politics

Am I out of touch?

If you weren't out of touch with the median US voter, you wouldn't be on this website.

I voted against the CO ranked choice voting because it seems to me that the "open" primary that goes with it would result in the rankable choices being exactly four of the same ghoul by allowing the two party duopoly to shut third parties out completely just by running an extra ghoul each.

Portland, OR has RCV for city positions and there was a lot of hand-wringing about how a significant portion of the electorate didn't fill out the ranked choice part of the ballot because they found it too confusing.

My response was that if people are going to self-select as too stupid to handle the simple task of ranked choice voting, then I do not have a problem with them not voting.

they don’t want ~~power~~ ranked choice voting,
they want to endlessly “critique” ~~power~~ firstpastthepost voting

and don't want to see their precious: lose ground

the bundling of the open primary with ranked confuses and is opposed by more people. just ranked choice would do better i think, people can wrap their heads around that but you start talking about how two (enemy party) candidates can go to the general and your (good party) candidates wouldn't in an open primary--even though the enemy winning would be fait-accompli in the old system too--but I guess not being able to cast your FPTP protest votes on candidates who never win in solid districts would break the kayfabe

People find it confusing? I don't know.

In the case of the open primaries, if you’ve got a state where one party regularly gets 55-60 percent of the vote, open primaries just opens up the possibility of the minority party voters plus 10-ish percent of majority party voters with independent/antiestablishment streaks banding around a moderate/independent majority party candidate. Which threatens the majority party, so they campaign against it.

In the case of RCV, in primaries there’s often several antiestablishment candidates and one establishment candidate. FPTP ensures the establishment candidate wins whereas in RCV it means the antiestablishment vote could be great enough to filter to one winning candidate. In the general, the same principle applies as in open primaries, so once again the parties campaign against it.

I don't understand US primaries at all, why does the state help political parties choose which candidates to run in real elections

I've talked with people about it ant they found it confusing at first. Once I had the chance to explain it usually they came around to support it, but there wasn't enough of that in my state to push it over the edge.

EDIT: This is a big reason why doorknocking is so important, and why I hammer on it all the time. Other issues like ballot measures can be championed by organized individuals on the ground.

I've also learned about score voting recently and now I think that would be better

Ranked choice voting is a trojan horse for fascist in the us imo