alt Hacker NewsThat only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties.
They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this:
1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round.
2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the first round advance to the second round to determine the winner.
In that election there were 14 candidates. 6 from right-wing parties, 4 from left-wing parties, and 4 independents. The most anyone got in the first round was 22.94%, and the second most was 19.18%. Third was 19.15%. Fourth was 13.86%, then 8.79%.
With that many candidates, and with there being quite a lot of overlap in the positions of the candidates closer to the center, you can easily end up with the candidates that are more extreme finishing higher because they have fewer overlap on positions with the others, and so the voters that find those issues most important don't get split.
You can easily end up with two candidates in the runoff that a large majority disagree with on all major issues.
They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
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>That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties. [...] They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
Firstly, there's many forms of elections, each with their own pros and cons, but I don't think the voting method is the core problem here.
Let's assume Norway would have the exact same system and parties like Romania. Do you think Norwegians would have been swayed by a an online ad campaign to vote a Russian puppet off tiktok to the last round?
Maybe the education level, standard of living of the population and being a high trust society, is actually what filters malicious candidates, and not some magic election method.
Secondly, what if that faulty election system, is a actually a feature and not a bug, inserted since the formation of modern Romania after the 1989 revolution, when the people from the (former) commies and securitatea(intelligence services and secret police) now still running the country but under different org names and flags, had to patch up a new constitution virtually overnight, so they made sure to create a new one where they themselves and their parties have an easier time gaming the system in their favor to always end up on top in the new democratic system, but now that backdoor is being exploited by foreign actors.
Ranked choice is very similar to what you just described, has the same downsides, and is much more difficult to understand. What you want is approval voting which has all of the upsides ranked choice claims to have, none of the downsides, doesn't have multiple rounds, and is trivial to understand. On top of that approval voting has an additional benefit where voting third-party/moderates doesn't feel like throwing any vote away so you can just include them and they're much more likely to win.