• PupBiru@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    sure! absolutely! for primaries go nuts, kick up a stink, let’s get a better candidate! totally agree!

    but when it comes to the election and if trump is the nominee for republicans and biden is the nominee for the democrats then you get the hell out there, suck up your pride and you vote against the dictator… and the only effective way of voting against the dictator is a vote for the democrats - not because you like it, not because it’s fair - but because the USA has a first past the post system and that’s just the bullshit reality of the situation

    and then, if you have the energy, you help at the local level to implement something like RCV

    (should be noted, i’m australian so i have no power to do anything, and a lot of people will say i have no business making comments like this because im not american! however america has placed itself in a position of power on the global stage - the way yall vote effects everyone! its critical - GLOBALLY - that trump doesn’t win)

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      (should be noted, i’m australian so i have no power to do anything, and a lot of people will say i have no business making comments like this because im not american! however america has placed itself in a position of power on the global stage - the way yall vote effects everyone! its critical - GLOBALLY - that trump doesn’t win)

      have you guys installed RCV? I’d love to hear specifics about implementation. (The biggest resistance is “people won’t know how to vote”… because they’re sooooo good at voting now.) trying to convince the Lame Duck governor to go for broke on everything.

      • PupBiru@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        yeah we have RCV for everything… everyone knows how to vote; it’s really not hard

        https://www.aec.gov.au/media/2022/05-11.htm

        this articles a little old and it’s changed a bit since then, but on a basic level it the same:

        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work

        the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)

        so your ballot paper has about 20 different parties[1] on it, ranging from the major parties (coalition/liberal/national and labour) to a few others (greens are becoming big, socialist alliance, etc), and then single issue parties (legalise cannabis australia, there was a high speed rail party at 1 point)… and it has a bunch of individual politicians below each party with their own boxes

        if you decide that legalising cannabis is the issue you care about, you can just number their box and they’ll allocate your preferences - hopefully based on how likely they think a particular politician is to support legalising cannabis. you can also put multiple numbers above the line and a range of other things, but at its simplest it’s putting a 1 in a box and going home

        some of this might be slightly incorrect because it can get very complex and i don’t really delve too deep into how the ballot actually works at its most complex level… but i think the great thing is that you can vote according to whatever complexity or detail you like and the system ensures your vote is allocated to who you’d most likely want

        [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Australia

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)

          interesting. I… wonder how the system would resolve putting a ‘2’ in the box and then voting for somebody else as a 1, but otherwise party line. like the party-line vote is the failsafe, but I put my preferred 2 or 3 candidates in first.

          thank you for your input!

          • PupBiru@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            you can only vote above (party preference) or below (all preferences) the line on our ballots, so that’s not a situation that can occur, however i imagine it’d be something the actual counting system could tolerate - heck you could probably even assign someone an arbitrary 51 and imo the system could just grab that person out of the party preferences, sequence the list, and then put them in at number 51 and that’s your preference list

            otherwise, the party preferences are published in advance, so you can always print them off and tweak them, then vote below the line