The DC crash is interesting. Have you seen this video? https://youtube.com/watch?v=1IUJpRwzHZU

Seems like there were several factors. But we’ll need the black box analysis to know more.

The Helicopter pilot was certainly in the wrong place, but from their point of view, it’s understandable why they were in the wrong place.

The question is, did the controller give clear guidance?

And would a second pair of eyes on the situation have helped?

It will take more than 8 years to repair the damage done so far.

Fun fact, the Vatican did use Cardinal voting (Approval) for a few centuries, until some rich assholes took over.

But aside from that, your comment is useless.

The reason why the media can control the narrative is because of the voting system. See, it’s super easy to control two sides. Two teams.

But if you have a dozen teams, it’s much harder to control the narrative. And with a dozen teams, some of them will be on our side and will break up the media monopoly. Hell, we had Trust busters under or current system, we can have them again.

But I guess defeatism is comfortable for certain people. But it doesn’t get anything done, so fuck that shit.

All due to Ordinal voting. First Past the Post is the simplest Ordinal system, and completely broken if you have more than two candidates.

The only solution is a Cardinal voting system. Cardinal systems can handle two or twenty candidates without issues. Approval or STAR are the best options.

The sad part is, in 1780, First Past the Post was the only system available. It had to be adopted before mathematicians could look at it and say, hey shits broken.

The first was Condorcet. A French Mathematician who noticed the first problem with Plurality in the 1780s. But if you know your history, you’ll know that being a French Nobleman in the 1780s was not the healthiest thing to be, regardless of how fucking based you were.

As an aside here, Condorcet was fucking based. He was antislavery, and argued for full suffrage for both women and the slaves that he wanted to free. He argued for universal education for all, and thought it would solve so many problems.

Anyway the next guy who saw the problem with Plurality was another French Mathematician and political scientist named Durverger. He proved that First Past the Post voting will always result in two party dominance. And he proved this in the 1950s. So not much to be done about it.

The next guy to put his name to voting science was Kenneth Arrow, an American who in the 1970s, showed that all Ordinal voting systems were flawed.

But again, the data came in far too late to easily fix things.

So here we are. The saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 year ago, the next best time is now. So call your local representative and ask them to sponsor a switch of voting system to Approval or STAR.

By a worm no less.

Two rounds of counting. It’s more of a feature. Think of it as an automatic recount.

As to knowing who wins. Well, that’s always the rub. There is no system that lets you know who wins before all the counting is done.

There is an argument for simplicity, but if we’re going to change things, we might as well try for the experimentally best option.

RCV is a bad option that’s presented as if it could fix anything.

RCV was first invented in the 1780s, and the inventor wrote about it as the bad idea that it was, but because he was a mathematician, he wrote about the dead ends in the search for something better than the simple First Past the Post system that was in use in America.

The inventor, by the way, was Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet. His life was fascinating, and his death tragic, but for the moment we’ll focus on his efforts to find a better voting system.

He created a criteria for a better voting system, now named in his honor. The Condorcet Winner is the candidate who can win against any other candidate in a one on one race. They’re sometimes called the pairwise winner.

The point being, RCV, or it’s older name of Instant Runoff, cannot reliably elect the Condorcet Winner.

This was why Condorcet abandoned the system.

It was revived by some guys a few decades after Condorcet’s death. They didn’t care that it was a flawed system, just that it was slightly better than the only other option available at the time.

But that was 200 years ago. We now have quite a few options that are not deeply flawed.

First is Approval. It’s a dead simple system that always finds the Condorcet Winner.

How Approval works is thus; you get a list of names on your ballot. Mark any and all that you approve of. You may mark more than one candidate for each position.

The candidate with the highest overall approval wins.

Then there’s STAR. It’s brand new as far as voting systems go, only created in 2014. But it’s also the best system designed to date.

Basically the voter rates each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5. Multiple candidates can have the same rating. To find the winner, you simply add up the ratings for each candidate, then you take the highest two and look at each ballot. The candidate with the higher rating on that ballot gets the vote. If neither of the top two is rated higher on a ballot, either being not rated or rated the same, then the ballot is counted as No Preference, and that number is reported as part of the final tally.