If you want to know more about this idea see [1].
Respectfully disagree. It's not that easy.
Legislating is an information processing problem. The politics of attention. All the legislators I know can barely keep up with the torrent of information. Overwhelming them with info and votes and meetings prevents them from taking initiative. They need more staff.
All games have winners and losers. Weakening legislators -- thru term limits, cutting staff, whatever -- strengthens lobbyists and administrators (heads of departments, the silent state) and executives.
My baptism to the policy world flipped most of my positions.
Some measures that would strengthen legislators, give them more autonomy, would be public financing of campaigns (no more dialing for dollars), public disclosure commissions, pay raises and full time employment (so regular people, not just lawyers and retirees, could serve), full staffs, recording every vote (disallowing roll call voice votes), lengthen the legislative calendar, diffuse power thru more fair committee assignments (not just seniority), etc, etc.
There's no shortage of worthy reform proposals. Just mind the winners and losers with every rule change.
I'd love some of that where I live. I now fully embrace transactional politics. Quid pro quo.
democracy (dĭ-mŏkˈrə-sē) Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives - American Heritage dictionary, first definition
With apologies to Plato, the word "democracy" most commonly refers to nearly any political system that involves voting. The only time anyone uses the word democracy to mean "direct democracy," with every citizen voting on every issue, is when they're criticizing someone else for using the word democracy in exactly the way almost everyone does all the time.
See my companion rant: Hitler's National Socialism was a form of fascism in the way we use that word today, even though he and Mussolini had distinct political ideas.
On the other hand, in smaller districts the electorate will be more likely to share opinions and interests so maybe that counteracts the problem?
IIRC Spain has a system along these lines.
First past the post needs to go.
Approval voting is best for executive positions, like governor, mayor, sheriff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
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FPTP is terrible. Among other reasons, per Duverger's Law, it begats a two party system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
People railing against duopolies (Democrats & Republicans) haven't yet learned it's the result of the form of elections, not a natural law.
Anyone that wants to be on a ballot for a particular position should have to do the same thing as anyone else (probably collecting a modest number of signatures on a petition, maybe with some rules to limit the number of candidates).
I guess parties might be allowed to place an endorsement on a ballot, but if not they could still release a list of endorsements.
In that arrangement, contesting the national delegate convention to get the endorsement of the party might still happen, but it would not be so inordinately important.
A party organization would still be hugely useful in getting wide ballot presence, but an incumbent organization would not have the huge advantages that they enjoy today.
The idea is to not solve every problem with democracy, but to remove the corrupting influence of needing to raise money from vested interests to spend on advertising so you can get elected. This is the major problem.
Unlike every other modern democracy, the US has opt-in voting. To the best of my knowledge, universal voting registration does not increase participation. But it does prevent disenfranchisement. Only compulsory voting would (otherwise) increase participation.
Some of our jurisdictions have switched to all postal balloting. This permits ballot chasing. In general, these campaigns no longer attempt to persuade. (Clinton vs Sanders is a notable exception, because most contests are face to face.) They spend most of the money on GOTV (get out the vote), turning out your base (supporters). Which has led to alienating voters. No one likes to be contacted 30 times per election (4 times a year) to be reminded to mail their ballot.
Postal balloting has also harmed the culture of voting. This intangible is very hard to measure. But some studies show that "I voted" style markers, visible to your friends and family, boost voter participation.
I do agree that it is a very good idea, but compulsory voting doesn't solve the corrupting effect of large districts.
The second benefit, for election integrity activists, is preventing the "under vote", where down ballot races which are left blank, and potentially filled in by helpful administrators.
Note that in the US, ballots in metro areas can easily have dozens of races. Sheriff, judges, schools, water district, city, county, state, national, referendums, levies, etc.
Mexico doesn't do too well, but apparently mandatory voting isn't enforced.
Radicals like me believe no taxation without representation. I support enfranchising pretty much everyone, especially for local issues.
It is an interesting question if the vote should be extended to non-citizens. I can see good and bad aspects to doing so and I am not sure which is more important.
For reasons of equality among the states, the US capital is not located in any of them. The District of Columbia, not being a state, doesn't have the privileges of a state either, such as being represented in the US government. This is not easy to fix; giving DC state privileges would be a severe blow to the idea that the federal government doesn't favor any one state over another.
It still gets taxed, though. People are sore enough about this that when someone submitted the suggestion of "no taxation without representation" for the slogan on DC license plates, it was vetoed by DC government for being "too controversial".
I would actually be OK with saying that DC doesn't get taxed, since they're legally prohibited from participating in the government. But I don't think that's a widespread viewpoint. Do you have an opinion?
I do agree that there are much better voting systems then simple majorities - I like instant runoffs.
This is interesting.
On the other hand, will we make ourselves even more vulnerable to "grassroots campaigns" like the tea party and lobbies like Alec?
I'm not an expert but there are mathematically and sociologically sound alternatives that are better than what you and I can prescribe. I'd prefer one of those.
In regards stability it is better than proportional voting which tends to splinter the electorate. With instant run offs the candidate that is close to the consensus tends to win.
Yes you can. Basically the scenario is that by gaining votes from other parties, you can change who is eliminated in the first round, which changes distribution of second round votes.
You can argue about how likely this is to happen, but on some level it doesn't matter. If people can't feel absolutely confident that voting for who they actually want won't reduce their vote's impact, many will continue to vote tactically.
>There is no way that placing your preferred candidate first can ever result in your vote not being given in the order you choose.
No, but it can end up harming your second choice, by eliminating them early, so your vote for them doesn't matter. This is called Favourite Betrayal, and it's a serious problem with IRV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
And as a quick worked example, if you have 4 people voting A>B>C, 4 people voting C>B>A and 3 people voting B>A>C, then A wins. If one person voting C>B>A changes their vote to B>C>A, then B wins. So by putting C first, they were harming their second choice B.
That doesn't just sound plausible, it sounds like exactly the pattern of growth for a third party that you'd expect.
From those visualizations and my reading elsewhere it looks like approval voting is the closest to a Voronoi-style partitioning of the opinion space without being subject to strategic voting.
In short, tactical voting isn't all that important. For instance, Score Voting and Approval Voting perform better with 100% strategic voters (in which case they are identical) than IRV does with 100% honest voting. So even if IRV magically encouraged all voters to be honest (which it doesn't), Score/Approval would still be superior.
Score Voting is definitively superior to Approval Voting in terms of producing the right electoral outcome (ignoring practical concerns around complexity and the cost of adoption, upgrading voting machines, etc.). That's because, for tactical voters, both systems are the same. But for honest voters, Score Voting adds less noise/loss/distortion, because it doesn't force you to round your 7 up to a 10, or your 3 down to a 0. Hence better outcomes overall, as seen in this graph of Bayesian Regret figures.
And there's obviously some variance of complexity between them, but even fine grained Range Voting isn't that hard to understand.
The problem is that FairVote, which advocates IRV (apparently because it's a useful steeping stone to the their REAL goal of STV), is run by a professional liar named Rob Richie, and he disseminates a massive amount of false and misleading information about voting systems. E.g.
Also I'm not very familiar with the work of committees. Would they grow larger? Would they become even more powerful and stay the same size?
I would imagine that committees would get bigger. Hopefully with more politicians you would get more people who actually knew about the area that they were on a committee for. The main thing is once you got rid of the need for money the desire to be on a powerful committee would decrease.
In fact any proposal which claims that making districts more homogenous in their voting behavior - "80% of people in this town vote republican so why don't we just make a district that reflects that commonality," for example - is effectively gerrymandering and disenfranchisement harming both sides. 20% of the population of that town will always be ignored. 30% of that town are casting republican votes that don't matter at a larger level, and which don't contribute to countering a democrat vote.
Seems to me smaller districts would be more likely to exhibit those alignments and disenfranchise more people?