In most states, write-in votes are not counted, unless for a registered write-in candidate. I used to do a lot of write-ins, but since I've been working polling sites in elections, I know nobody bothers to count. I also understand why. At the end of a 15 hour day, it would mean potentially another hour counting whimsical notions that are…
In most states, write-in votes are not counted, unless for a registered write-in candidate. I used to do a lot of write-ins, but since I've been working polling sites in elections, I know nobody bothers to count. I also understand why. At the end of a 15 hour day, it would mean potentially another hour counting whimsical notions that aren't going to have any impact at all. Much as I used to enjoy doing write-ins.
The present situation in the U.S. is a good argument for moving to proportional representation, rather than the effective binary choice of D or R.
For example, a pro-life voter might cast their #1 (highest) vote for a pro-life party such as the ASP, hold their nose and vote R #2, rank the other parties accordingly, and put the Dems at the bottom at #5 or 6 or whatever.
It would allow people to vote both with their hearts and strategically.
Absolutely. A lot of people would have voted for Buchanan or Nader first, and then someone else in 2000. A fair number would have ranked the two of them 1 and 2, in whichever order.
Be wary of ranked voting. In San Francisco four candidates for district attorney in 2020 (three of whom were more or less competent) produced Chesa Boudin, the son of Weather Underground terrorists who was reared by radical academic Bill Ayers. The resulting carnage was even too much for ultra-liberal SF, and Boudin was successfully recalled in 2022.
I've read in the Wall Street Journal of problems in Alaska too. It may depend on exactly how it is structured. But If four candidates, three of them competent, on a single ranked-choice ballot, put Chessa Boudin in office, it would seem that a lot of people who voted for one of the three competent candidates picked Chessa Boudin as their second choice. You might consider why they did so, what motivated them, before denouncing the ranked choice ballot. I suspect that a ranked-choice ballot in 2016 would have given us much better results in the presidential race. If used in partisan primaries, it might have squeezed Trump out -- because only about one third of primary voters supported him, and most voters who preferred one of the ten or so other candidates would have ranked Trump last no matter how they ranked everyone else. If everyone were put on a single ranked choice ballot, I suspect it would have taken several rounds to turn up a winner, but Hillary Clinton would have lost out before the final round, and whether Sanders won would depend on how many Democrats picked him over any Republican, as well as whether a small number of Republicans preferred him to about half their own candidates.
I do think for presidential races, we need to draw on our entire two centuries plus history and work out a system that allows for a few months of state by state balloting, allowing for voters to study the candidates and how various constituencies relate to them, then have a final four ranked choice ballot in November.
I'd much rather we compressed our elections to six weeks or so worth of campaigning. These days we are in almost perpetual election mode and it stinks.
It does, but when picking a President of the United States of America, it makes sense to take a bit more time for voters to get to know the candidates, for dark horse candidates who have something to offer to become known and considered. If we can have a state by state primary season from March to June, then a pause for the summer, then a general campaign September and October, I think we'll have a good balance. I have often thought about being a candidate and putting up billboards in June saying "enjoy your commercial free summer" -- would that harness the resentment of nonstop TV spots to gain votes for me over opponents who spent indiscriminately? When Jerry Brown was running for re-election against Meg Whitman's fortune, he held back on TV spots while she shot the moon, then came on with his message the last 6-8 weeks when his more limited budget counted the most, and won. That was contrary to political wisdom, but it worked.
And many Sanders voters' second choice was Donald Trump -- at least in preference to Hillary Clinton. It was a year for a break with the status quo, for an outsider to win, and the DNC totally missed that.
Boudin's victory garnered much discussion here in SF. As alluded above, candidates 1-3 were ideologically similar, i.e., tough-ish on crime but open to alternatives to incarceration when appropriate. Boudin was the clear outlier: he never met a criminal he didn't want to release. One theory is that voters chose their preferred candidate among 1-3, and then randomly picked their 2nd & 3rd choices, giving Boudin the edge. Who knows? SF ballots are notoriously crowded, with multiple candidates for even minor seats and tons of propositions, often quite arcane. It's easy to get confused or frustrated.
There's also speculation that many voters realized their mistake and hence voted for the recall of the Soros-backed Boudin.
Maybe fans of Rod Dreher thought they were voting for his favorite Cajun sausage! Long confusing ballots I understand. I work at a polling location (in Wisconsin) and voters are often confused. Since we have open primaries, they often vote for some GOP candidates, some Dem candidates, occasionally also a third party candidate, then wonder why the machine rejects their ballot. (Each voter can vote in any party primary for any given election, but, cannot vote for candidates in any other party primaries.) In theory voters who pick one qualified kinda conservative candidate should make a 2nd preference for the next most similar candidate. I wouldn't be surprised if many voters who favored Ralph Nader in 2000 would have preferred Patrick Buchanan to either Bush or Gore, or vice versa, and I expect all voters who dismissed all three of the other candidates would have been a core of Boudin's support. But unless he got an outright majority on the first round, the second or third rounds should have coalesced toward one of the qualified candidates, perhaps leaving Boudin with 40 percent but not gaining much in the later rounds. (Order of preference should prevent Boudin from winning with 40 percent, when three qualified candidates split 60 percent of the vote three ways.)
The UK is a bit like the USA in that we only have two main parties (although the minor parties do better than in the USA). I always felt that proportional representation would enable a wider spread of views, giving me a party nearer my values. However, that's the situation in Japan, with a dozen or more parties, and there still aren't any that I much like.
Better to write in Thomas Sowell and have it counted as nothing than to leave the ballot blank and for a Democrat operative to fill in for me. Not that it matters, Trump came crawling back (some may say he was in tears, crying like a baby and begging for forgiveness) after the backlash. He's back to pretending to kind of care about us. In truth, he cares very deeply about our votes. A transactional relationship it is...
That's the most we can expect from him. We can't just roll over and go along with him betraying us on key issues and destroying Florida in the process.
There are not enough Democratic operatives with enough time to fill in the bank spots on your ballot for you. Plus, at least in my state, when your ballot is fed into the tabulating machine, it counts the number of blank votes for each line, information which is printed out on a physical tape, recorded on a thumb drive, and transmitted to the election commission via wi-fi after polls close. Thus, a large number of votes filled in later would be glaringly easy to document.
Caterwauling about massive voter fraud is initiated by petty politicians in a fit of denial that voters could possibly have rejected them, and believed by people who have no clue how elections are actually organized. I did once hear from a fervent Trump voter in Texas who also works elections, who told me she had figured out a way voter fraud could be perpetrated with all the safeguards now in place, but its none of the airy notions people have been floating the last few years, and of course she's not telling anyone what it is.
As for Trump crawling back, yes, I noticed that, but he ALSO wants the votes of pro-choice Republicans back, and he changes his focus every five minutes, so don't expect much. He's wobbling because he wants the pro-life vote and a chunk of focused pro-choice voters.
In most states, write-in votes are not counted, unless for a registered write-in candidate. I used to do a lot of write-ins, but since I've been working polling sites in elections, I know nobody bothers to count. I also understand why. At the end of a 15 hour day, it would mean potentially another hour counting whimsical notions that aren't going to have any impact at all. Much as I used to enjoy doing write-ins.
The present situation in the U.S. is a good argument for moving to proportional representation, rather than the effective binary choice of D or R.
For example, a pro-life voter might cast their #1 (highest) vote for a pro-life party such as the ASP, hold their nose and vote R #2, rank the other parties accordingly, and put the Dems at the bottom at #5 or 6 or whatever.
It would allow people to vote both with their hearts and strategically.
Absolutely. A lot of people would have voted for Buchanan or Nader first, and then someone else in 2000. A fair number would have ranked the two of them 1 and 2, in whichever order.
I read back in 2016 that many Trump voters' 2nd choice was Bernie Sanders.
Ranked ballots would have been interesting!
Be wary of ranked voting. In San Francisco four candidates for district attorney in 2020 (three of whom were more or less competent) produced Chesa Boudin, the son of Weather Underground terrorists who was reared by radical academic Bill Ayers. The resulting carnage was even too much for ultra-liberal SF, and Boudin was successfully recalled in 2022.
Interesting! We don't have it here (in Canada), so it's easy to idealize.
I've read in the Wall Street Journal of problems in Alaska too. It may depend on exactly how it is structured. But If four candidates, three of them competent, on a single ranked-choice ballot, put Chessa Boudin in office, it would seem that a lot of people who voted for one of the three competent candidates picked Chessa Boudin as their second choice. You might consider why they did so, what motivated them, before denouncing the ranked choice ballot. I suspect that a ranked-choice ballot in 2016 would have given us much better results in the presidential race. If used in partisan primaries, it might have squeezed Trump out -- because only about one third of primary voters supported him, and most voters who preferred one of the ten or so other candidates would have ranked Trump last no matter how they ranked everyone else. If everyone were put on a single ranked choice ballot, I suspect it would have taken several rounds to turn up a winner, but Hillary Clinton would have lost out before the final round, and whether Sanders won would depend on how many Democrats picked him over any Republican, as well as whether a small number of Republicans preferred him to about half their own candidates.
I do think for presidential races, we need to draw on our entire two centuries plus history and work out a system that allows for a few months of state by state balloting, allowing for voters to study the candidates and how various constituencies relate to them, then have a final four ranked choice ballot in November.
I'd much rather we compressed our elections to six weeks or so worth of campaigning. These days we are in almost perpetual election mode and it stinks.
It does, but when picking a President of the United States of America, it makes sense to take a bit more time for voters to get to know the candidates, for dark horse candidates who have something to offer to become known and considered. If we can have a state by state primary season from March to June, then a pause for the summer, then a general campaign September and October, I think we'll have a good balance. I have often thought about being a candidate and putting up billboards in June saying "enjoy your commercial free summer" -- would that harness the resentment of nonstop TV spots to gain votes for me over opponents who spent indiscriminately? When Jerry Brown was running for re-election against Meg Whitman's fortune, he held back on TV spots while she shot the moon, then came on with his message the last 6-8 weeks when his more limited budget counted the most, and won. That was contrary to political wisdom, but it worked.
And many Sanders voters' second choice was Donald Trump -- at least in preference to Hillary Clinton. It was a year for a break with the status quo, for an outsider to win, and the DNC totally missed that.
Boudin's victory garnered much discussion here in SF. As alluded above, candidates 1-3 were ideologically similar, i.e., tough-ish on crime but open to alternatives to incarceration when appropriate. Boudin was the clear outlier: he never met a criminal he didn't want to release. One theory is that voters chose their preferred candidate among 1-3, and then randomly picked their 2nd & 3rd choices, giving Boudin the edge. Who knows? SF ballots are notoriously crowded, with multiple candidates for even minor seats and tons of propositions, often quite arcane. It's easy to get confused or frustrated.
There's also speculation that many voters realized their mistake and hence voted for the recall of the Soros-backed Boudin.
Maybe fans of Rod Dreher thought they were voting for his favorite Cajun sausage! Long confusing ballots I understand. I work at a polling location (in Wisconsin) and voters are often confused. Since we have open primaries, they often vote for some GOP candidates, some Dem candidates, occasionally also a third party candidate, then wonder why the machine rejects their ballot. (Each voter can vote in any party primary for any given election, but, cannot vote for candidates in any other party primaries.) In theory voters who pick one qualified kinda conservative candidate should make a 2nd preference for the next most similar candidate. I wouldn't be surprised if many voters who favored Ralph Nader in 2000 would have preferred Patrick Buchanan to either Bush or Gore, or vice versa, and I expect all voters who dismissed all three of the other candidates would have been a core of Boudin's support. But unless he got an outright majority on the first round, the second or third rounds should have coalesced toward one of the qualified candidates, perhaps leaving Boudin with 40 percent but not gaining much in the later rounds. (Order of preference should prevent Boudin from winning with 40 percent, when three qualified candidates split 60 percent of the vote three ways.)
The UK is a bit like the USA in that we only have two main parties (although the minor parties do better than in the USA). I always felt that proportional representation would enable a wider spread of views, giving me a party nearer my values. However, that's the situation in Japan, with a dozen or more parties, and there still aren't any that I much like.
Better to write in Thomas Sowell and have it counted as nothing than to leave the ballot blank and for a Democrat operative to fill in for me. Not that it matters, Trump came crawling back (some may say he was in tears, crying like a baby and begging for forgiveness) after the backlash. He's back to pretending to kind of care about us. In truth, he cares very deeply about our votes. A transactional relationship it is...
That's the most we can expect from him. We can't just roll over and go along with him betraying us on key issues and destroying Florida in the process.
There are not enough Democratic operatives with enough time to fill in the bank spots on your ballot for you. Plus, at least in my state, when your ballot is fed into the tabulating machine, it counts the number of blank votes for each line, information which is printed out on a physical tape, recorded on a thumb drive, and transmitted to the election commission via wi-fi after polls close. Thus, a large number of votes filled in later would be glaringly easy to document.
Caterwauling about massive voter fraud is initiated by petty politicians in a fit of denial that voters could possibly have rejected them, and believed by people who have no clue how elections are actually organized. I did once hear from a fervent Trump voter in Texas who also works elections, who told me she had figured out a way voter fraud could be perpetrated with all the safeguards now in place, but its none of the airy notions people have been floating the last few years, and of course she's not telling anyone what it is.
As for Trump crawling back, yes, I noticed that, but he ALSO wants the votes of pro-choice Republicans back, and he changes his focus every five minutes, so don't expect much. He's wobbling because he wants the pro-life vote and a chunk of focused pro-choice voters.