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Comment by YuriNiyazov | Hacker News Reader

The 25% is a consequence of the Electoral College system. And before someone says "well, we should just go by popular vote" - if the election was determined by popular vote, the campaigns would have completely different strategies, with different participation and outcomes.

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The 25% is not a consequence of the Electoral College system. The 25% is a consequence of only 50% of eligible voters voting, half of which voted for the winner.

True, but the electoral college contributes to the problem. In winner-takes-all states that are heavily for one party or the other, there is not much incentive to vote. Turnout would almost certainly be higher under a national popular vote.

Then people could complain or discuss about voluntary versus obligatory voting, then about having just two real candidates versus more (powerful) parties, then about limited vs unlimited funding, then private vs company vs public funding, then about quotas for any category you name, then ...

There are so many combinations and possibilities that it's hard to say which one is the best.

And all them can be gamed.

> [...] then about having just two real candidates versus more (powerful) parties [...]

You can have more than two candidates without more powerful parties.

Proportional representation leads to parties, something like range voting can keep the primacy of candidates, but lets us escape from the two party system.

http://rangevoting.org/

Proportional representation in the electoral college is equivalent to a national popular vote, and is no more or less conducive to party power than the status quo.

Proportional representation in the House of Representatives is possible without increasing party power (or even without parties at all) by using Single Transferable Vote.

Instant Runoff Voting (the single-winner variant of Single Transferable Vote) for presidential (and gubernatorial) elections would help to protect against excessive party power by allowing third party and non-party candidates a fair chance.

Instant Runoff Voting (and the Single Transferable Vote) wouldn't really help: Australia has those, and if anything, there electoral system is even worse than Britain and the US---eg they don't have a single non-white MP.

Electoral systems can do little for democracy other than promote majority rule. STV and related systems do this well and also provide proportional representation on non-party matters. Civil society also has a role to play in keeping democracy healthy.

Instant Runoff Voting is really only suitable for single winner elections like presidential, gubernatorial and mayoral elections, and not for the multi-winner legislative elections it is used for in Australia.

There are better forms of STV than that used for the Australian Senate, but I'd take any form of STV over FPTP.

FPTF is definitely awfully. STV might be marginally better or not. But why settle for something so marginal and still clearly suboptimal. It's also complicated to explain, yet alone count votes.

Approval Voting or Range Voting are much simpler to explain and to execute, and they have much better properties. (And, yes, I can well believe that the Australian system can be improved up on, and doesn't present the best version of STV. There's lots wrong with Australia, so this aspect probably too. Eg, their STV system requires a valid ballot to rank all parties, making sure that every vote cast will eventually be counted for one of the major parties. The guy who came up with a hack to avoid having to choose a major party got jailed for promoting it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote)

Range Voting is literally the same procedure people know from figure skating competitions in the olympics: the judges (=voters) give the candidates numbers, candidate with the highest average wins.

Approval voting can be explained as: just like FPTP, but ticking multiple candidates (eg everybody but Trump or Hillary) doesn't void your ballot. (Or you can see it as a special case of Range Voting, that only allows the numbers 0 and 1. Approval voting was my favourite system to elect a single winner, until I learned about Range Voting.)

The range voting guys wrote about STV, too, see http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html

By "STV" I mean the multi-winner form ("quota-preferential" or "PR-STV"). Neither range voting nor approval voting is a substitute for it; they don't provide proportional representation. For that you need Reweighted Range Voting: http://rangevoting.org/RRVr.html

I'd be happy to see STV, RRV or both used more widely.

Oh, I don't have too much of an opinion on multi-winner systems right now---apart from the practical observation that the post-war German systems seems to produce appropriately boring consensus politicians. (But I highly doubt it's an particularly optimal system.)

I'll look into it, thanks.

My note was about single-winner systems.

Given that the vote was basically 50-50, and that most of the votes are cast outside the swing states that got the attention, then no, the 'mandate' result would not have been different from 25%. Different tactics wouldn't shift that general number much.

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