Comments

1

" If you’re the only one who likes pineapple on pizza, then tough luck. If you're vegan, starve." No, as you yourself Hannah wrote in your previous article, it's Chege who wants the vegan people to starve. To quote from your article, "To satisfy all the competing likes and dietary needs (damn vegetarians) and come up with a pizza everyone is okay with, eventually you will settle on a cheese pizza or on the least-offensive veggie pizza, Chege said."

So it's Chege by his own words that wants vegans to starve, not the Approval Voting advocates. Did you just forget what you wrote or something? What's with the lying?

2

Not sure why The Stranger is all hot for the status quo, for once. Pretty light on details for why this is a Bad Thing. The current primary system is an absolute dogpile, with spoilers and rando candidates emerging from the dust to vie for top leadership position of $6B budget enterprise, armed police force etc. Cary Moon anyone? At least this approach is an attempt to create some order of our primary system. Honestly, local candidates would benefit from opting into a non-binding party system, so at least people know what camp they’re in. I would have liked to see less attention to legal issues and maybe ask Fargo or St Louis how it’s going for them.

3

And the pizza metaphor is patronizing. What are we all a bunch of stoners?

4

@1,

Huh? She was quoting someone. Unless I'm misreading something, your issue is not with Hannah, but rather the person she's quoting here.

5

I just re-read the post and it comes off as pretty straight forward and objective reporting, really only quoting the advocates who are explicitly for or against the proposal. I think it's intriguing and almost certainly a step up from the existing systems.

Mostly unrelated, but it's kinda fascinating to me that our society is capable of coming up with so many interesting and innovative potential fixes to consider implementing on local levels, but are simultaneously saddled with the wildly undemocratic and disproportionately influential & powerful United States Senate nationally. We're dumb like that.

6

It was under this new approval voting system that St. Louis managed to elect its first-ever Black woman—and a progressive to boot—to the position of Mayor. https://news.stlpublicradio.org/government-politics-issues/2021-04-07/7-takeaways-from-a-history-making-election-night-in-st-louis

7

@4 No, the writer Hannah intentionally misquoted her previous article to make Chege's pretty abhorrent analogy seem more palatable. She's no where near objective on this.

8

This post contains much innuendo equating Approval Voting with white racism, but fails to support any of it. For example: "Approval voting operates as a majoritarian system, so it’s great for majorities, but it would dilute minority groups who tend to vote somewhat in blocs, Chueng said."

How would Approval Voting "dilute [the votes of] minority groups"? This is simply not explained. As any voting scheme which did not give victory to the majority would, by definition, be undemocratic, it's hard to understand exactly what Chueng's objection is.

These attempts to associate Approval Voting with white racism become unintentionally funny, when viewed in context of how Seattle's citizens have actually voted:

"In a city that is mostly white, Cheung and Chege argued that approval voting could lead to minority groups getting stuck with a less-than-ideal candidate that the majority likes."

Seattle's most recent mayoral general election saw a BIPOC male defeat a woman of color. Twenty-five years ago, "a city that is mostly white" had a Black mayor, and the votes of that "mostly white" city had helped elect both a Black King County Executive, and the first Asian-American governor of any mainland state.

There may be good arguments against Approval Voting, and if so, at least one of those arguments may be based in the electorate's inherent racism. This headline post validates neither of these ideas.

9

What exactly is being proposed by "some kind of proportional voting?"

10

And I fail to see how approval voting would make any difference if you assume that the voters are racist. We're a majority white city, so under the current system, said racist voters would be expected to only put white people in the top two. As Tensor points out, that is far from what is happening.

Under approval voting, the same hypothetical KKK-filled electorate would be expected to approve of only white candidates, again ensuring that one of them gets elected. Fortunately, recent history demonstrates that Seattle's electorate is far from the white supremacist slumber party that the article seems to assume it is.

Finally, the issue (some would say it is a feature) with a partisan primary system is that if you don't want to be stuck eating vegan cardboard, you have to vote for the least offensive meat party candidate rather than the veal delight you really want. On the other hand, it kind of keeps things in the middle; neither veal and baby rabbit pizza nor wacky socialist candidates wind up getting chosen.

12

@7,

What previous article of Hannah's? I just googled the quote "If you’re the only one who likes pineapple on pizza, then tough luck. If you're vegan, starve," and the lone returned hit was this post.

Also, why would she accurately quote him, then mis-quote him later? Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to simply mis-quote him from the start?

I also tried googling "To satisfy all the competing likes and dietary needs (damn vegetarians) and come up with a pizza everyone is okay with, eventually you will settle on a cheese pizza or on the least-offensive veggie pizza," but am only coming up with hits related to pizza restaurants.

If you're going to go around making accusations of journalistic negligence, I'd suggest doing a better job of sourcing your information.

13

@12 https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/11/22/63031658/proposed-initiative-would-let-seattle-vote-for-as-many-primary-candidates-as-theyd-like

14

@13,

Please, for the love of fucking god, show me where Hannah misquoted anyone, intentionally or otherwise, either in that article or this one.

Or allow me to save you the trouble and inform you that she did not.

15

@11: "At the end of the day no matter how many candidates there are for a job if there’s only one job you have to make a decision of which candidate is best."

If you've ever worked on an actual hiring committee, you know they should practice some kind of ranked-choice or approval voting, because their first chosen candidate can decline their job offer. If that happens, then they extend an offer to their second choice, etc. It's only in elections that we fill a position with the top vote-getter and never have to revisit the decision, because any such re-visit would happen at the next election.

17

@16: Yes, whether we use our current system, or Approval Voting, or ranked-choice voting (of which Approval Voting is a simpler version), voters will still have to decide who reaches elective office.

My point is our current system allows for no Plans B or C; Approval Voting and ranked-choice voting offer those options. Voters would still have decisions to make (in fact, they would have more decisions to make!); why you keep claiming they would not is beyond me.

Good night, sir.


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