this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
845 points (89.2% liked)
Political Memes
5414 readers
5133 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wonder sometimes if elections were specifically turned around if it would improve things. That is, you don't vote FOR someone, you just cast a vote saying 'not that guy, anyone else is better' and whoever has the least votes against them wins.
I'm not sure what the downsides would be, but I think people would better understand it if it was framed that way.
I mean, it's sort of what we have now: you can vote against one of the two possible candidates by voting for the other one, or you can refuse to participate by voting for anyone else. But reframing it to explicitly be voting against the person you don't like might result in better participation.
If we're gonna fuck with it - either go ranked (and use a sensible selection method), or else let people check all the names they like. Most votes wins. That's called Approval Voting, it gets near-ideal results, and it is genuinely that simple.
This pick-one-guy approach just plain sucks. There's no reason for it. It's not even how we did things to begin with! Voters in the 18th century wrote two names for president. Runner-up was vice-president. That changed after congress took thirty-five failed attempts to make the electoral college work. The twelfth amendment, instead of getting rid of that stupid fucking system, just streamlined the presidency and vice-presidency into separate single-winner seats.