From The Denver Daily News, via Poli-Tea:
There’s at least one gubernatorial candidate happy to see Tom Tancredo enter the race for governor as a third-party candidate, and we’re not talking about Democratic candidate John Hickenlooper. Libertarian candidate Jaimes Brown welcomes Tancredo into the race “with open arms.” . . .
Brown believes Tancredo’s run is further evidence that the nation’s two-party system is broken, and he uses the event to advocate for a system known as approval voting. In an approval voting system, voters are allowed to vote for multiple candidates. The candidate with the most votes wins. Advocates say the system cuts back on “cheap elections.” They say the two-party system forces voters to simply vote down their party line, ignoring third-party candidates that may be more attractive to them, but that don’t get the vote because voters don’t believe they have a chance of winning. The system especially comes in handy during primaries, say advocates.
Many voters vote for the primary candidate with the most money, or the most establishment backing because they feel that will position the candidate to better defeat the other party come the general election. But Brown says the approval voting system puts an end to all of this. “I get that all the time that you’ve got to vote for someone that’s going to win. Well, shouldn’t you vote for who you want to win, not for someone who you’ve already pre-determined as being the only possibility?” said Brown.
“If you were falling into this trap of the Libertarian is going to take votes from the Republican, you might also vote for the Republican. But a lot of people don’t want to vote for the Republican, they want to vote for a Libertarian, or a Constitution, or even a Green for that matter.”
If any AV/RV supporters want to write in to the paper to give them props or provide more details on the voting method, be sure to head over to the Denver Daily News contact page, which has an embedded contact form. You might also be interested in learning more about Libertarian candidate for governor of Colorado Jaimes Brown as well.
Eric,
Ranked choice voting (simplified IRV) strategically “forces” you to rank your favorite frontrunner in first place, even if that is not your overall favorite. For instance, if you prefer Green>Dem>Rep, you are better off to top-rank Dem. Most IRV proponents do not understand this, so I made an attempt to explain it as simply as possible here:
http://www.electology.org/debate/IrvPlurality
In short, IRV does not eliminate the spoiler problem. The last IRV mayoral election in Burlington VT featured a bloc of Republican voters who could have gotten the Democrat instead of the Progressive if they had insincerely top-ranked the Democrat instead of the Republican. The Republican was indeed a spoiler. A candidate who did not win, but whose presence in the race gave them a worse result for being sincere.
Approval Voting never gives voters an incentive not to support their favorite candidate. It also never discards ballot data as IRV does.
http://scorevoting.net/IgnoreExec.html
These facts largely explain why Approval Voting comes out far ahead of IRV in Bayesian regret calculations, which is how you measure the performance of a voting method.
http://scorevoting.net/UniqBest.html
Also Approval Voting is simpler than IRV and can be subtotaled in precincts.
Approval voting is better than our current system of plurality voting, but Ranked Choice Voting is far better. With approval, a candidate I love, one I support tepidly, and one I can marginally stand, all get the same one vote. How is that really representative of my preferences? With ranked voting, I rank them in preference order. If my favorite loses, my vote is counted instead for my highest preference still in the running. No spoiler effect, no voting for the lesser of two evils. Ranked voting is the best way to go, and right now in Colorado, everyone can see plurality voting sucks.
LOL. For libertarians, the Republican Party is the trap, just as the Democratic Party is the trap for self-described progressives. The GOP are as hostile to freedom and liberty as the Democrats are to justice and equality.
Approval is the world’s simplest way to vote, and it’s spoilerproof.
And in many instances voters can avoid that “trap,” by simply voting LIBERTARIAN REPUBLICAN.
A record amount of Republicans are now identifying themselves as “libertarians.” There are now more elected libertarian Repulicans than ever. Now, even some of the most diehard social conservatives on the GOP ticket have a “libertarian streak.”
We’ve made enormous progress for the libertarian movement within the Republican Party over the last decade.