New polling results released just weeks away from Election Day show a
majority of Americans want to replace the Electoral College with popular
vote system.
I’m afraid that I still don’t get it, most probably because I am thick.
Someone has to be eliminated. That’s the whole point of elections. OPV means that your choice counts, well your preferences do. It also means that you don’t have to vote for the person you don’t want to, but you can rank your preferences. It is very rare that I would rank a bunch of people the same value. It is generally easy to rank candidates.
In our senate we sometimes have to rank over 100 candidates. If you do that you must number every box and can’t make a mistake. Or, the parties have registered their preferences and you just tick one box for your chosen party and that’s it. So it’s either one box ticked or 100 or so. The optional thing is that you don’t have to pick all 100, but that changes sometimes due to party politics playing with the system. One the whole, our electoral system limits how much political parties can mess about with elections. For instance, no party chooses electoral boundaries. Gerrymandering doesn’t happen here anymore. It used to, but not now.
Your system sounds fine. The benefits of STAR over OPV is just the two situations you described. One, you can rank two choices the same, and two, you can modify your preferences by adding or erasing stars.
The downside to Star voting is that you should have at least as many stars as candidates. But if there were 100 options, that’s going to be a massive ballot no matter what you do.
I’m afraid that I still don’t get it, most probably because I am thick.
Someone has to be eliminated. That’s the whole point of elections. OPV means that your choice counts, well your preferences do. It also means that you don’t have to vote for the person you don’t want to, but you can rank your preferences. It is very rare that I would rank a bunch of people the same value. It is generally easy to rank candidates.
In our senate we sometimes have to rank over 100 candidates. If you do that you must number every box and can’t make a mistake. Or, the parties have registered their preferences and you just tick one box for your chosen party and that’s it. So it’s either one box ticked or 100 or so. The optional thing is that you don’t have to pick all 100, but that changes sometimes due to party politics playing with the system. One the whole, our electoral system limits how much political parties can mess about with elections. For instance, no party chooses electoral boundaries. Gerrymandering doesn’t happen here anymore. It used to, but not now.
I shall have to investigate the STAR system.
Your system sounds fine. The benefits of STAR over OPV is just the two situations you described. One, you can rank two choices the same, and two, you can modify your preferences by adding or erasing stars.
The downside to Star voting is that you should have at least as many stars as candidates. But if there were 100 options, that’s going to be a massive ballot no matter what you do.