AskBeehaw

2008 readers

1 users here now

An open-ended community for asking and answering various questions! Permissive of asks, AMAs, and OOTLs (out-of-the-loop) alike.

In the absence of flairs, questions requesting more thought-out answers can be marked by putting [SERIOUS] in the title.

Subcommunity of Chat

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

it's election season, Beehaw, so — what are your thoughts on compulsory (mandatory) voting? (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

60 comments fedilink hide all child comments

good idea/bad idea, necessary democratic reform or authoritarian imposition? are there better or worse ways to do it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Our preferential voting also helps to drag the main parties towards the middle too. But that seems unlikely to ever get in over there since it'd allow more than two parties

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oddly, IRV is actually seeing some success, slowly growing across the States. But compulsory voting is basically a non-starter over there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

USA trying to improve the electoral system!? Shocked Pikachu face

Surprisingly good news

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah, it's one of the very few advantages of the fact that their elections—even federal elections—are not actually standardised nationwide. States run them according to their own rules. Mostly this is a bad thing, but it does mean that one place can improve their system like this as an experiment, without needing to convince the entire country to do it at once.

So I think there are 2 states that do IRV currently. And there might be a few more places where IRV is used in non-congressional/presidential races.