In France, there is run-off voting. You get to both have the cake of voting for who’s gonna be the best, and then eat the cake of even if your favorite lost, you can keep the most evil out of power. I’m so jealous of this and I urge everyone to please help keep the fachos out!
Sometimes it’s pretty frustrating thinking about election systems since not only are fair elections impossible, even if we did have fair elections, people would still vote for some pretty bad policies. But let’s make the best of the world as it is (without giving up on saving it), and please vote.
@Sandra I'm not that worried about voting systems : none of the "alternative" voting systems that are popular (approbabtion, Majority Judgement, or other mean-based score votings) is perfect but for large scale choices, they are usually quite fine.
The main issue is getting rid of uninomial voting systems like the one we use in France.
This single feature leads to strategic voting and to the curse of alternatives, where candidates close to you reduce your chances.
Most systems fare better.
@Sandra yeah, I want them to lose by the closest possible margin so Macron doesn't get to say that the French people is rallying behind him.
At least if he is to continue distroying our future for 5 years, I don't want him to be able to say that a majority of French people trusted him to do that.
I want the fachos to lose resoundingly.
@Sandra that's the thing -- even a 90-10 result in favour of Macron would not be a "resounding defeat of the fascists", because the fascists are also in Macron's team (Blanquer, Darmanin, Castaner,..).
This run off is fascist v. fascist
Now I do agree that Le Pen will be way worse (not just because she deals directly with neonazi militias) and I do hope she'll be denied the presidency.
But i also understand what @silmathoron is saying about the thinnest victory margin possible: a big score in the run off would be immediately spun by macron's team as a nonnegotiable mandate to carry out his policies, like it was for Chirac in 2002. This is also very dangerous, more so since Chirac maliciously synchronised both executive and legislative elections to happen simultaneously. Least bad outcome this year is a thin margin victory and a hung parliament.
I gave you a bad answer because I didn't acknowledge or validate your point about mandate strength. Yes, you'e right, that's a problem, a really big problem, both an optics problem and a practical legislative power problem. I can't solve it. I just think that the other possibility (a relatively higher proportion of votes going to RN) is a much bigger problem.
@silmathoron
"I do agree that Le Pen will be way worse" — and that is the only thing on the table for this particular runoff election. There is no longer a way to get a good candidate elected. It's deadly poison (REM) vs even more disgusting deadly poison (RN).
"Least bad outcome this year is a thin margin victory and a hung parliament." — I do not co-sign that statement.
It's… again, if it were IRV, this would not even be an issue. This is the problem with the human compiler at work. We're asked to manually do the robots' job and it's so distasteful. Macron won over the good candidates. That sucked. That was a tragedy (and will be, throughout the rest of this cycle, until 2027). Now a writhing corpse called RN has flopped its way onto the table. Kick it off.
(Also let's keep working for election reform because yes, this system sucks.)
@silmathoron