe a state or two flips over to RCV in the mean time if we’re lucky.
Yeah, they know the progressives will beat them if they allow rcv
I mean, Ken was for it when he ran Minnesota…
I don’t know why he wouldn’t be for it now.
Just gotta make the dumbasses in the Pedo Party to think Ranked Choice is somehow good for them, or that they came up with the idea.
Send mayor Mamdani to the White House again. He did well in that cesspool last time.
STAR voting is simpler and
peer-reviewed, topping the charts in all studies of accuracy and representativeness.
Star is way worse at preventing gaming the system because if your favorite candidate is one of the less likely to win, mathematically you shouldn’t rank anyone else even 1 star or your vote may be the reason your most favorite candidate loses by ensuring someone less favorable to you wins. If you made me vote on STAR id literally never rank an establishment candidate ever, my ballot wouldn’t change at all from how it looks now and neither would any of the people who want smaller candidates to win and know how math works.
I used to run then elections in the organization I was a part of. Just use Scottish RCV it’s better and with plenty real world tests and results.
I am having trouble understanding the math you are describing. How has the system been gamed if you voted this way? It sounds like you only play yourself, if you would discard your second-choice in the hopes that your first wins. The system is still going to favor consensus.
It would only work if they converted to a national vote, instead of state by state elections with individual ranked choice votes.
Both. We need to outloaw fptp. Usually these things happen by States first, then its forced on the holdouts by the feds
That’s how we got woman the right to vote.
This doesn’t fix the electoral college or the state electors corruption. It just changes how they’re gonna ignore peoples vote for the popular vote anyway.
My state is currently in the process of banning RCV statewide :(
