Are STAR, IRV, and Condorcet constitutional?
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There's a strong argument to be made in court--though as far as I'm aware it hasn't been made yet--that systems violating monotonicity or participation are unconstitutional. Specifically:
- Participation failures violate procedural due process for candidates, by introducing rules that are excessively arbitrary.
- P/M failures violate substantive due process, by stripping voters of their right to representation (essentially "negating their vote").
- P/M failures violate the "one person, one vote" principle laid out by the Supreme Court, occassionally replacing them with "one person, negative one votes."
- The Supreme Court is stacked with Republicans, most of whom don't like IRV, so they can come up with whatever other reasoning they'd like.
There's also precedent for this abroad--German courts have struck down voting methods after participation failures.
On the plus side for STAR/Condorcet, IRV is a lot more likely to be challenged in court on this basis. Still, even rare participation failures might be enough to get a method struck down.
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@lime I don't know too much about the US constitution, but one advantage of approval voting is that it is the only method that has basically no disadvantages relative to FPTP. There are plenty of methods better than FPTP, but FPTP proponents can always point to certain aspects of other methods where FPTP is better - generally simplicity and participation, and also sometimes monotonicity (with IRV at least). Approval is unharmed by any of this, and has many advantages over FPTP (as of course other methods do as well).
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@lime I don’t think any of the points are actually valid except the last one, with the addendum that Democratic representatives are just as likely to stall or derail voting reform efforts, because they also benefit directly from lack of accountability to public interests.