Democratic activists are looking to overhaul the party’s presidential primary process with ranked-choice voting.
Proponents of the idea have privately met with Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and other leading party officials who want to see ranked-choice voting in action for 2028. Those behind the push include Representative Jamie Raskin, the nonprofit Fairvote Action, and Joe Biden pollster Celinda Lake.
Axios reports that ranked-choice supporters told a DNC breakfast meeting in D.C. that they believe it would unify and strengthen the party, prevent votes from being “wasted” after candidates withdraw, and encourage candidates to build coalitions. The publication quotes DNC members as being divided on the issue, with some being open and others thinking that it is best left to state parties.
Neat. You caught up to… alaska.
Not new at all.
Neat, help us out ween out loser dems too.
ABOUT FUCKING TIME
The first step to get the voting fixed shouldn’t be ranked voting. It should be getting rid of winner takes it all. If a party gets 40% of the votes, and there are 10 representatives, it should get 4 of them, not 0.
What would happens is Dem states will do proportional allocation, republican states would stick with winner take all, and you end up with a permanent republican presidency.
States run elections, states also get to decide how to allocate their electors.
Anything short of a constitutional amendment will not work.
This is talking about the Democratic Primary. What you’re saying is definitely true if we were changing the allocation of Electoral College votes for the general election – for that, we need Congress to pass an Amendment (or maybe a regular law would suffice?)
Amendment. Or as the other comment alluded to, interstate compact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
That probably requires congrsssional approval. And even then, that last until the supreme court strikes it down. Or even if it doesn’t gwt struck down, its unclear if the next congress have the ability to revoke the previous session of congress’s approval of the interstate compact.
So many shenanigans.
You can solve that with state compacts which go into force when you hit a threshold where that’s not a risk
the electoral college experiment should be abandoned. It clearly didn’t serve the function it was intended to serve when it was implemented 200 years ago.
It actually largely has. It both reduced the numbers of people who needed to ride horses around to figure out the winner, and it helped keep power consolidated with the powerful.
A good chunk of our early democratic institutions were designed with a lot of influence by people who didn’t entirely trust their constituency and wanted to keep things from being too democratic. So you have several options for elected officials to disregard voters in most matters, and the president has the power to say “nah” to legislation.
Okay, but the entire idea was to allow the electors to basically go against the will of the people, if the people are a bunch of idiots and elect a despot wannabe. And when a despot wannabe actually got elected, the electors didn’t go against the idiot electorate.
Now all electors are party loyalists chosen by their party, nobody aint doing any faithless defection.
Oh good, let’s focus on voting and not things like gerrymandering and Citizens United. Or even the Electoral College. The candidate with the most money usually wins, so even if you change how voting works odds are it’s still gonna be a republican or democrat frontrunner.
I hear ya! It’s true, ranked-choice voting is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to fixing our broken electoral system. But hey, every little bit helps!
This is for the primary. This means that people can vote for a more progressive candidate as their first choice and have their second choice be for the “safe” candidate.
The winner of the Democratic presidential primary is almost certainly always going to be a Democrat. There’s almost nothing you can do to change that.
Beyond that, they can do multiple things so doing w good thing doesn’t mean they didn’t do something else.
How do you propose they fix gerrymandering, a state level issue affecting the election of representatives, or citizens United, a supreme Court ruling, via the procedural rules of the party presidential primary? It’s like saying there’s no point brushing your teeth if you have credit card debt.
It’ll be an uphill battle since Ranked Choice Voting would weaken the power of both Democrats & Republicans and party leadership knows it but I also support it strongly for just that reason.
If it gave party leaders more in depth knowledge of which candidates had broad appeal (which is likely - knowing how popular each first + second choice combination is gives power to data analytics), they could more accurately spend resources to win more general elections. Actually giving the party more power.
Eventually. They would have to completely rebuild many of the established campaign strategy tools. I think sunk cost fallacy (we invested in these tools, we can’t switch to a system where our expensive software and stuff isn’t used!) is a more powerful block here than power hunger.
This is just for the primary, not the general election - but the same idea applies there, as it weakens the ability of the party leadership to choose who wins
Jesus fuck finally.
This is how we get rid of the one party system.
Missouri tricked people into banning it by making it sound like they were banning non-citizens from casting multiple votes and the dumb dumbs who don’t read anything just voted for it.
Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:
- Make the Constitution consistent with state law by only allowing citizens of the United States to vote;
- Prohibit the ranking of candidates by limiting voters to a single vote per candidate or issue; and
- Require the plurality winner of a political party primary to be the single candidate at a general election?
MO GOP had a long history of getting illiterate voters to vote against themselves with shade language. Voters approved an anti-gerrymandering amendment but GOP put confusing language on the ballot, a year later, that tricked voters into cancelling that out.
A judge had to step in on the abortion ballot proposal because they tried to do it again. Thankfully, the judge made them out clear language on it. Unfortunately, they are trying it again with abortion next year.
https://www.kmbc.com/article/missouri-abortions-judge-approves-ballot-language/68915245
Thats because republicans have absolutely no morals or shame.
I didn’t vote for it because I can read
Lol I made a showerthoughts post about how its such a wonderful thing that global literacy rates are rising… then these shit happens…
🤦♂️
In all honesty Missouri is suffering pretty severely from braindrain, in some ways it’s worse than the Deep South. It’s probably in a worse state long-term even compared to the most rural and fucked over parts of Appalachia.
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I just want to point out that Ranked-Choice Voting was on the ballot in Colorado in 2024. It ultimately failed because it was opposed by both parties. I was surprised, because I talked through the issues with a friend who considered herself “very progressive” she mentioned she was against Ranked-Choice Voting because her Democratic Voting Guide recommended voting against it.
From https://tsscolorado.com/colorado-voters-easily-reject-ranked-choice-voting/
…it angered both Democratic and Republican party leaders and drew opposition from prominent Democratic backers, including a plethora of unions, progressive groups and some environmental organizations.
Happened in Massachusetts in 2020 too. Absolutely insane that people don’t realize how much better RCV is
It really does show that 1) People in general aren’t very smart. Most people won’t do some basic research to see what they’re voting for. And 2) Most people are just going to vote how their party tells them.
including a plethora of unions
If there iwas anything that pissed me off more than the Democrats abandoning support for workers it was union leadership doing so.
If you blindly follow a Democratic Voting Guide, you’re not “very progressive.” Probably not even “kind of progressive.”
Ohio passed a law this year banning state funds to any municipality that implemented ranked choise voting. Only one or two representatives voted against it. The only bi-partisan bill they passed thos year
Yeah, politicians are scared of anything that will disrupt their power structure.
This shouldn’t be that surprising, RCV will completely topple the establishment politics apple cart. When people are no longer forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, they can instead choose someone who’s a halfway decent human being who will represent them instead of corpo pac donors. It would be absolutely transformative to roll this out nationally.
The problem with the two party system, is the only thing they’ll always agree on is that it should remain a two party system.
We had the same issue in the UK. We had the choice of something else and it was dismissed as “too complicated” and “too expensive”.
So instead most of us have their votes thrown out locally, and then most of the rest have them thrown out nationally.
You mean one party system.
Following a democratic voting guide has got to be the least progressive you can be as a Democrat
It has already passed in Alexandria VA for the 2024 elections and the DNC sued to prevent it from being implemented. They kept rcv option off the ballot in DC.
Even if it were implemented across the country no capitalist politician would be ranked on my ballot
It was combined with a top 4 jungle primary that was not ranked choice, which was why a lot of people who might have voted for it otherwise voted against it. It looked like a way to implement ranked choice while creating a system where less moderate candidates would be eliminated in the primary.
Could we also make it so primaries don’t take six months? I’ve never voted in a presidential primary where my vote affected the outcome at all because every state I’ve lived in was late in the schedule.
Then what is the media going to talk about for 6 months?
Don’t get me started on the electoral-media complex that makes our elections too damn long.
If we’re making impossible demands on the system I’d also include 60 day election cycles. No political advertising or campaigning more than two months before the election.
But I’m a bad American who hates the GDP.
It all comes down to the political parties. Which is partly why our elections suck so much.
You’d think either party would want the chance to talk about their candidate for an extra few months. But maybe they’re worried familiarity breeds contempt.
Actual policy ideas instead of horse race polling, maybe?
The real problem is with the people consuming the media. They would rather see the horse race polling than actual policies.
Same here, it’s such bullshit. Then people scold me when I complain as if I didn’t go to the primaries when typically it’s the primary that doesn’t come to me. How dare I not go vote for someone who already conceded, I must be what’s wrong with democracy.
Oh but don’t you want to know first which Democrat places like Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas would like? You know, those bastions of democracy.
/s, like it’s needed lol.
They stagger primaries to manufacture the party choice for their chosen candidate
Six months? I think you mean a year and a half.
I kinda get why they drag it out, it allows canidates to respond to the electorate better.
My suggestion would be to make it take 3 months and divide the delegates evenly between all 3. Hell let Iowa be a week early. Plus with ranked choice if a canidate drops out those votes can be reallocated
I do just feel like there’s something about these long races that allow us to get a much better idea of who a canidate is. Once they begin to feel the pressure they start to change.
Except candidates have been less responsive to the electorate than ever before
You still get to see how they handle under pressure. Which i think is important especially when picking a residential canidate.
“Seeing how they perform under pressure” has yet to allow me to actually voice my opinion before the current system prevented it from mattering.
Yet they love to tell me that “every vote counts” after my vote didn’t count.
Man I didn’t mean to call the party perfect or desirable in any way. I was just trying to express how I do think longer primaries can be beneficial but the current system should be reworked.
If you want to complain, and rightfully so, how bad the dems are there’s at least 20 other threads where that is the exact topic of conversation. You don’t have to force it in here
I wasn’t forcing anything. This thread was the elongated primary season. I voiced a very real issue with the current length. That fits in perfectly with someone singing the praises of a system that has not gone to the end of primary in like two decades.
It doesn’t matter how long they endure the pressure if the race never lasts long enough for the last states to get a real vote. Staggering those states doesn’t add anything to the equation.
Right issues on promary length is fine. You quickly pivoted into “dems are bad and out of touch” as a point of policy. Not due to length of the primary. You were right with those thoughts just not at all what I was talking about.
Tbh, it’s exhausting. If the dems even hint at doing something slightly better it quickly becomes an absolute dog pile of “since the dems are not becoming literally perfect overnight this is still bad”. Like I’m starting to think people don’t want any improvement in our political systems
It boils down to this: If you support the direct will of the people in choosing a candidate, you probably like RCV. If you want the party to have significant influence in choosing a candidate, you probably don’t like RCV.
It is possible the Democrats are realizing that their establishment selected candidates are not competitive against modern Republicans.
It’s also possible they are considering somebody more radical but want plausible deniability about how that person came to be elected.
Or it’s possible they are just out of ideas. Or maybe all three…Interesting given that in the recent past the Democratic Party opposed implementing RCV 👀.
I’m still betting they oppose it. They’re just not in power right now. The second they have a majority again all RCV initiative stops. Maybe a state or two flips over to RCV in the mean time if we’re lucky.
Yeah, they know the progressives will beat them if they allow rcv
Democrats will ratfuck progressives under any ruleset.
Crazy idea. What if the Democratic primary was actually a democracy? Let the candidate who wins the most states with an electoral weight be the candidate.
Let all the states vote before declaring a winner. I’ve never voted in a primary with more than one active candidate.
Makes sense, having all the votes over about a month would be convenient.
Make them open. Make then count. Make them accountable.
Good news!
The voting members of the DNC agreed with you 8 months ago when they elected a chair with a decade long track record of fair primaries and then putting the full weight of the party behind every candidate in the general.
We’re also very unlikely to see a push to consolidate behind a “winner” after only a handful of states vote.
I don’t think the current DNC chair has ever weighed in on any primary. Even for Mamdani he waited till the day after the primary. And Martin loves Mamdani almost as much as trump does.
So we can expect neutrality till the very last state reports their primary result.
So they plan to kill super delegates?
Super delegates only vote in the second round. That’s been on the books since 2020. Sure, it doesn’t remove them entirely, but you just need to have the majority of pledged delegates for it to not matter.
There was a rule vote in 2024, the same time Martin got elected, that changed some stuff. So I’m assuming Martin didn’t want to immediately override them when it won’t matter for years.
But ideally I’d want to see the removal of all delegates, supes and normies.
Straight popular vote in the primary, 1:1 representation, and the candidate is just the person the most Dems want to vote for.
Straight popular vote for a candidate is a great way to almost guarantee losses for the electoral college.
Huh?
I thought you wanted representation…
But you don’t want actual 1:1 representation?
I’ll never guess it, you’re going to have to share what “moderate” level of representation you believe is ideal. And obviously people are going to question why you believe more representation than that would be a negative
You need a way to ensure the presidental candidate is popular across many states, because that’s part of the election. Straight popular vote can easily skew to a candidate that wins a few states by a large margin, but ultimately loses the election.
What hypothetical candidate would win all of a large state like Cali by a huge margin but lose to a Republican in enough smaller states that they lose the general?
Like, you know the EC is relatively proportional like the House, it’s not set up like the Senate…
