I think it’s because the majority of people don’t understand what it is. I voted for it, but I guarantee my parents saw that on the ballot and were like “what the fuck does that mean?” I asked some of my coworkers and they said they didn’t even get it.
The people never cease to amaze me with their stupidity and/or willful ignorance. Ordering things in a list is something we teach kindergartners.
Things take time. It’ll take putting it out there, trying again, winning some battles in small places and losing it in big places, and a lot of persistence for it to really go anywhere.
It would be nice if the news would tell people that these things are important and give them some kind of insight into what was going to go on with their government, but that’s not what we have, unfortunately. We need a new social media.
Tell people they do something similar in Ireland (for all levels of government) - and there’s an Irish election coming up in a couple of weeks so watch how some interesting counts unfold. Note how the system particularly favours some maverick independents.
The word isn’t out on it yet. It’s simultaneously central to how everything works, and arcane.
This needs to be required viewing for everybody:
I mean it doesn’t matter now, but it’s still good to have it out there. In an archival sense, at least. Aliens, this video is something the voting public writ large did not understand, and that’s part of how this all happened.
Aliens, this video is something the voting public writ large did not understand, and that’s part of how this all happened.
Don’t hit me with this in the middle of the day, when I haven’t prepared for it.
Hopefully they meant alas
Was talking to my mother earlier, saying how excited I was there was a ballot measure for switching a lot of primaries in CO to ranked choice. She said she they had ranked choice in VT a little while back, and she didn’t like it, and that it was too confusing. I was sad and surprised. Never occurred to me that anyone would object to a better method, especially for a reason that sounded like “oh I just don’t know about all these new fangled computers”. Oof.
Feels like alternate voting has the same issues that a lot of new ideas do, which is PR and UX (I’m looking at you, science!). I hope we don’t have to wait for old clueless people to die off before things change.
That’s the number one complaint I’ve seen, actually the only complaint I’ve seen from real people.
“It’s something important, I don’t want to mess it up, I don’t understand what it’s asking me to do, it’s not doing what I’m telling it to do, it’s broken, why don’t they just leave it alone? Are they trying to trick me?”
What was so confusing about it?
Flat size 12 font at waist height from a standing position, First time they had ever seen it Some weird shit about multiple votes per page (I still don’t know what they meant) Votes being out of order
I wouldn’t classify them as old and clueless, I’ve met people in there 40s who wouldn’t be able see the screen of what I described above (which is how it was described to me) and would need assistive tech to do so. That’s not even acknowledging the horrible UX that very well lead to mistakes.
Is it because they didn’t use a ranked choice voting mechanism? ( said in partial jest)
Of course they did, nobody who would have voted in support of it went to go vote for it.
