Since Kucinich is not going to be doing the corporate world's bidding while in office, it's important that we help support his campaign get enough money to give him sufficient publicity. If everyone just donates a little then we can really make a difference. We don't need to be able to raise as much as Clinton or Obama will (which would be nearly impossible) but if we get our numbers up there high enough then it will be enough to get the message out (at some point the money raised starts to give diminishing returns I'm sure). It's very easy to pack a lunch instead of going out to a restaurant, buying one less beer at the bar, or skip some other thing you do each day and give that money to Kucinich.
Yesterday I gave my first contribution ever ($20) to a political campaign. You can give to Kucinich via the ActBlue link to the right hand side of the screen. Or, equivalently, you can give on this website which is this blog's ActBlue fundraising page. As you can see 1 person has donated on this page (moi). You can also click on Kucinich's name and see how our blog is doing in terms of ranking against the other Kucinich ActBlue fundraising pages.
Actually, the good feeling I get from giving that $20 is worth more than what I could have otherwise bought with it. Looking back on this a couple of years from now I will be able to say that I helped finance the president who has just given us universal health care and instant runoff voting. Or, if things don't turn out that way, I can at least say 'Don't blame me for the war with Iran, I supported Kucinich".
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7 comments:
IRV is, unfortunately, perpetuated largely on the basis of persistent myths and misinformation. The truth is that better and simpler methods than IRV exist - and IRV is lethal to third parties, because voting for a non-major-party candidate is statistically more likely to hurt you than help you. The world needs Range Voting or its simplified form of Approval Voting. Here's why.
Consider this hypothetical election using IRV.
#voters - their vote
10 G > C > P > M
3 C > G > P > M
5 C > P > M > G
6 M > P > C > G
4 P > M > C > G
C is the clear Condorcet (condor-SAY) winner, meaning he is preferred by a landslide majority over all his individual rivals. C is preferred over G, P, and M all by an 18-10 margin.
But... M wins, even though he also has fewer first-place votes (6 voters) than C with 8.
Also:
1. P is preferred to M by 22 of the 28 voters, yet he's the first candidate eliminated.
2. G also has more first-place votes (10) than M's 6.
3. So M either loses pairwise to, or has fewer first-place votes than (or both) every rival, but still IRV elects M.
The example above was intended to be "realistic," perhaps somewhat resembling the situation in the (now evolving) 2008 US presidential race with G="Green", M=McCain, C=Edwards, and P=Paul. But if you are willing to drop realism and construct artificial election scenarios, then this demonstrates how to construct arbitrarily-severe election examples of this kind: http://rangevoting.org/IRVamp.html#bad
IRV sounds initially appealing, because people picture a weak third party candidate who loses in the first round. The myth is that this takes away the fear of voting for your sincere favorite candidate, and gives third parties a fair chance to grow; but if that candidate or his party ever grows to be a contender, he is statistically more likely to hurt the party closest to his own than to win. It doesn't matter how unlikely you imagine the above scenario to be - it's still _more_ likely than the odds "Green" will win. And so third party voters will learn to strategically vote for their favorite major-party candidate, because it will more often be a good strategy than a bad one. You don't have to buy my math; you can look at decades of IRV usage in Australia's house, and Ireland's presidency. Both use IRV, and have been two-party dominated. So much for the myths that IRV allows you to "vote your hopes, not your fears", and eliminates spoilers. Now you can see why the Libertarian Reform Caucus calls IRV a "bullet in the foot" for third parties, and why Australian political analysts at AustralianPolitics.com say that IRV "promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents." Ironically, most of the many countries in the world who use a genuine _delayed_ runoff have broken free of duopoly. Yet third parties just worked to help replace that system with IRV in Oakland, CA. This can be chalked up to a result of massive public ignorance, largely perpetuated by groups such as FairVote and the League of Women Voters (http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html).
Electoral reform advocates (especially third parties!) should be demanding Range Voting - score all the candidates and elect the one with the highest average. Its simplified form, Approval Voting, is probably the most feasible to implement. It simply uses ordinary ballots, but allows us to vote for as many candidates as we like. Consider the benefits:
* More resistant to strategy: As we see above, IRV strategically "forces" voters not to top-rank their sincere favorite; the general strategy with IRV is to top-rank your favorite of the front-runners (typically the major party candidates). But with Range Voting and Approval Voting, this _never_ happens. The worst a voter may do is exaggerate his sincere scores to the max and min scores allowed. But with Range Voting, a vote for your favorite candidate can never hurt you, or the candidate, whereas with IRV it can hurt both. -- http://RangeVoting.org/StratHonMix.html
* The previous fact helps to explain why IRV results in two-party duopoly, just like plurality voting. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TarrIrv.html
* Spoiler free: Whereas IRV merely _reduces_ spoilers. -- http://rangevoting.org/FBCexecSumm.html
* Decreases spoiled ballots: Since voting for more than one candidate is permissible, the number of invalid ballots experimentally goes down with Range and Approval Voting. But IRV typically results in a seven fold increase in spoiled ballots when we started using IRV. -- http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html
* Simpler to use: In 2006, the Center for Range Voting conducted an exit poll experiment in Beaumont, TX. There were 5 gubernatorial candidates, and voters were allowed to rate them 0-10 (or "abstain"). They all seemed to find the process as simple and intuitive. There were no complaints of complexity, or any questions for clarification. And the fact that spoilage rates go down with Range Voting, but up with IRV, shows that there is some objective sense in which RV is simpler. Voters literally make fewer mistakes.
* Simpler to implement/tabulate: A simple one-round summation tells us the results, whereas IRV's potential for multiple rounds can cause long delays before the final results are determined. A positive side-effect of Range Voting's simplicity is that it makes the necessary transition to manual counting, and away from voting machines, more feasible. And Range Voting can be conducted on all standard voting machines in the interim. Whereas IRV's complexity leads most communities implementing it to purchase expensive and fraud-conducive (electronic!) voting machines, the fraudster's best friend. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Complexity.html
* Greater voter satisfaction: Using extensive computer modeling of elections, a Princeton math Ph.D. named Warren D. Smith has shown that these methods lead to better average satisfaction with election results, surpassing the alternatives by a good margin. But IRV turns out to be the second _worst_ of the commonly proposed alternatives. This mean that all voters will benefit from the adoption of either of these superior voting methods, regardless of political stripe. -- http://RangeVoting.org/vsi.html
* Reduces the probability of ties: While they are not extremely common, they do happen. IRV statistically increases them, but Range Voting decreases them. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TieRisk.html
* In case you're going to say, "But IRV has more _momentum_ than Range Voting", you should consider this. -- http://RangeVoting.org/IRVsplitExec.html
* In case you wonder why groups like FairVote and the League of Women Voters support IRV, maybe you should consider all the misleading and even patently false claims they've made about it. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html
Get the facts at RangeVoting.org and ApprovalVoting.org
And if you're in the market for a better system of proportional representation (http://RangeVoting.org/PropRep.html) than the antiquated STV system, check out Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting.
http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html
http://RangeVoting.org/Asset.html
Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA
415.240.1973
clay@electopia.org
Heyyy, it's like our first semi-spam (unrelated to the post)! I looked into rangevoting.org. I don't know the intricacies of vote tabulation, but it seems to me that while this method is ok, it wouldn't work in the American system, as rating all the candidates could lead to some being boosted by celebrity value; just the thing it's trying to replace in IRV voting.
My comment wasn't spam, as the original post mentioned Kucinich's support for what you call "IRV voting" (Instant Runoff Voting voting).
You say that Range Voting is "okay", but here are some objective metrics of exactly how good it is. It is vastly superior to IRV or Condorcet. People can choose to like or dislike a candidate because of celebrity status, or anything trivial like that, in any voting method. The voting method has nothing to do with why people have the preferences they do. It is only a way for voters to express those preferences.
Let me put this more bluntly. If you think you know of a better voting method than Range Voting, just name it. I'll show you point-by-point how Range Voting is superior to it.
Range voting has one high-profile use -- the Olympic Games figure skating competition. And we all know how one crafty, insincere judge can throw off those results -- and that's even with having to reveal one's votes publicly.
Kucinich (and other presidential contenders like Obama, McCain and Nader) are right to advocate instant runoff. A good website is at www.instantrunoff.com. I think it includes a letter Kucinich did to boost "IRV" in some of its city wins (it keeps winning big on the ballot).
broken ladder! I'm sorry! Hiya. I assumed you were a hit and run poster. You weren't, that's awesome. So I pored over the range voting site. I honestly don't know, and you're right that if it has problems, they're of the same magnitude as anything else. This could help minor candidates, as people would feel safe being able to vote for them as well as other candidates...it's something that should be mentioned with IRV, to be sure. Will keep an eye on it myself I suppose, thanks.
This range voting does seem very interesting to say the least. I'll have to do more research on it. I believe professional sports use something like this in their mvp voting. Definetly worth some thought.
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