Maine has rank choice voting. In our congressional several years ago the candidate who received the second largest number of votes won. Rather than having each local town count their votes and send it to a central point, the ballots are collected, recounted according to a confusing formula and weeks later someone tells us who won.
'The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.'
I had looked up this, but now see that it is may have been a common idea much earlier.
“Stalin’s former secretary, Boris Bazhanov, in his memoirs, claims that in 1923, Stalin said something along the lines of:
“I regard it as completely unimportant who in the party will vote and how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”
A New York Times editorial in 1880 included this line:
“I care not who casts the votes of a nation, provided I can count them.”
These suggest the idea (that counting votes is the crucial part) was already floating in political discourse in English well before the Stalin‐attributed version.”
Residential parking won't matter when the reverse watermelons take the cars away.
Maine has rank choice voting. In our congressional several years ago the candidate who received the second largest number of votes won. Rather than having each local town count their votes and send it to a central point, the ballots are collected, recounted according to a confusing formula and weeks later someone tells us who won.
'The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.'
Joseph Stalin
RCV is a scam.
The original on that was Boss Tweed.
I had looked up this, but now see that it is may have been a common idea much earlier.
“Stalin’s former secretary, Boris Bazhanov, in his memoirs, claims that in 1923, Stalin said something along the lines of:
“I regard it as completely unimportant who in the party will vote and how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”
A New York Times editorial in 1880 included this line:
“I care not who casts the votes of a nation, provided I can count them.”
These suggest the idea (that counting votes is the crucial part) was already floating in political discourse in English well before the Stalin‐attributed version.”
ChatGPT
There was a famous Thomas Nast cartoon about that.
Thanks. I found it Harpers Weekly 1871.
The UK should really move to ranked choice voting. The fact that one party has a huge majority in Parliament
based on such a small vote share suggests first past the post system doesn’t work very well with the vote dispersed among many parties.