Elections are bad for democracy
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you are interested in reading the whole article, please be my guest, but if you'd like to jump to the payload, use your browser search for "sortition".
(Though I can't help but point out the article undercuts its own premise accidentally. The EU, to the extent that it is even a democracy, is certainly subject to the exact same flaws described in the first half of the article! Therefore, logically, the decision to leave an organization where democracy is failing must not be so bad, even if it was made by a process that was itself democratically flawed. This does not "destroy the argument", in the parlance of the day, but it weakens this particular vote being used as the hook for the article. A vote on any other topic would arguably work better.)
This annoys me. There is no doubt the result would have been "very fair" if it had been remain.
What we are seeing now is IMO hypocrisy and contempt of ordinary people at a scary level.
Now, did I want Brexit? No (I had no opinion). Do I think they should have requested more than 50% of the votes? As a conservative biased person I guess so, -don't take a risk unless there is clear demand, simple as a discriminator in electronics: you want to protect against bounces and wobbling...
- but this should have been said up front, not after losing.
Edit: upvoted this for the discussion, not for the original article.
I don't believe mainstream media ever worked in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way. They definitely have not been for the past few decades I've been on this planet. Maybe in the past they were more under control by various "elites", government or otherwise. Now, in the west, they are "free" - which means they actually serve Moloch[0], by writing what sells. That is, the most outrage-inducing, biased misrepresentations (and often outright lies) they can get away with.
Not sure what is worse[1], but it doesn't matter much. The point is, media isn't "a place to go for trusted information", it never has been, and if this is an institution "critical to democracy", then we have a big problem right here.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
[1] - "elites" at least care about something identifiably human; metaphorical Moloch does not, so the outcome may be very well something nobody wanted, including any of the "elites"
I think painting all news media with the same brush is significantly misconstrues the situation.
As a comparison, no software developer is perfect and can be absolutely trusted, and some devs are toxic. But I would be wrong to say: Therefore all software developers are toxic.
Similarly, there is better and worse news media. Can we absolutely trust any? Of course not; these are human institutions. But there's a long way from The Sun and The National Inquirer to The Financial Times and NY Times.
To follow your comparison - sure, we don't say software developers are all toxic[0]. But we like to complain that almost all software is shit. There are gems of almost perfect beauty and usability, and we love them, but there are so few of those. Here on HN we sometimes like to discuss dynamics of what makes most of software shit - and we often find similar sort of economic pressures to those mass media faces.
The thing is, we put extra care in the software that directly affects lives of people. For anything else, we rarely bother. So if the institution of media is so important to democracy, maybe we should put some extra care here too.
(Though I don't know how to do that.)
[0] - also note, that I didn't say "all journalists are toxic"; however, the products of the institutions they form are a different story.
People like to use hyperbole, but IME I've never met someone who thought all software was bad or equally bad. There is a very wide range of quality.
I don't think this is what's happening. Much of the media - especially the Murdoch/Fox empire which includes many of the most popular news outlets in the US and UK - sells anger, distrust of government and 'mainstream media' (which somehow doesn't include Murdoch's companies), and outright lies and propaganda.
IMHO, that's where much of the distrust comes from; it's nothing more complex than a propaganda campaign.
This isn't anything new. It's the justification for all the bureaucratic layering in government. The people are too stupid/bigoted/whatever to make decisions for themselves, so we'll make it for them.
You make this sounds like a bad thing. Of course this is true; this is why we have governments rather than have everyone voting on every decision.
Many people are too stupid, or at least misinformed, to weigh up complex decisions. We don't ask people to vote on tax levels and spending plans because they'd tend to vote in lower taxes and higher spending.
This was very similar to what was promised by the Exit team: continued access to the internal market but that they would no longer have to pay for it. This was clearly not a viable strategy.
Some of the Brexit voters may have had a more nuanced view but the above situation was how most of them saw, and were sold it. (Not that the Remain campaign was that much more honest.)
This is why we vote in a government to make decisions for us. It's perfectly reasonable to conclude that some decisions are more complex than the average citizen has the knowledge or time and inclination to research so they can vote intelligently.
We are a social species. Our greatest advancement as a species is the ability to create societies that are stable enough for people to specialize. We are no longer hunter/gatherers exactly because at some point, we stopped requiring that every hunter hunts for himself.
We don't have to weigh up complex decisions, whether we can or not: we have delegated that task to others. Our task is to make sure that our delegates are doing their job dutifully, not make their decisions for them. That is hard enough in practice.
The crowds wisely thought the sun orbited the flat earth, and have voted for many bad decisions throughout history. Democracy is supporting their self-determination - the crowds have the power. That doesn't at all mean that every decision is a good one.
EDIT: As Abe Lincoln is quoted:
You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Well, I guess there's a little bit of hope there ...
EDIT2: Can't believe I forgot this part:
Most nations use a republican form of government, where people choose the best of them (or the best person running) to deal with these issues. Direct democracy, where the people decide issues directly, is actually not part of the system. The UK has had 3 nationwide referendums and the US none, AFAIK.
There's a good reason for that: The average person has no idea what they're talking about on most issues. They have other jobs and interests, or no interest. Do I want the wisdom of the crowds deciding how the military should be funded and structured, or do I want elected officials who have hearings, a staff of aids, who study the issue and talk to the generals ... egads, I pay a lot of attention to public affairs, but I wouldn't want that responsibility.
The historical evidence that this was ever a widespread belief is quite weak. People generally either didn't think about it, or knew it was round.
I believe that in a democracy things should be hard to change. Changing things should take a super majority. This will lead to more compromise and possibly better results for all. If there was a 2/3 requirement to change things then there would be little room for controversial changes to occur that cause an uproar among the citizenship. There would be more cooperation because to change something you'd need to compromise with your opponent for them to get a change they want instead of trying to get a slim majority in the government by election, etc.
If this principal was applied in the first place the UK never would have joined the EU and Brexit wouldn't have ever even been an issue. In fact, many of the things a lot of people find disagreeable wouldn't have happened.
We are divided because we let our form of democracy divide us.
For example, de Gaulle originally blocked the UK's entry into the EEC. So the UK went off and formed the rival EFTA with some peripheral nations, until EFTA was eventually folded into the ECSC / EEC.
By the time a referendum on remaining was eventually held, in 1975, the UK was already deep in the EEC. Change had been achieved without a majority, or even a minority.
The EU was founded in large part to prevent yet another European war; that's a noble goal and for all its flaws I think the EU can claim a lot of credit for 70 years of peace. Warnings against complacency that "it could never happen again these days" are well-made and well-taken.
But we haven't had a violent revolution or civil war in western Europe for a fair while either - anything since Franco? - and I think that's largely thanks to functional democracy. Messing with that is not to be taken lightly either. You don't have to go back very far to find everyone collectively soiling their breeches every time a monarch started getting on a bit without a solid heir in sight.
I would love to see a study that uses the scientific method to determine what the best percentage is for keeping the most people happy. My gut tells my 70% is too high and 50% is too low but that's conjecture.
> The Ship of State is a famous and oft-cited metaphor put forth by Plato in Book VI of the Republic (488e–489d). It likens the governance of a city-state to the command of a naval vessel and ultimately argues that the only men fit to be captain of this ship (Greek: ναῦς) are philosopher kings, benevolent men with absolute power who have access to the Form of the Good. The origins of the metaphor can be traced back to the lyric poet Alcaeus (frs. 6, 208, 249), and it is found in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes before Plato.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State
Unfortunately, many of the same criticisms apply to sortition as apply to Plato. The problem is that no-one really has access to the "Form of the Good", and no-one can accurately predict what the overall outcome of a decision is going to be over the very long run, however much they study it. In fact, as Popper argues, you're quite likely to draw the wrong conclusion and end up going horribly wrong.
On balance, I'd rather put my faith in a large number of people selected from all social backgrounds than a small number of people selected from a potentially narrow social background. There's also a sense of shared agency about the decision making. If it turns out the wrong decision has been made, what are we to say to the person who is not only on the receiving end of said bad decision, but wasn't even allowed to vote on it?
It also seems to me that one should be wary about making sweeping statements about a system that has endured for thousands of years in the wake of a decision that they themselves disagreed with.
In sortition, rather than polling the entire populace about complicated issues on which they are likely not well informed, we select a balanced random sample of people from the populace , provide them information, and then allow them to engage each other on the issue. Then we have those people vote.
This has several advantages:
1. It actually places "faith in a large number of people selected from all social backgrounds" depending on how large your sample, as opposed to letting elected politicians decide, which is the definition of "a small number of people selected from a potentially narrow social background".
2. It solves the problem where a huge number of people end up voting because of gut instinct or misinformation. Consider the passage of Proposition 13 in California which prohibits the raising of property taxes. If you poll the entire population, that referendum is going to win 100 times out of 100, because for most people the gut check decision is "no I don't want my taxes to go up". However, the correct way to consider that proposition is to get an understanding of how property taxes are used, how they are collected, what the procedures are for changing them in the legislature, etc. and then come to a determination. That determination might be "Yes", it might be "No", or it might be "we should not limit increases in property tax rates but instead limit increases to the real value of collected taxes, by accounting for changes in property values". [1]
[1] I'm not proposing that is the right answer, I'm just suggesting that you might arrive at that conclusion if you actually had time to study the issue. Almost by definition, the vast majority of people do not have that time.
Referendums are for very important cases were we suspect politicians are out of touch with ordinary people.
This has been a nagging issue in UK for years and finally they figured it was better to ask the people.
Referendums are a great idea, but I think that the British yes/no vote was way too simple to game. Using hindsight to save the day, given that there appears to be no gameplan for where to go now, maybe the different options should have been explored before putting it to a vote:
* remain in the EU
* leave the EU, remain in the single market
* leave the single market
* leave the single market, destroy the chunnel
At least with a referendum like that, you force the people to have a content-filled opinion, instead of relying just on an empty "no". That also reduces the options for tea-leaf reading by the losing side.
As I see it, the public have voted to Leave, but some of the options for Leave are actually quite appealing, and would even appeal to some pragmatic Remainers (Norway-style EFTA agreement, join Schengen, negotiate trade agreements with the EU from the outside on a common basis with other EFTA countries, allow Eurozone to integrate closer).
By allowing the public to decide not only the decision but the details of the implementation (although I'm sure you weren't 100% serious with the "destroy chunnel" option) you increase the scope for voters to choose the worst one out of sheer spite.
Thinking about that last option some more, maybe it would make sense to put a nuclear option (like "destroy chunnel") on the ballot, to weed out the spiteful votes from the constructive ones. Even if you explain beforehand that the chunnel will never be closed -- some people just need to vent.
Saying that the public are in control of the direction of travel but leaving the experts in charge of the implementation (as long as it doesn't go against the wishes of the public, i.e. politicians can't just choose not to invoke Article 50, but saying they're free to explore constructive EFTA options) seems preferable.
As I see it, it doesn't really matter if we agree that EFTA is the moderate brexit option: the primary focus of the Leave campaign was on freedom of movement, and it was clear (even before the referendum, given the situation with Norway and Switzerland) that freedom of movement is an integral part of the single market treaties -- a point reiterated by Merkel and Tusk over the past few days.
So regardless that you and I may prefer for the Leave side to explore the EFTA route, it isn't in their mandate -- they won on a campaign of curbing free movement. Had the "moderate Brexit" been a separate choice on the ballot, they might have had a mandate to go for that option. But right now, nobody really knows how many of the Leave voters voted against free movement, and how many voted "just" against the EU.
The politicians making the promises may not even be in the government (it tended to be Leave.EU and Farage that focused on immigration, Vote Leave was wary of doing the same and focused on the economy). All politicians can do in a referendum campaign is talk about implied benefits one way or the other.
It's now up to the politicians to work out the best deal for our country. It's going to be a much smoother ride (and much better for the country as a whole) if free movement of people is allowed and we join EFTA than if the government tries to hold firm on that one, for sure.
While those are options that Britain could attempt to pursue if it leaves the EU, they aren't things that Britain can just choose to do. They are things that Britain can try to do after it leaves the EU (but may or may not succeed in, even if it tries.)
While there may be other downsides of sortition to consider[0], it at least seems to avoid this problem - since each issue is considered by people in isolation, there's no point in trying to make deals, since the next time around someone else will be chosen to vote.
That said, we have XXI century now - why not try and let everyone vote on everything? I think the idea is sometimes called "liquid democracy".
[0] - one downside that comes to mind is a lack of context and inability to form a coherent strategy; it's already one of the biggest problems with democracy, and that would only deepen it
> In sortition, rather than polling the entire populace about complicated issues on which they are likely not well informed, we select a balanced random sample of people from the populace , provide them information, and then allow them to engage each other on the issue. Then we have those people vote.
This is utopian, and fraught with difficulties. Who decides what constitutes balanced? Does anyone elect the deciders? How can a sample be both balanced and random? Through what forum do they engage? How do we ensure a genuine discussion takes place, rather than both sides talking past each other. How do we overcome the problem that the larger the sample, the harder it will be to have a discussion? How do we prevent the media playing a role in influencing the decision making?
The referendum campaign was poorly articulated on the Remain side, and played to people's most base fears on the Leave side. Remain should have known that touting the impact of Brexit on big business would fall on deaf ears with those that feel powerless in their own communities. That's an argument for making better information available during the course of a referendum campaign. Of course, had the Remain campaign won, as it nearly did, no-one would be questioning it, just as they didn't call for an overhaul of democracy in the wake of the (equally disgracefully fought) NO2AV campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_on_Electo...
"With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision."
Compared to jury duty you'll face some serious scaling issues.
Every one of these other participants breaks the analogy enough to make it useless.
And I don't say this often, but the bureaucrats would be right here. They would be necessary.
There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". It shouldn't be, either; it needs more structure than that. Right down to things like shielding the chosen participants from undue influences, and a lot of really interesting questions around transparency... again, quite like a jury.
In a US-like system, if you replace election of leaders with sortition, there is no superior bureaucracy that can impose a judge-like supervisor on the sortition-based bodies.
And if you have an bureaucracy that can impose supervision on the elected bodies you are considering replacing, then you don't have a democracy to replace with sortition to start with, you have bureaucratic aristocracy, and talking about problems of elections and democracy is kind of irrelevant to dealing with your system of government.
> There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision".
There's basically a couple of possible models of sortition; there's a legislature-like model (where sortition is how you choose legislators for a term, and then they are replaced with a new body chosen by the same method.)
And there's a case-by-case model where there is some method of proposing an issue, and then there is a "jury" chosen for an adversarial "trial" over the issue. (One way you could do this would be to replace one house of a bicameral legislature with case-by-case sortation, so that the remaining house would propose legislation and provide advocates for [and against, usually] that legislation, who would argue in front of a sortition-chosen panel.)
In the latter, case-by-case, approach, there would probably be some bureaucracy supervising the process, and the sortition-based body would be very much like a trial jury in relation to that bureaucracy. But then you aren't replacing the elected body with sortition, you are replacing it with a bureaucracy with sortition serving some function within that bureaucracy.)
In the legislature-like approach, though, a supervising bureaucracy is fundamentally inconsistent with the concept.
> Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts?
I would expect members of a legislature chosen by sortition to educate themselves about issues the same way as any other legislature. This probably involves a subordinate bureaucratic infrastructure (e.g., staff employed by each member, and bodies answering to the body as a whole, like the GAO), but not a supervising infrastructure.
Similar mechanisms to grand or petit juries? Because the latter is what most people are familiar with, but most sortition proposals would seem to be structurally more like grand juries [0]: which are, for structural reasons (including the time commitments involved) far less representative of the jury pool they are notionally drawn from than petit juries are.
And the mechanisms which keep them fair and balanced are different (though similar in one way: for both kinds of juries, one of the important methods is that most of the things they do aren't decisive on their own -- except criminal acquittals -- and are inputs to final rulings by judges; for grand juries, this is particularly true, since they act at the very beginning of the process; clearly, this common aspect of the control on juries is not present in most proposals for lawmaking-by-sortition.)
[0] For California (and some other US) jurisdictions, take this as "criminal grand juries", as civil grand juries may not even be notionally representative.
Sounds like how many prosecutors use grand juries in the USA these days.
- Winston Churchill, House of Commons, November 11, 1947We've never tried sortition on a large scale, and on smaller scales it's already been shown effective.
A perfect opportunity to experiment with it would be the Canadian senate, IMO.
Also note: sortition is a form of democracy. In fact I would argue it's the most democratic process proposed which does not run a risk of mob rule. You still have an "elite" making decisions... only that elite is constantly changing, is made of a representative sample of the general population, and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups.
It's actually quite beautiful and elegant: so simple, yet it addresses so many of the criticisms of every other system proposed. While at the same time it's incredibly flexible in implementation: it can be perfectly fitted to a parliamentary government structure or any other variation of already existing governments. Any country or state would be able to experiment with it without needing a major overhaul of how its legislative/executive branches operate (only how its members are appointed).
No, its not. Democracy is either direct (in which each citizen has a direct vote on proposals) or indirect (in which each citizen has a vote on representatives, who either directly vote on proposals or select other officials who do.) The common element of democracy is that there is a chain of choice from the citizenry at large to the decision, what differs among forms of democracy is whether there are intermediate links on that chain, and how many, what those particular intermediate links look like.
Sortition is does not share the unifying characteristic of democracy, it is, instead, one of many forms of rule by an unelected, not-democratically-accountable elite.
> and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups.
People that aren't trying to get reelected , and which are rotated fast enough to be "constantly changing" (which also means that public attention on each of them is fleeting), is, if anything, more subject to corruption.
They may be less valuable to corrupt (since you are more likely to be renting them for a single decision than buying them for a whole extended career), but I don't think that the combined effect makes them less risk of being corrupted. At a minimum, I think that claim requires substantial support that hasn't been offered.
Let's take four major forms corruption takes: (1) a big bag of money dropped on your table. (2) I rub your back, you rub mine, reciprocal relationship. (3) Blackmail. (4) Personal: the desire for power.
(1) is of course still possible, but you're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be very careful with how you approach. Usually, the path to bribing someone requires a "romancing" phase; you have to make sure the other side is open to your proposal and, most importantly, won't give you up. This is a lengthy process that is much easier when the pool of candidates is small and doesn't change very often. How valuable is that bag of money when that person won't have any influence in 4 years' time? You're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be a lot more careful about who to approach.
(2) This one is out of the question. These sort of reciprocal relationships take years to cultivate, and we've immediately removed one of the prime motivating factors which is campaign funding.
(3) Blackmail. This one will still work, but again: you're gonna need a lot more detective work to dig up brand new dirt, every 4 years, on every member of a senate. This becomes very impractical. Also I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the sort of secrets an average sample of the population can be blackmailed on is not the same as that of a small group of career politicians.
(4) Again, mostly out of question. There is a much higher incentive to pass laws that benefit people "like you", but not much you can do to benefit yourself directly (excluding the unlikely chance that the person who drew the lottery ticket is, say, CEO of some large corporation), and still, this only works if by some chance a large proportion of other lottery winners are like you. Otherwise, strategically, the only personal benefit you can get out of a position of power is to pass laws that benefit the country as a whole.
On the definition of Democratic. Yes, that's a fair point. Or perhaps sortition lives in a sort of quantum state being both democratic and dictatorial.
I hope someone manages to test this out. To me it seems obvious that the biggest threat to society is not climate change, or antibiotic resistance, or bad economies or poverty: all of these have a single root cause: corruption.
There's no lack of scientific innovation to solve the other problems; it's corrupt institutions that stand in their way.
Our number one focus as a species right now should be to figure out how eliminate corruption from our institutions and lessen the impact of bad actors.
This, of course, remains eminently workable with sortition, especially a rapid turnover form, where decision-makers will be leaving government soon after decisions are made and are no longer prefiltered to tend to include people who have fairly excellent job prospects even without corrupt rewards.
Doing it this way means that you can still guarantee a continuity of government, and replace the sortition seats every six months (maybe with voluntary term extension). You'd not replace general electoral voting, but the article doesn't make a strong case that it's really broken anyway.
Racism is hard to overcome and widespread. People are not either 'racist' or 'not racist'. Certainly people can be pro-racism or anti-racist in their intentions, but that is separate from how we actually act, since a lot of racism is unconscious and invisible.
Labeling actions and activities and even groups as racist is necessary, because we need to become conscious of these forces if we are ever to overcome them.
However, whether labeled as racist or not, everyone's voice needs to be heard in the political process. So where I agree with you is in using the label of racism as a tool to silence or ignore people.
You see the same thing with the EU Constitution - the voters rejected it in two countries. That can't be allowed. So we'll do the same thing via the Lisbon Treaty, but we won't let anybody vote on that, because they might vote wrong.
That's about the only part of the article I agree with: if you're going to do referendums, then do them regularly. Referenda are only a useful tool if the public feel they really are involved in the process. Otherwise you'll have to answer for every decision that went around them.
It styles itself as the voice for the downtrodden and disenfranchised, but the moment they make the 'wrong' decision it posts article after article dedicated to denigrating these same people, advocating their voice be ignored. Quite sad really.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
But to this day, we don't have democracy in a single country.
Democracy supposes that the people has the power. It's not the case in what we call democracies today.
You have a small group of people getting in the election pool because of where they come from and how much money they can manipulate. Then, this small group takes most of the decisions, which is what we call an oligarchy.
Voting then, is just a way to swap people from this group. In no way it puts power in the hand of the people.
Quite often people opposes dictatures with our systems to justify that if they are in that state, then we are in a democracy. The fact we have a better, and confortable system doesn't make it magically fit the definition.
For the people to have power, you would need them to want it in the first place. But most don't read political programs, most don't think hard about what their country should do, and most certainly don't accept any responsability for anything happening today in their country. They won't choose what they buy or whatch on TV according to the impact on the social life.
Hence, elections are not bad for democracy, it's just we never manage to use them to setup a democracy in the first place.
In fact, to have a democracy we would need to educate people to want it first. To make everyday's decisions by thinking about it. And to think about what society can become on a regular basis.
Right now, as most of us think and act mostly for ourself, we can't achieve democracy. Democracy cannot be brought only by using a fair political system (that we don't even have), you also need citizens.
Now that the elites don't get the desired result, it's broken.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
Most nations are republican democracies, not democracies. People choose the best of them (or the best person running) to deal with these issues. Direct democracy, where the people decide issues directly, is actually not part of the system. The UK has had 3 nationwide referendums and the US none, AFAIK.
There's a good reason for that: The average person has no idea what they're talking about on most issues. They have other jobs and interests, or no interest. Do I want the wisdom of the crowds deciding how the military should be funded and structured, for example, or do I want elected officials who have hearings, a staff of aids, who study the issue and talk to the generals ... egads, I pay a lot of attention to public affairs, but I wouldn't want that responsibility.
Note also that while elected officials are very human and imperfect, their credentials and experience are far above average.
An election needs to get the same results twice back to back.
So for instance, you could replace the primaries and November presidential elections with that system. Vote once: whoever is first needs to win the next round to become president. Candidates may decide to drop out, or not. The public knows: if on round two, they still vote for the candidate that won the first round, that's the winner.
For the UK referendum, a second vote would have eliminated the protest vote. You see the results of the first vote, and you really ask yourself: really? Do I want this to happen? And vote one more time to confirm.
Simple system, with one huge caveat: no guaranteed outcome. But it would eliminate the need for polling, and hopefully result in better democratic decisions.
But bicameralism doesn't refer to two votes by the public in order to pass one referendum or elect one person. That's... something else. I don't know what to call it, but it's not bicameralism.
Interesting New Zealand recently had a double/two part referendum that was reported on Hacker News (due the the complexity of changing the National flag)
Would it? To pass a measure is to approve a change, so there's always a side that wins if the vote doesn't pass. Opponents of a change could defeat it on the first ballot, and would likely focus effort on doing so, especially if turnout was expected to be small -- because the first vote isn't meaningless, if it fails, the measure is dead, and there is no second vote.
But because of this, supporters of the vote would also work very hard to mobilize support in the first ballot, because succeeding in it would be necessary to get to the second.
It was a sensible approach given that the flag choices were so underwhelming that nobody wanted to change in the end.
I guess it's a little different because you're voting for different things but I guess it's similar. Have a vote and then have the power to bail out.
What tends to happen is the Far Right parties do quite well in the first round of voting, at which point the parties who have been eliminated cross political divides to encourage everyone to shun the Far Right. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire#In_politics).
It's hard to say whether, on balance, this is a useful exercise. The FN is able to use this approach to present itself as the voice of the 'anti-establishment' Party, everyone is able to use the first vote as a pressure valve to let off steam and vote FN knowing there won't be any consequences too it, and there's always the risk that voters tire of Cordon Sanitaire entirely and just vote the Far Right in in the second round anyway.
(Herodotus on the Persians, http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/herodotus-persians...)