The NEW Nuclear Option. Puerto Rico and DC Statehood.

Seanchaidh

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For the second question Schwarzenegger got 4,206,248, Bustamante got 2,724,874, and McClintock got 1,161, 287. I trust I don't have to explain how well that parallels the subject at hand, and how under your logic Davis should have remained governor. However, that's not what happened. Davis was recalled and Schwarzenegger was the new governor. Because what you're objecting to is not chicainery, it's standard operating procedure.
Why not allow Sheriff Smith or Gray Davis to be on the second ballot?
 

Asita

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Why not allow Sheriff Smith or Gray Davis to be on the second ballot?
Because fundamentally that's double dipping. I'll keep my references confined to Davis for simplicity. The first question was a simply yes/no about whether he should remain in office. If yes, he'd remain in office and the results of the second question becomes an entirely moot point. If no, then the question being asked is "Who should be Davis's replacement?" Putting him back on the list for the latter question is asking them to vote on him - and him alone - twice: "Do you want Davis to keep the job? No? Well how would you like to rehire Davis for the same job?"
 

tstorm823

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Tstorm, I actually have formally studied analytics and related research, and this falls well within that purview. I'm quite familiar with the trade-offs of splitting and consolidating votes and conditional/nested questions. Moreover, I believe I've made it quite clear in the past that I do not appreciate being treated as an idiot. So unless you want this to devolve into another shouting match of thinly veiled jabs between us, I suggest taking a deep breath and dropping the patronizing "golly gee" attitude.
I'm not treating you like an idiot. I'm arguing with you. If you were an idiot, I wouldn't be arguing with you.
To take it away from hypothetical scenarios, we might look to California's gubernatorial recall election in 2003. Two questions on that ballot: Question 1: Should Governor Gray Davis be recalled? (55.4% in favor, 44.6% opposed) Question 2: In the event that a majority voted to recall him, which candidate should replace him? (48.6% Schwarzenegger, 31.5% Bustamante, 13.4% McClintock). But if you want some more concrete figures: 9,413,488 votes total, 4,007,783 saying not to recall Davis. For the second question Schwarzenegger got 4,206,248, Bustamante got 2,724,874, and McClintock got 1,161, 287. I trust I don't have to explain how well that parallels the subject at hand, and how under your logic Davis should have remained governor. However, that's not what happened. Davis was recalled and Schwarzenegger was the new governor. Because what you're objecting to is not chicainery, it's standard operating procedure.
To answer this, I'll borrow the 3rd party response:
Why not allow Sheriff Smith or Gray Davis to be on the second ballot?
The reason to not allow Gray Davis on the second ballot is because he just underwent a long legal recall effort, where they had to collect over 1 million signatures from California voters just to get the issue to the ballot. The overall process isn't weighted against the incumbent because of the high bar set to even trigger a recall vote. Having triggered it, the vote itself being biased against him makes sense. If you do a sucky enough job to warrant a major effort to recall you mid-term, you don't necessarily deserve a fair spot in the resulting election. Like, why is the hypothetical Sheriff Smith being fired? If the vote was triggered just because someone wanted a different sheriff more, that process is inappropriate. If the vote was triggered because the sheriff was sexually harassing arrested women, it'd be perfectly reasonable to conduct the vote that way. "Do you not want to keep this sheriff" is a meaningful material question in that case.

I don't see any particular reason to construct Puerto Rico's referendum in this way, other than to push the outcome of statehood. There have been multiple previous referendums where the people actively voted to maintain the status quo, so why construct the ballot as though the status quo is actively offensive to people?
 

Seanchaidh

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Because fundamentally that's double dipping. I'll keep my references confined to Davis for simplicity. The first question was a simply yes/no about whether he should remain in office. If yes, he'd remain in office and the results of the second question becomes an entirely moot point. If no, then the question being asked is "Who should be Davis's replacement?" Putting him back on the list for the latter question is asking them to vote on him - and him alone - twice: "Do you want Davis to keep the job? No? Well how would you like to rehire Davis for the same job?"
So? The alternative is potentially electing someone with even less support. If more people want to rehire the same person, it is undemocratic to ignore them.

But then, we're talking about plurality voting in the United States. It's already undemocratic. Anyway, "because that's double-dipping" is quite glib for an answer of why to exclude a candidate from a ballot.

If the vote was triggered because the sheriff was sexually harassing arrested women, it'd be perfectly reasonable to conduct the vote that way. "Do you not want to keep this sheriff" is a meaningful material question in that case.
If the vote was triggered because the sheriff was sexually harassing arrested women (or some other specific and unacceptable behavior), it'd be perfectly reasonable not to vote on whether to replace them at all; to decide to replace them using a much more suitable process for determining facts and enforcing standards.
 
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Asita

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I'm not treating you like an idiot. I'm arguing with you. If you were an idiot, I wouldn't be arguing with you.
That you were arguing with me does not preclude you from infantilizing me or otherwise treating me with disdain. They are not mutually exclusive concepts. Hence why I used the "'golly gee' attitude" as an example of such behavior.

To answer this, I'll borrow the 3rd party response:
Doing the same here, as otherwise the post is going to end up very redundant.

So? The alternative is potentially electing someone with even less support. If more people want to rehire the same person, it is undemocratic to ignore them.

But then, we're talking about plurality voting in the United States. It's already undemocratic. Anyway, "because that's double-dipping" is quite glib for an answer of why to exclude a candidate from a ballot.
I'll grant that the wording is perhaps a bit crass (it was very late and I was tired), but it's not unwarranted. To put it a bit more professionally, it is a passive aggressive attempt at undermining and potentially invalidating the results of the first vote by reasking it in a way that splits the 'no' vote among mutually exclusive options that are counted separately. It creates a loophole wherein a majority opinion that he be removed from office can be ignored by creating a duplicate question in which instead of Yes/No, the answers are instead Yes, No1, No2, and No3, artificially splitting the "No" vote to bias the results towards "Yes".

To make this a bit less abstract, let's imagine a circumstance wherein...let's say 60% of voters voted for his removal. Majority says they want him gone, and not by an insubstantial margin. For this scenario, we'll go on to say that he got put on the second ballot, and got 29% of the vote. For completion, let's say that the runner up got 26% of the vote, and the other two candidates got 24% and 21%. With these numbers, is it right to say that the people soundly voted in favor of removing him for office but also voted for him to remain in office? Is it right to ignore the first vote and instead focus on the second to say that the people voted against removing him from office?

The point of keeping the questions distinct to avoid a double-barreled question of "should this guy be removed from office, and if so who should replace him?" The question of whether or not the status quo should change is separate from the question of what should replace the status quo. Moreover, the end result of asking both at once is to unfairly favor the "no change" vote by turning the vote to "change" into several mutually exclusive options that are then counted separately. Returning to precedence, for instance, the first question of the 2003 recall election was "Should Davis remain in office" The answers were yes and no. The second question was if Davis was voted out, who should replace him. If we were to consolidate the two questions into one, then the answers become "1) Yes, 2) No, Schwarzenegger should replace him, 3) No, Bustamante should replace him, 4) No, McClintock should replace him..." and so on down the ballot. The "he should not be removed" vote remains static while the "he should be removed" vote becomes spread across many other candidates. The more the one option is spread, the more the format biases results towards the unspread option even if the respondents' sentiments have not changed.

The basic gist of this is perhaps better understood visually. I'll try to represent it here as best I can, but I ask some patience and imagination.

Should Gray Davis remain Governor?
Thank you for your vote.
2a) Who should replace him as governor?
  1. Schwarzenegger
  2. Bustamante
  3. McClintock
Thank you for your vote

This doesn't perfectly encapsulate it, but it does reflect the general gist of it. The Yes option is a vote for Davis. Votes for the other candidates only become relevant in the event that people decide that Davis should no longer hold the office. Where the ballot diverges from this visual is that, by keeping what I have listed as "2a" a separate question, the people who voted for Davis to keep the office can cast their vote for a replacement in the event that Davis is kicked out without their vote for the potential replacement counting towards the "no" vote, giving them a voice in Davis's potential replacement without voting against him. They don't get the option of casting a vote for Davis in 2a because, in addition to the issues listed above, that would uniquely give him two win conditions by listing him on the ballot twice.
 
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dreng3

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Make PR and DC states and then fix the part where the US is okay with "less representation for the same taxation". 1 man 1 vote, and each vote should carry the same weight.
 
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Seanchaidh

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To put it a bit more professionally, it is a passive aggressive attempt at undermining and potentially invalidating the results of the first vote by reasking it in a way that splits the 'no' vote among mutually exclusive options that are counted separately. It creates a loophole wherein a majority opinion that he be removed from office can be ignored by creating a duplicate question in which instead of Yes/No, the answers are instead Yes, No1, No2, and No3, artificially splitting the "No" vote to bias the results towards "Yes".
I know what the spoiler effect is (hence why I mentioned plurality voting). Regardless, if the incumbent in a recall election can win another election that runs in precisely the same way as they are ordinarily elected, it's not justified to exclude that candidate. The remedy for this isn't excluding candidates, it's not having positions be elected by plurality voting in the first place. And that's quite apart from how to structure a recall election ballot. Because this very same problem plagues every election decided by plurality without a majority; we just haven't gone to the trouble of measuring whether candidates that win a plurality can survive a "yes/no" except in the case of recall elections. "Double-dipping" remains glib.