What do you all think of this voting system?

[mjr]

Approval Voting

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

https://electology.org/approval-voti...FYlbfgodhZ4MoQ

I think it has some definite merits. Of course, like any voting system, it's going to have it's drawbacks. But I think one of the merits is that it eliminates the "either/or" choice.

Think about this: Approval Voting could have given us a Presidential Race that's Rubio vs Sanders. Or Carly Fiorina vs Hillary. Who knows?

I think it's an interesting idea.

[TheHuckster]

I think a less drastic measure would be to just have the primary elections held on the same day, so that it's not just a handful of states who actually have a choice as to who to nominate. It's hard to tell if Trump and Clinton would have still won the nomination had it been that way, but it certainly would change their strategies to not just focus on, say, Iowa and New Hampshire, plus other early-primary states to get their nomination.

It's an interesting idea for sure, but I think approval voting would make for a lot more noise, as there would be possibly dozens of candidates competing for ad time and attention trying to get your approval.

[Gravekeeper]

Or you could just switch to a parliamentary system and get out of the winner takes all trap entirely.

As for approval voting, I'm not sure it would work with US politics due to the nature of the system and the electorate. Purity voters are still going to tick a single person ( and political parties based on ideological purity like the GOP may continue to push doing so ) while conscience voters are still going to tick a single "not one of the main two" option.

The party heads and the big money is still going to want to consolidate on a single candidate for maximum chance of victory. Campaign finance and infrastructure costs is a large part of the problem in perpetuating the 2 party system. Even after being elected US politicians are forever having to fund raise to the point of absurdity.

[Ghel]

I much prefer the idea of instant-runoff voting. You rank the candidates according to your first choice, second, etc. If the candidate with the most votes doesn't have a majority, they drop off the candidate with the least votes and use those voters' second choice. Then continue until one of the candidates has a majority of the votes.

[mjr]

I much prefer the idea of instant-runoff voting. You rank the candidates according to your first choice, second, etc. If the candidate with the most votes doesn't have a majority, they drop off the candidate with the least votes and use those voters' second choice. Then continue until one of the candidates has a majority of the votes.

I see where you're coming from, Ghel. Based on the reading I've done, though, the "IRV" is more confusing to people than Approval Voting. One other reason is that if you have two candidates that you basically rank equally, you can't really list them as 1 and 1a on a ballot. With approval voting, you can basically say "I'm comfortable with candidates X, Y, and Z", without ranking them.

[jackfaire]

I say we do away with the primaries. The very idea that only the people who belong to certain groups get to decide who we vote for is ridiculous.

I don't belong to any party and while I vote for the candidate I

1) Most agree with

2) has the best chance at winning.

I don't get to decide who one of the two major candidates are. Instead of two elections where we remove half of the people running off of the board because people felt a certain way on a certain day let's just have only the general election. Then people vote for whom they want to be president and whomever gets the most votes wins regardless of their own party affiliation.

[s_stabeler]

to be fair, i'm 99% sure that the primaries aren't a part of the presidential election itself. It's just how the main parties select their candidates. If you can form a political party that meets ballot access laws, you could get your name on the ballot papers in 2020.(as a rough guide, if you have 50k supporters in each state, you are probably fine.)

[mjr]

to be fair, i'm 99% sure that the primaries aren't a part of the presidential election itself. It's just how the main parties select their candidates. If you can form a political party that meets ballot access laws, you could get your name on the ballot papers in 2020.(as a rough guide, if you have 50k supporters in each state, you are probably fine.)

I don't even really think you need to "form a party". I think if you meet the signature criteria you can run as a "write in" or as an Independent.

[wolfie]

"Write in" candidates don't need to register as such - individual voters write their name in on the ballot. Of course, some states treat write-ins as spoiled ballots.

Mickey Mouse gets a fair number of votes for President every election - and I think he's a better choice than either of the "big 2".