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Comment by trod1234 | Hacker News Reader

Its hard to ascribe individual responsibility in that way when the only two choices were existentially awful.

"You elected an idiot president...", the choices were Communism, or Fascism; which is recoverable and better for people. Certainly not the former, but to be clear neither are a real choice when you vote for democracy, and not voting is a vote for both fascism/communism at the same time.

Such was a similar failure and rise of demagogues that ruined Rome.

First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice...

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"Don't blame me, I voted conservative"

Funny how all the people who would traditionally trot out that phrase immediately forgot it as soon as the other team had the conservative candidate.

> First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice...

What voting system so you think is best? None are perfect but IMO ranked choice is the best as it keeps the good attributes of FPTP without suffering from the spoiler effect

When most people say "ranked choice" they seem to refer to IRV, which is broken in multiple ways, but most notably that it has the property that ranking someone higher can make them lose and ranking someone lower can make them win. That happens because IRV ignores all of someone's preferences except their top choice, until their top choice is thrown out, at which point IRV looks at their next preference.

There are much better systems: approval (for simplicity, at the expense of more accurate preference information) and Condorcet (for accuracy, at the expense of making it more difficult to explain tie-breaker corner cases to the average person).

Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting) is the single worst of the very many seriously proposed ranked ballots method; it retains most of what is bad about FPTP. It is somewhat easier to tally than the best (in terms of the logic of who wins) ranked ballots methods (methods satisfying the Condorcet criterion), but not particularly good even on that among all ranked ballots methods, e.g., it can be improved in that dimension by just adding all preferences of the next rank until a candidate crosses the maiority threshold without elimination, which also reduces the degree to which the system is prone to paradoxical effects (promoting a candidate causing them to lose by changing the order others are eliminated.)

River method is better, but any ranked method is better than approval for sure, and literally any multiple-choice method is better than FPTP.

>adding all preferences of the next rank until a candidate crosses the maiority threshold without elimination

I don't follow, what method is that?

I am legitimately surprised that someone who can write complete and cogent sentences believes that a vote for one of the two presidential candidates was a vote for communism.

These days, any sort of tax on the wealthy at all is seen as full blown communism.

Do...do you know what communism is?

It's not "the government does stuff and I don't like it"

No, a choice for Harris was not a choice for Communism. By no means.

Now, I would like to hear your specific recommendations for alternatives to FPTP or ranked choice voting. Approval? Multimember?

> the choices were Communism, or Fascism

Which was which? I see both right now.

By European standards, Biden & Harris are solidly right-wing. Bernie would be centre-left.

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