And a fiasco in New York - ranked voting

That's entirely irrelevant since I never said otherwise. My point was that the error with the test results had nothing to do with the voting system. As long as you remain unwilling or unable to understand how the system works or what actually led to the error, we're not going to get anywhere.

 

I think it is quite astounding you don't? Shouldn't there have been some HUGE RED FLAG when the results of the subsequent audit showed that increase. And again what if it had been just a couple of thousand in a race where a couple of thousand is the margin?

As we make elections more and more complicate and confusing not just for the voter but for the vote counters this is the result. All my life I have voted on election DAY, for at least half it showing my ID, then I get a blank ballot, then I fill it out, then I myself run it through the tabulation machine and my vote is counted. I don't have to go through this ranked voting having to rank ALL the candidate in some order else my vote could get cancelled taken out of a finally tally. If there was no majority winner then the two who got the most campaign against each other to win the votes of those whose candidates lost. That is an important thing that runoffs do, they force the candidates to WIN the votes they lost not just get them by some default.

Tell me exactly what is the purpose of ranked voting? How does it make the final result better than having a runoff between the top two.

 

Sounds like the Democrats tried to cheat a election.

 

Said republican hokeyness being entirely the product of the Republican party, created for the express purpose of creating just that loss of faith thereby making it just that much easier to pass voter suppression legislation under the guise of "voting integrity". Man, talk about lipstick on a pig! I really wish that forum rules did not allow me to call you guys blithering idiots but they don't allow it, so I won't do that.

 

I've no idea what you're saying there? Astounding that I don't what?

In general, you're still avoiding the very simple point of your own OP. You're suggesting that the error with the test votes happened because of the move to RCV. That suggestion seems to be largely based on a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of what the error actually was and how it happened.

I responded to point out that the error that happened had nothing to do with the type of voting system. They tested the tabulation system but failed to clear it down before the real election. It's that simple. You would expect them to test the tabulation system regardless of how simple the process might be and so it'd be perfectly possible for them to fail to clear the test data down regardless of how simple the process might be. Either way, the step that failed to happen would be the same, someone hitting some kind of delete or reset option.

Now you can make perfectly legitimate arguments against RCV and other more complex voting systems but that would be an entirely separate discussion. I'd even be happy to have that discussion, but only if you first acknowledged that the nature of the voting system wasn't actually relevant to the error that happened in this case.

 

Perhaps we should consider creating a private sector company to collect and tabulate ballots. I wouldn't trust government to tie my shoes.

 

I think you do since you answered with 4 paragraph's. And no you can't separate the complication and confusion and incompetence, they all add up to the results we are seeing. Astounding how these ballots got injected into the vote counting and it took a candidate to note, a candidate who has filed a lawsuit and asked the court to take oversight over the counting. As I noted they ran counts, and then ran this count and the test ballots got injected into that count. Why are they having to run all these counts? Ranked voting. It opens the door for such incompetence and people can't figure out who exactly they voted for and how their vote was counted and in particular in the final tally.

Do we have a winner yet or or election officials still handling those results and those ballots?

And again

Tell me exactly what is the purpose of ranked voting? How does it make the final result better than having a runoff between the top two. In a normal electionif there was no majority winner then the two who got the most campaign against each other to win the votes of those whose candidates lost. That is an important thing that runoffs do, they force the candidates to WIN the votes they lost not just get them by some default. Take Louisiana which has an open primary. Everyone runs against everyone else regardless of party. If not clear winner the top two face a runoff. That could mean the top two Democrats face a runoff. The Democrats now have to campaign to get some of those Republican votes giving that minority a voice. If it were ranked voting Republicans would probably NOT cast a vote for a Democrat in the first round and vice-versa so then that means only Democrats are mostly Democrat votes would determine the ranked runoff, those Democrat voters get another vote.

Our elections have worked fine for DECADES trying to complicate them and open all these doors to possible fraud is folly.

 

Just no. You are still failing to understanding the simple sequence of events. There was only one formal count from the tabulation system and that included the test numbers in error. Again, regardless of the system, the ballots would have been uploaded in to some kind of central system to produce the ultimate result and that system would have been tested beforehand. The error could have just as easily occurred regardless of the voting system.

They wouldn't have had the final results regardless since the mail-in ballots hadn't been included yet (as planned).

I'm not here to promote ranked choice voting, only to point out that the voting system itself had no direct relevance to the error. Couldn't it be that your obvious dislike of the system (or maybe just dislike of change) is colouring your perception of the actual problem here?

I don't think it does. The problem with a run-off is that you need to whole an entire new election and it would take even longer to get an actual result. Part of the point of systems like RCV is to achieve the benefits of a run-off within a single election.

A candidate still needs to convince supporters of other candidates to put them as a second choice though and it should be an option for a voter not to rank a candidate at all.

I don't like the idea of primaries at all, especially open ones. Parties should be responsible for choosing their candidates themselves and the actual election should just be for the posts. Primaries just help shore up the major parties over anyone else.

How well your elections have worked in the past is very much open to opinion. But ultimately, it will be the politicians winning those elections who get to vote on changes to the electoral system going forwards.

 

No there is not. There is a cult problem in the USA.

 

And in doing so showed how easy it is to catch fraud big enough to change the outcome of an election. This was caught in less than 1 hour.

 

I cited you what happened stop with the denials. It was in a subsequent recounts as I cited. This has become a another New York fiasco PERIOD. And I asked why ranked vote, why is it better and you say you aren't here to defend it OK I agree it's not defendable on the basis it is a better system. So why do it. Have the top two now have to go after the votes they didn't get.

And I agree I think the parties should go back to having their party conventions and choosing their candidates. They would pick candidates that better represent the parties positions and ideals. When I was a kid I used to watch the presidential primaries with my mother and the back and forth and negotiations and factions and they fought it out and came up with a candidate who represented the party.

But watch out hold that position you will be attacked by the "WE ARE A DEMOCRACY AND I HAVE A RIGHT TO VOTE" faction around here.

And the mail in ballots? Another Cuomo created fiasco. The ballots should be accept BY election day it should not be held up by people too lazy to cast it 5 days before the election. But then everyone voting on the same day at a polling place worked for all me my 47 years of voting and doing so in three different states.

 

You're still wrong, it had nothing to do with recounts and even if it had, there are recounts regardless of the voting system so you've still provided zero reason to blame the error on the voting system.

Don't put words in my mouth. It's a most insulting form of lying.

I already pointed out why RCV is better than having a separate run-off election. It means you don't need the time, effort and cost of having two elections. RCV isn't a perfect system but then no system is - that's why there are so many different ones in use - but it isn't a terrible system either.

And it still had nothing to do with the error that triggered this thread in the first place.[/quote][/QUOTE]

 

And in those 47 years the population of the US has grown by 55%. The more people you try and stuff into as single day of voting the worse idea it becomes.

 

The purpose is to promote more candidates and encourage more people to vote. As a Third Party candidate voter, I know my candidate will rarely win, even though they are far and away the best choice. This discourages some people from voting and also keep people from voting in elections that are seen as a "runaway" RCV allows 3rd party candidates to get more votes, but also for those voters to still have an impact on the outcome. It is also far cheaper for the city/state. A runoff election cost just as much to administer as the previous election, and there is no advantage to the runoff.

With RCV it causes those candidate to care about other voters before the runoff. It discourages negative campaigning as pissing off people from the other side is not a good way to get ranked higher.

"Just because we have always done it that way" is a terrible reason to keep doing it that way.

 

So you think the 2016 elections were fair and not influenced?

ETA: An I agree there is a cult problem in this country, but it is the left that fermented it to dangerous levels!

 

Two very separate things.

An outside source can influence and election and it can still be fair and free of widespread fraud.

It is a very different thing to say that someone attempted to influence the election and to say that there are millions of fake votes that cost a candidate the win

Anyone that thinks it is only from one side is part of the problem.

 

We have plenty of candidates and how does this encourage more people to vote? OH we have ranked voting now I think I'll go and vote now, preposterous. It makes it more difficult and confusing. And if the vote is seen a a runaway ranked voting is going to matter since one candidate ran away with and no runoff.

And the claim that 3rd party will get more votes and those voters will have more impact is another myth that totally ignores voter "exhaustion" as I have already mentioned.
From a LIBERAL publicatin

Ranked-Choice Voting Is Not the Solution
RCV, on the ballot next week in Maine, is far from an adequate fix to our deep-seated electoral woes.

......RCV regularly falls short of Yes on 5’s headline goal: a majority winner. In a 2014 paper in the journal Electoral Studies, political scientists Craig Burnett and Vladimir Kogan analyzed some 600,000 votes cast using RCV in four local elections in California and Washington. In none of the four did the winner receive a majority of votes cast.

How is this possible? On paper, RCV ensures that no one can win unless she receives more than half of the vote. But what works on paper doesn’t necessarily on ballots.

The problem is exhaustion. Not the kind you’re experiencing now, as you cry yourself to sleep at the prospect of another day absorbing the pay-per-view punishment of “Clinton v. Trump: The Rumble in the Rustbelt.” No, this is ballot exhaustion, which happens when voters rank too few candidates to stay meaningful until the final runoff. Say there are five candidates running, but the voter ranks only three, and all three are eliminated prior to the last round. As a result, none of their votes will have gone to the winning candidate or the runner-up. In effect, their ballot doesn’t figure in the outcome.

This may sound like a marginal problem, but its effects can be substantial. Of the four elections Burnett and Kogan studied, none produced an exhaustion rate lower than 9.6 percent. In one case, the 2011 San Francisco mayoral race, just over 27 percent of valid first-round ballots were exhausted before the last tally. “Voters who cast these discarded ballots had no say in the final round of vote redistribution, which decided the election outcome,” Burnett and Kogan write. This is akin to saying that, thanks to RCV, 27 percent of voters who cast primary ballots sat out the general.

When RCV does produce majorities, they may be unconvincing. In 2010 the Australian Labor Party won the House of Representatives with just 38 percent of first-place votes on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition captured 43 percent. That hardly sounds like a firm mandate.
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/ranked-choice-voting-is-not-the-solution/



And cost are now the issue well the lowest cost election is one day of voting, if cost are your concerns then let' get of having to keep polling places opened for weeks and having to keep and store ballots for weeks and having people handling mail in ballots and checking signatures for weeks I mean we can REALLY cut cost if we all just vote as we have done for the VAST majority of our country's existence.

Not nearly as much when it get's down to the top two and they know exactly which voters they have to go after and can concentrate on those voters. What is has turned up is the idea that people can enter as deep dark horse and get a few supporters and then to wheel and deal those voters to get something in return. Yang was going around negotiating with others about his votes when he lost and who he would tell those voters to vote for.

It is when it works.

 

So what? So have the number of voting places and voting machines where I vote. The more days and the more ways people can vote the more rules that have to be applied the more confusion injected the worse an idea it becomes. "Keep it simple stupid".

 

Can you show some evidence there has been anywhere close to a 55% increase in the number of voting locations where you live? The trend across most of the country is to have less, not more.

Not really. Sorry you are confused by it all, but it is not really a problem for most people.

So, going by this logic we should all still be using rotary dial phones as they worked. Dial up modems worked, why move away from those?

 

[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

No I'm not wrong and you have presented nothing to refute it. The huge jump in the numbers came not in the initial counting but in a subsequent round.

I await your defense of ranked voting in our little debate here then, that is what you do come here to debate, right?

And it's not an either this or that caused the chaos that is going on it is a combination of them. The complicated and confusing RVS and the incompetence, if not corruption, of election officials.

 

Sorry, I no longer speak with people who post as cultits.

 

There were initial counts of the first choice votes cast on the day which gave an indication of the result but that kind of reporting would always be preliminary regardless of the system. The first formal count when the ballots were entered in to the tabulation system and that is where the error occurred. The error is not as complex as you're trying to make out and there is no reason to believe it was in any way due to the ranked choice voting system.

No, I came here to correct the misrepresentation in the OP that the error was due to the voting system. That isn't a defence of that system in itself. I could hate the idea of RCV but that still wouldn't make it responsible for the error.

You have provided zero evidence that the nature of the voting system caused the error though. They tested the vote tabulation system and failed to clear it down before the real election. There will always be a tabulation system, that system will always need testing and it will always be a simple task to clear down the test results. Why would this be any different with any other voting system?

 

Then we should be able to have a dialog as I surely am not a cultist, but willing to speak to them to understand their mindset, hence why I do not mind talking to you.

 

This is about 95% of the problem. People latch onto one *widget* and use it as an excuse for anything and everything. It's pervasive on this forum. As soon as I see some posters' names, I know it's going to be something hateful, overly dramatic and divisive. It's like they only have one note and any kind of civilized discussion is impossible.

 

I think ranked voting is probably more difficult and time consuming all the way around both for voters and vote counters. I fail to see the advantage. The simplest way is normally the best way in almost everything.