Politics is bad because we use an 18th century voting system
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
Here in Canada one of Trudeau's platforms was to get rid of first-past-the-post. But he nixed it when he found out the committee was going to recommend mixed-member-proportional (which would probably hurt his parties chances) rather than ranked ballots (which would definitely help his party).
(Of course, sometimes those future savings wouldn't have happened anyways, due to unreasonably optimistic assumptions about the performance of the economy.)
Second, even if everybody knew who was going to be the loser from the changes 8 years in advance, that's not enough. That party would have to be strong enough under the current system to undo the changes. In practice, that would require controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency... unless both parties decide that they would lose power to third parties, and strike a deal.
E.g., in the first cycle, extreme candidate A wins the actual election while the moderate, B, is shown to be widely tolerated under the approval system. Nearly half the voters--those who voted for the opposite extreme, C, end up loathing the results of the actual election and wishing in retrospect that the approval system had been in place. Perhaps in the second election cycle, candidate A wins re-election because they're a known-quantity/incumbent.
Finally, in the third cycle, history starts repeating itself and people get tired of A's party. E.g., the Overton window slides back towards C's perspectives leading to C being seated. This time the people who still prefer A are disgusted with the outcome and prefer the outcome of the approval system.
At this point, half the voters have long argued that the approval system makes more sense and the other half has also come around to thinking maybe it could bolster their position as well. It'd only remain for less partisan activists to e.g., get a petition going towards a referendum.
It's hard to predict the short-term beneficiary parties when it goes into effect, sure, but its quite easy to predict the long term ideological benefit of increases in proportionality on modern democracies.
Ironically, that may make near immediate implementation more viable, if their is a divergence between the expected short-term and long-term impacts, and those expected to benefit believe they can use that to preempt the naturally expected long term benefit but those who would expect that long term benefit don't believe their opponents will succeed at that.
The way that we look at it is instant runoff voting has been passed as a ballot initiative in a number of cities, but we see approval voting as producing better outcomes, and having better political dynamics compared to instant runoff voting. Approval voting is also so much easier, and it avoids a lot of the problems.
If instant runoff voting can win, then surely, a simpler voting method that produces good outcomes and has good dynamics should also be able to do it."
This problem is negated when the is a consistent meaning to approval or disapproval markings, which can happen with non-secret ballots tied to concrete commitments. Approval is, for that reason, an excellent voting method to decide group activities in a social group, where an approve vote is a binding opt-in to the activity if it is chosen (or if a disapprove vote is a binding opt-out.)
For the same reason (the lack of a concrete definition of what “approve” or “disapprove” means), approval is not really simpler than IRV (or other ranked ballots) methods, even if the space of possible ballot markings is narrower.
Folks cite the fact that fringe parties only receive 1%ish of the vote in Canada as evidence that this is not a valid concern but it is easy to see how voter behaviour would change as campaign mechanics changed due to a PR system. (These arguments rather conveniently ignore the number of Green Party votes that Canadians in most ridings cast knowing they are throwing their vote away when arriving at the 1% number.)
-- Like the "pirate party", which is really doing a good job on pushback against all kinds of corporate enrochement against copyright laws. (like the stupid Spain link tax).
Sometimes these 'fringe' parties bring ideas and raise concerns on issues that the major parties are not considering due to their self interests.
Sometimes they are down-righty looney, but I think the positives on having small parties represented outweighs the negatives.
AMS/PR has had the effect of forcing parties to work together much more in Scotland than has ever happened in the FPTP UK Parliament. I would dearly love for the UK Parliament to learn some positive lessons from the Scottish experience, but I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime.
I really like AMS - it retains the direct constituency link of a member for a region elected via FPTP, with the fairness of additional regional members selected proportionally resulting in a pretty proportionate outcome. The downside is that it creates two classes of member - those elected via FPTP, those elected via what AMS calls the 'list', and of course the complexity of giving people two votes instead of one that behave in different ways. The first vote is a classic FPTP, the second vote applies to the list. Your party's performance in the FPTP vote affects the "weight" of any list votes you receive, which is how the system remains proportional. As I said, it's a pain to explain, but one of the fairest systems I've experienced.
Plus, you don't already see the Republican party in the US as the type of extremist party you worry a "fringe party" could become?
Canada has mostly solved the gerrymandering problem and where geography makes solving it impossible the strong party system makes MPs that want to act irresponsibly accountable to a party that has battles to win in other places that make their positions untenable.
I am open to some examples of fringe parties that have made significant positive contributions to the status quo, I would like to see some examples that are of more significance than the negative effects pseudo-fascist parties rising Europe have had.
There's nothing stopping the government from saying "A party must have 5% of the vote to be awarded any PR/list seats" in order to keep the fringe parties from grabbing individual seats here and there. BC just released their suggestions for an October referendum on reforming provincial elections, and that was part of all three suggested systems.
If lightning strikes once and you get an MP into parliament after that as a private member that MP is going to get a lot of media attention, it will immediately change politics because with large parties member discipline is important whereas in an MMP system a party that has no hope of ever winning it all has the reverse incentive - they are 100% committed to whipping up their "base" for their pet issue.
They are welcome to participate in democracy and do the hard work to get their ideas into the mainstream of Canadian public opinion but they are not "entitled" to a system that gives them representation in a specific way. One should be honest with oneself about how representative democracy works and not pretend that the purpose is to have every hair-brained idea at the table.
Democracy doesn't start and stop with elections.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling
But yes, at the very least, use the Approval vote. It has way better statistical properties than Ranked Voting.
Maine switched.
Also Canadians do not like minority governments. Proportional representation is not that popular on Canada.
Also we like simple systems with simple voting strategies. MMP is very complicated. Lots of weird tactics like voting for a small party but a candidate from a bigger party.
Proportional representation doesn't need to result in minority governments. Proportional voting is very common in Europe but minority governments aren't.
Just means parties need to find common themes on which they agree, and compromise on some their more controversial goals. Finland has had up to six parties in a single government to make sure tough decisions can be passed.
The NDP/Green coalition in BC is new, but seems OK so far, and that same minority aspect probably tempers the behaviour of both parties.
I do need to do some homework before the referendum though.
To me the answer to Trudeau's concerns was so obvious; just do mixed-member-proportional, but limit the number of top-up seats to 2x or 3x the number of riding based seats won by the party.
That way we don't have to put up with the lunatic fringe, but we still fix the warping effects of FPTP.
The "fringe" party he's concerned about is the NDP.
Can't this be reasoned scientifically?
There is no need to use small, single-winner voting districts to choose the members of the Parliament. Make voting districts 5-10 times larger and use proportional voting. Arrow's Theorem is not valid for that kind of systems.
There are other voting systems that get around this. Kenneth Arrow himself was into non-ordinal voting systems.
This interactive graph predicting outcomes for different voting methods convinced me that this is much harder to do than it would seem. Very much worth checking out the link. I think maybe I found it on HN.
The further to the right a voting method is, the more it "maximizes happiness" for the voters
Why should group satisfaction with the winner be the important metric? Surely good governance should be the most important metric. If the quality of government is too hard to measure then length of time before overthrow or revolution should be a good proxy.
Markets are supposed to be efficient they match demand with production efficiently, or some such. Political demand needs to be matched with equal efficiency. Imposing good governance into a voting system will very likely create distortions.
Wouldn't that only be true if preferences are roughly normally distributed (or some other fat-middle distribution)?
And if that's the case, shouldn't the outcomes of the voting system tend towards a moderate middle?
Approval voting allows voters to vote for 3rd party candidates without "throwing their vote away". That would be a huge improvement over first-past-the-post, as 3rd party candidates would have a decent chance of winning if they can make a compelling case to voters.
At the extreme end, a legislature consisting of communists, anarchists, facists, theocrats, and hippies wouldn't accomplish anything but igniting civil war.
I think the main problem is the single-winner election system itself, and even the best voting mathematics can do only very little to help that. They all will still lead to a two-party system.
Only the presidential elections need to be single-winner. But for all other political bodies, a proportional system where at least 5 to 10 representatives are chosen from each voting district, would be better. Choosing e.g. 10 winners from a single voting district with a proportional voting system would set the election threshold to 10%, so any party with at least 10% support would get at least one representative. This is how almost every European country runs their elections. (Only UK and France still use single-winner systems.)
This is the only way to bring diversity and options to the political landscape. And by having more than 2 viable parties, you would have more diverse political discussions, too.
And even for the single-winner presidential elections, more than 2 parties would have the existing organization and funding structures to plausible run campaigns and candidates, so as a byproduct you would get diversity and options for the presidential elections, too.
I do recognize that it is problematic to organize proportional voting for (a) the Senate and (b) for those states that have less than 5 House representatives. For example, you'd need to pool Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, N Dakota and S Dakota into one voting district. But even if you went with proportional voting only for the House, you'd still have more than 2 viable parties in each state, who each could make serious attempts to run for the 2 senators. So you would still get more than 2 parties represented in the Senate, too.
Granted, if there are more parties to choose from there's more opportunity for voters to reject dysfunctional parties, but it's not inconceivable that you might end up with, say, five dysfunctional parties instead of two.
I suppose a sensible hybrid system might be to have voters vote for their party in the regular election, and then for each party with one or more seats, that party runs a primary (via a multi-winner variant of approval voting or STV or something) to elect the people who actually serve in those seats. Does anyone already use a system like that?
Two-round elections in which a candidate that doesn't get 50%+1 in the first round must run against the runner-up (and no one else) in the second round is a significant improvement over the single-round First Past The Post structure in the U.S.
No, it's not. It's one of the two systems in the US that are both referred to a FPTP (the two are more specifically known as plurality and majority/runoff, and both forms are widely used in the US.)
Either jungle or runoff system, with FPTP in place, seems to leave a bad taste in people's mouth when they see the top two in the same party. I think it's getting a lot more bad attention because the likely minority party has a good chance of getting the top two spots.
An interesting thought experiment is having 3 equally powered heads of state (or indeed any small odd numbered group).
Most people's instant reaction is that it wouldn't work because we don't have it now.
After some reflection most people think it wouldn't work for other reasons that they can't adequately explain.
I think if you're going to contemplate nation-state wide administration reform it's worthwhile contemplating all kinds of changes.
(I'm in AU, where we have some semblance of 2pp, though in our most recent federal election some 25% of people did not vote for one of the two major parties/coalitions. Our system is clearly broken, but not as badly as the USA's. Small comfort.)
> Most people's instant reaction is that it wouldn't work because we don't have it now.
Straw man
> After some reflection most people think it wouldn't work for other reasons that they can't adequately explain.
Condescending generalization
Parent had said that only the presidential elections need to be single-winner.
In Australia the head of government is the Prime Minister - curiously the specifics of that role are absent from our constitution, as it was evidently assumed to be a given. Head of State remains the reigning monarch of the Commonwealth, but that's a slight aside.
Prime Minister is not elected by the gen pop, despite many citizens of AU believing it to be the case. The 150 elected representatives in the parliament actually choose amongst them who the Prime Minister shall be -- a potentially very civilised approach to leadership elections.
Anyway, I'm not sure that I can defend myself against your claims about my personal observations.
Perhaps you could give it a go, and see if you get the same trends of responses that I described.
It sounds to me like you're thinking of the US as more monolithic than it is. If we only had the federal government, sure, only the president would really need to be single-winner. But pooling congressional seats logistically cannot happen, because congress is not parliament. The entire point is that senators represent their states, and House members represent their districts. Pooling them would be like pooling the EU Council and having all Europeans vote together on national ministers.
Remember that states are semi-autonomous, with their own governments following their own laws according to their own constitutions. Obviously our federal government is more powerful and rather more cohesive than the EU, but only up to a point.
(Note: I'm not saying this is a good or sensible system. In many ways, I would love for our resources and our voices to be pooled. The autonomy of individual states is a huge part of why the right wing is disproportionately represented at the federal level. And the fact that only states—not territories—get representation is a travesty.)
You're absolutely right, though, that the single-winner aspect is why we have essentially always had a two-party system (though _which_ two parties has changed several times over the years).
The way I once heard someone put it is that in parliamentary democracy, people vote for representation and their MPs form coalitions, while in the American system, the people themselves have to be the ones to form coalitions, in the form of the two dominant parties.
The US Congress is far too small for the size of the population it represents, so many constituencies are ignored. Having larger voting districts takes power away from gerrymanders and gives it to the constituents. The population would create their own districts via voting blocs, instead of being trapped in gerrymandered districts.
Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.
By comparison, I think most of us have had the experience of being in a conversation with a small group of people (or even one other person) and wanting to say something but not being given an opportunity to do so without seeming rude.
This could have other advantages as well. No reason why any one bill should block any other bill; anything with N/2+1 upvotes is passed by the House. It would also be possible for representatives to remain in their home districts among their constituents.
Don't take the above too seriously, I'm sure there are holes. Just a thought experiment in my brain right now.
If 51% of districts are 51% yellow while 49% are 100% pink, yellow wins.
With a second level, you can run that game twice, and 25% are enough to win.
This is possible if you eliminate congressional districts altogether and have people "subscribe" to a representative. It removes the problem of a single congressman "trying" to represent constituents with widely disparate views equally, and abolishes gerrymandering in the process.
Like YouTube, you would end up with superstar representatives that would capture an even larger share than the most powerful do now. And the fact that they wouldn't even have a home district would mean that they would be accountable to absolutely no-one besides those who helped them achieve their superstar status. So yes, you would have "your rep" but he would be like a small you-tuber compared to PewDiePie—4k subs vs. 100,000,000.
50 states. 300 representatives in each state's assembly, almost all power devolved to those states. 15000 representatives. OK, it's not 35,000, but I doubt that makes much difference.
How? When people complain about money in politics issues these days, they're usually complaining about 3rd party money. I don't see how having 100x more representatives would reduce 3rd party money. It's not like it's hard to target 3rd party ads to small geographic areas.
Candidates are far more concerned about 3rd party money than direct donations these days, because 3rd party spending is unlimited. Quid pro quo is not necessary because it's all done in public. You don't need a secret meeting with a lobbyist to know if the NRA likes your position on guns. Just watch the ads.
Of course not every House member has to worry about this; in fact most don't. Most of the big spending on House races is concentrated in the few districts that everyone expects to shift the balance. This would still be true in a House of 35,000. While most races would probably get less expensive, there would still be a small set of "tipping point" races that would attract most of the effort and money.
As much as I like the idea of proportional representation, I don't think getting 35,000 people to agree on anything is a viable solution.
Perhaps a better approach is one that decentralizes power as much as possible, giving more voice to local constituencies versus the Federal government -- and similarly, giving power to continuously smaller communities such as county vs. state, city vs. county and so on and so forth.
An improvement on top of that is having the superior legislature write framework laws that more local communities can elect to follow, should they prefer that over drafting their own legislation, for whatever reason. While this isn't applicable to every legislative issue, the theoretical argument for this approach is quite compelling¹, at least according to one UVA Law professor²
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1. http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/hein/kitch/70va_l_re...
2. https://content.law.virginia.edu/faculty/profile/ewk/1180712
Even if we upped it to 5,000-6,000 reps, it would be a huge improvement.
Wyoming has a total population (census 2010) of about 563,000. And about 98% of those are citizen. WY has 3 electors, so roughly 187,000 citizens per elector.
Citizen in WY have roughly 3x the voting power as citizen in CA, due in large part to a system designed to appease slave-holding states 200 years ago.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... 2 - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-ci...
This is intended behavior. IIRC it was to address the question of whether slaves counted as members of the population for the purposes of determining number of congressmen.
if we want to take money out we need to remove the ability of the political parties from spending money on who they chose and require them to fund a set number of candidates equally. Not all candidates as its obvious you can get some kooks, but as it stands now elections are more decided by the party than the voters. the parties decide who gets to run for the seat and it becomes big news when a maverick usually with their own funds upsets this quagmire.
so please by all means try to minimize the money influence elections but understand that most people's views are being heavily manipulated by operatives of both parties to make sure that the only money in politics is money they have full control over.
There are different ways to get representation. One way is to force everyone to vote like Brazil or Australia but this might not be practical in a country like India where elections go on for 1.5 months. But, there are other ways - where you draw a representation of the entire population and make them vote aka Sortition [0]. We already use this concept in juries and other aspects of life. It would be worthwhile to give this a serious try for alternative voting systems.
We could perform alternate experiment systems in parallel and then compare their outcomes to current systems - we don't need to adopt them. But, this has to start somewhere. We could have a debate on "HOW" to draw this representative sample but we should acknowledge that the current system rarely achieves the objective of representation.
That alone would help.
But every change produces winners and losers, and the losers really don’t want that change to happen.
But we can’t automatically register people because young people disproportionately support one of the two major parties, and that would be ‘unfair’.
And we can’t make Election Day a holiday because the people who work so much going voting is a hardship disproportionately support one of the two parties. And it would ‘hurt business’.
On the other end we can’t require IDs to vote people that would disproportionately hur the other party. And we can’t spend the resources to fix that because it would be ‘too expensive’.
early voting? postal ballots?
I'd much prefer a system where you have to "earn" your say in government. This would, I think, show a deeper commitment to the system.
Edit: if you’re downvoting me, irony aside, please detail why making voters more committed to the government they’re informing is a bad idea. Seems fairly reasonable to me.
In the US at least, we already have a representative body laying around with super-majoritarian rules and long, overlapping terms where citizen-legislators could build institutional knowledge. Conveniently it has both the most anti-democratic setup right now and one that's already been subject to revision via constitutional amendment. Selecting Senators at random is the simplest fix with the biggest potential impact on our democracy.
And that's just first-order effects, not counting the potential civil society benefits of encouraging every citizen to think of themselves as a future Senator, or having that structure mirrored in micro in smaller jurisdictions.
Finally, it seems uniquely American to address this problem with money.
If under such a system, the 'voluntary, compensated abstentions' are disproportionately 'poor people', what principle is being violated? Is the option-to-vote or the actuality-of-voting the more important value?
Is maximal voting participation a religious goal, to be pursued even if it delivers poor results, such poor results sometimes including the collapse of democratic-processes entirely? Or is voting just one part of a system to be evaluated based on how well it delivers welfare and protects rights?
In the long run, the rulers of a country don't condescend to pay attention to voters because it's the right thing to do - rather because it prevents chaos, revolutions and guillotines. Voting is fundamentally an accounting mechanism that is justified by its provision of information about what is best for the country.
It's not so rational for people to participate in voting, because (virtually) no election is ever decided by a single vote. Thus, the electorate, as long as voting is voluntary, is going to inherently be biased towards irrational people motivated by emotion. That's why compulsory voting is a good idea. Voting isn't a privilege, it's a form of feedback that is vital to maintaining a healthy state, and having it be voluntary makes no more sense than voluntary taxes.
I'm not saying that's good or bad, but that's what it is.
We could adopt some flavor of split system... FPTP for district reps, with some number of positions set aside state-wide for proportional representation.
I believe Germany does something like this, though I'll have to dig up the details.
Each voter gets two votes, one for a candidate and a second for a party list.
Half of the members of the Bundestag are elected by direct vote. The candidate in the election district that gets the most votes is elected.
The other half are distributed so that the total distribution matches the distribution for the party list. A party that fails to accumulate at least 5% doesn't get any seats from the second vote, but gets to keep any direct seats they gained, unless they win a minimum number of direct candidates.
If a party wins more direct candidates in a state than their share of votes per party list would allow for, the Bundestag grows and more seats are distributed to balance the proportion.
The system is designed to allow for direct candidates, but still keeps smaller parties relevant since any party that gets beyond 5% or manages to win direct candidates is part of the Bundestag.
(grossly simplified, but probably good enough for here)
For years Unification Church tried to get representation in South Korean congress. They failed, but votes show that they would have succeeded under proportional representation. Proportional representation enables extremist parties.
Having to choose amongst one candidate only is terribly bad because some candidates may have lot of similar ideas. However they may diverge on some points, such as they decide to make two parties. The votes get then divided between these two candidates, and they may not reach the second round, even though their idea may be more popular...
The winning parties has never wanted to change the system since that makes them win I guess.
Any other system would be a better idea than that one.
I think what also makes things strange in France is the rule that all parties must be given equal airtime, which leads to a few bizarre weeks every election cycle where complete loons are on TV and Radio 24/7
Then you have exceptional circumstances with many disgruntled people pushing for the extreme. Even then, two rounds can help. A one round system makes it very hard for the fringe to take control, but once this happen they're one of two. With a two round system only one side can go radical, with a likely result of the other side mainstream party winning.
Both sides extremes getting stronger is possible, and it's really what happened during the last presidential elections. But we got lucky and one "center" candidate went through (by a very small margin), and as expected won the second round. But as in other places we had about half people disgruntled, it's just that it was evenly split between left and right extreme parties, and only one went to second round (but the other was pretty close).
Voters now want to send people to Congress who will carry out a specific agenda. But the idea of a representative is that you were sending someone with (more or less) your general views, and they would use their own judgment.
This whole "pre-negotiation and coalitions before questions are put to the voters" might be more the problem than the solution.
"Obviously?" Perhaps they have considered it properly and have reasonably concluded both systems are utterly failed in terms of representing the views of the electorate. As an outsider looking in US politics appears equally broken, just sometimes in different ways.
So now let me stay on ground I am more sure of, the UK. It's one of the least representative "democracies" around.
For most of the electorate it simply doesn't matter who they vote for, it's pointless. Most seats are "safe". Where I currently live, if you have anything but Brexit-Tory views don't bother as the seat hasn't changed hands in years. So consider yourself entirely disenfranchised. We get especially poor candidates as a result - from both parties. A cardboard cutout would probably get elected if wearing a blue rosette.
If you have Tory views, and live in one of those nice £1m+ warehouse flat conversions you are probably now in a permanently safe Labour inner-city seat, and are equally disenfranchised. cardboard equally electable, just give it a red rosette.
The percentage in a given constituency who get the government they voted for is often quite shocking. CGP Grey did a video on this if I recall correctly.
What does that do to politics? Well, it's total war, total victory and total annihilation only. Parties only treat the electorate as even vaguely interesting in the 10% of seats that might change hands.
No one negotiates. Beforehand or otherwise, unless every other avenue to grab power has failed. System working as intended then as it tends to reinforce the two party status quo.
"Woo, we got elected, just." Now it's simple. Every policy of the previous government was crap. Even the really good ones that were proven to be working. No matter, we didn't think them up, so get rid of the policy with extreme prejudice. We'll rename the same policy when writing our next manifesto so that we can imply we did invent it next time.
> namely it forces pre-negotiation and coalitions before questions are put to the voters.
When did the US last have a coalition, or even pre-negotiation?
In the UK we had one, successfully, during WW2. Since then there has been one, but a selection of minority governments. The recent coalition is widely considered to have been a failure. Essentially we got Tory govt, with a few rough edges knocked off. Tories got a convenient kicking partner.
> the electorate can make a reasonably informed decision about whether A or B is better.
Gosh that's a positive view of how it works. In our media-first, FPTP, system it is much more about the media friendly face, nice smile, soundbites and dog whistles. Interviews become an excruciating exercise of answering the question you'd like to have been asked like it's a Monty Python sketch.
May gave us a comical example of doing soundbites and interviews wrong with the "strong and stable government" line that everyone, including the media, were sick of on the very first day of campaign. After a term or two "it's about time we gave the other guys a chance" and "I'm sick of these idiots" becomes a significant influence.
In short I am firmly in favour of electoral reform and adoption of PR (and not the second-class incarnation of it we were given a referendum about during the coalition). I'd quite like to figure out a way to weaken party politics too, but I digress. In my twenties I was quite in favour for FPTP as I felt it enabled more to be done. Nowadays I'd like a lot less done and a system that a) encourages consensus day to day and b) provides a parliament representative of the far wider range of views commonly held than two diametrically opposed parties. This became far, far too long so I'll spare you the deeper reasoning in favour of PR. :)
My own politics is a coalition - I like some parts of Tory, Labour, Green and LibDem. Even during my most focused support of one party I found some of their policies were utterly bonkers. I think that's the case with most aside from the tiny, tiny minority who actually join parties.
This happens nowadays anyway.
It sounds like I'm advocating corruption, and I kind of am. But at the same time, earmarks served the purpose of providing a good reason for parties to work together, across the aisle. If a little bit of corruption accomplishes that higher purpose, I'm glad to have it.
An earmark is only corrupt if it is bought--that is, if a citizen or company bribes the member of Congress to steer an earmark to them.
When earmarks were killed, there was actually little evidence that was happening. Earmarks were killed as a talking point about reducing spending. Which is silly, because earmarks allocated funds, they didn't appropriate them. That is, they typically divvied up the pot, not increased its size.
It's sort of like the debt limit. Politicians lie to people about things work, in order to attract votes. I don't know if that's corruption so much as cynical opportunism.
Only in theory. In practice, they are 1:1 - You initiate pork A here, I help you add pork B there. You own pork B company, I own pork A. We both win money, forget the constituents.
How about less gerrymandering? It results in more extreme candidates on both sides (as you get much more "pure" blue/red districts and fewer purple).
To wit, Merrick Garland would like a word.
As an aside, I happen to think that there is an important difference between "bipartisan" and "deal-making," and the latter is really where it's at in governance. Earmarks are tools for deal-making.
Framing things as "both sides" inappropriately elevates the 2 major political parties as a central feature of our system of government. They're not; in fact the largest political affiliation in the U.S. today is "indepdendent"!
And on any serious legislation, there are typically more than two "sides" with an interest in a particular outcome. That's why making deals is so important.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-ame...
e.g. "The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on."
If I can track down any of the book titles I'll follow up.
The founding fathers were smart, but nobody in the 18th century was smart enough to anticipate the requirements of a modern electoral system. Their real mistake though was making the electoral system both incredibly complicated and very hard to change.
Proportional representation should be the minimum requirement. Adding additional voting system goodness on top of it is great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
Closer to home, it's also used by the Apache Software Foundation for the annual election of the Board of Directors.
When the election is only for a single position, this is exactly equivalent to "instant runoff".
For the House of Representatives, each electorate is much smaller and parties only have one candidate each, so you only have five or six choices, and you preference all of them.
1. https://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/z/r/7/i/p/image.re... 2. http://farm8.static.flickr.com/7296/9569414534_b3ee06fd84.jp...
It's okay IMO but could be improved somewhat.
The Open List system used in most of Europe (with France, parts of Germany, and Spanish congress being notable exceptions) seems like a very good, successful one also.
UK is still first past the post for MPs. Australia seems to be different again but not first past the post.
When there are is only one winner and STV is exactly the same as instant runoff, it is not so difficult to understand.
This surprised me but you're right. NI have(/had?) STV, but not Westminster. Very odd.
> Australia seems to be different again
This was my question really. Australia uses IRV, afaik, which is somewhat equivalent to STV except that it's slightly simpler, though I don't see any major disadvantage to the extra complexities in STV.
Woke: 13th century voting systems http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf
For: https://www.betterelectionsforsantaclara.com Against: https://noasantaclara.com/
Easy to explain, tabulate, verify (audit).
Consolidates primaries & general into single event.
More robust in presence of (inevitable) errors.
Greatly reduces negative campaigning (everyone wants to be your second choice).
Per Durverger’s Law, breaks political duopoly.
I meant approval voting for executive races like president, sheriff, mayor.
Use PR (proportional representation) for assemblies, councils, houses.
These systems are ostensibly biased towards moderate candidates, but when there are no moderates as in these days of wildly antagonistic partisanship, the result is disenfranchisement.
Instant runoff is vastly superior in terms of allowing people to express their voting preferences.
But the candidates we have are a reflection of the voting system. That is to say, hyperpartisanship is a feature of FPTP and so our candidates are a reflection of that. A voting system that rewards moderates will bring about more moderate politics.
Biasing towards supposed "moderation" marginalizes a broad range of the citizenry outside the mainstream and breeds cynicism and fury. Even if they cannot command a policy-enacting majority, minority opinions deserve a voice.
People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them!
>People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them!
People need to stop seeing voting as some kind of identity affirmation.
Check this out: http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
> While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics. Approval voting is adored by voting researchers, who regard it as the best simple voting system available.
Get rid of the popular election of senators and go back to having them be appointed by their state legislatures. That returns the proper focus on balancing the federal and state government powers.
To me, it would be better if we could have continuous voting: everyone can re-vote once a day, for any candidate they are elibigle to vote for. Then a politician can be voted out of office at any time, with a new candidate taking their place.
We are still voting for the best liar, but at least when someone in office proves that they are a liar, we can get rid of them.
As far as I know, fairvote.org has good intentions, but IRV (also variously referred to as alternative vote or ranked choice voting) has problems that are kind of hard to explain succinctly but which are likely to cause real problems. Basically, IRV tends to eliminate compromise candidates early and it also fails the monotonicity criterion, which means that there are cases where a candidate could win if some group of voters mark that candidate as their N'th choice, but the candidate loses if those same people mark the candidate as their N-1'th choice.
That's a problem that even first-past-the-post doesn't share. In FPTP, you can't cause a candidate to lose by voting for them.
I worry that voting reform will be perpetually stalled because IRV sounds good, but then the people in a position of power to enact real legislation do some research and talk to some experts and find out it's not as great as they thought. I don't know if that's what happened in Canada with Trudeau, but it I wouldn't be surprised.
I don't know if it's better, but to say "this will solve all our problems" is wrong. Provably wrong. With math and everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
People are claiming that approval rating works better than first-past-the-post in many important cases, such as introducing a moderate candidate into an established two-party situation. Arrow's theorem does not contradict that.
So yeah... Math and everything! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting
It doesn't prove that any of those criteria are necessary. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, for instance, is especially problematic.
Finally, Condorcet methods don't even fail Arrow's Theorem when there's actually a Condorcet Winner (which is pretty much always given enough voters).
Every time there are presidential elections in Russia everybody knows the outcome in advance, absolutely no viable competition takes place ever. But despite the corrupt system some states/counties/cities in Russia manage to elect reasonable candidates that are in opposition to the president occasionally when it's about parliamentary elections, especially about local parliaments.
This makes me conclude the parliamentary republic system is better than the presidential system.
The main advantage of this system is that it gives incentive to the candidates to pick a position on the political spectrum close to the median voter. From individual voter's perspective this may look like you're given a choice between two equally bad candidates, but that's just an illusion.
Arrow's theorem only talks about single-winner elections. Most of the world's countries use multi-winner electoral districts and some form of proportional voting for their Parliament elections, totally circumventing Arrow's theorem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_meth...
If you exclude dictatorship as trivial solution by adding it as the fourth condition, no other voting system can be objectively better (satisfy more than three out of four conditions). You may prefer some side effects to others, but any such comparison is going to be subjective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_voting
But IMO it sidesteps the most important issues, which are related to what happens after the election. Currently, only people who vote for a winning candidate are really represented. The system assumes that differences in opinion are largely regional but we actually have strong differences of opinion within each region. It seems to me that there are two basic ways to improve this (that I can think of, I'm sure there are more).
1) Change how elected representatives vote. Instead of each representative getting one vote yes or no, a representative might vote X% yes and Y% no. In this system the representatives would ideally be nonpartisan, with systems outside the government used for collective influence.
2) Look at voting in terms of how each individual picks the representative that best represents them personally with some limitations such as fitting within a particular number of total representatives ("subscribing" to a representative as excalibur puts it). Voting for each individual would then be expected to be between fairly similar candidates, but possibly a completely separate set of candidates than someone you live with who has a significantly different perspective. Lots of complicated possibilities here. One notable suboption would be a two layer system where the person you vote for is not the final representative, but someone who closely monitors politics on behalf of a small number of people and votes for the representatives who make the detailed decisions. This person could be nonpartisan and local as in #1, leaving a combined system where a large number of local nonpartisan representatives are primarily responsible for setting up a partisan government with a composition that accurately reflects constituents (I'm not sure this would be the best option, just one possible option).
Another very effective use for Approval Voting would be for party primaries. The person with the most support, most votes, marked on the most ballots, is the person that is nominated to represent their party. NO VOTE SPLITTING!
Join us at http://BetterSimplerVoting.com
It's really quite hard to create an electoral system with no distortion, because whatever you put up gets gamed.
It terms of feasibility it should be popular because everyone wins either an hour of their life back or wins a chance to really make a difference.
(Starting out a vote by randomly selecting a smaller set of participants is called "sortition")
Every alternative voting method I've seen proposed by voting geeks has flaws that are as serious as the current system.
There are two main problems with approval voting (and other similar systems like condorcet). The first is that approval voting assumes that every preference has the same weight. Either yes, I approve, or no I don't approve.
If we imagine three candidates, A, B, and C, with 10 voters giving a score of 0 to 100. If 9 people give A a score of 100, B a score of 1, and C a score of 0, while one other person gives C a score of 100, B a score of 1, and A a score of 0, then B will win the election in the earlier methods, despite being 99% unpalatable to the majority of everyone.
The second problem is non-voters. Our current system ensures that the will of the non-voter is never accounted for. Now, that seams obvious, because they haven't voted, but it's possible to build a system that accounts for everyone's vote.
In the world of single-winner systems, I think the only voting solution that truly represents the will of the people is repeat-stable voting. With repeat-stable voting, you keep repeating the election until the results are stable. An example of this would be voting every day on the exact same election until the results of two subsequent votes produce the same winner.
That way there is no such thing as the surprise upset. If the will of the people is not captured in the first vote, they have the chance to mobilize for the second, or the third. In this way, you capture the will of the abstainer, as well, because the abstainer is guaranteed to know the result of their choice to not-vote, which means they have the opportunity to change their vote and haven't done so.
To move beyond single winner, however, I think the next big leap forward in voting enabled by technology would be hierarchical vote delegation. Instead of electing a leader, you delegate your vote to a leader. (This holds for any role) An elected representative is not making decisions, but wielding their collection of delegated votes. On any single issue, a person is free to manually control that issue, overriding their chosen delegate, and this ensures that the actions of government are truly those decided by the electorate.
https://medium.com/@dontvoteconservativeuk/uk-general-electi...
That, and lack of term limits.
The job of politics is to bring about consensus. If you don't get consensus prior to a vote, then all of the candidates that could have done a deal ahead of the election suffer.
Under a first past the post system, the job of the candidates is to horse trade so that there are only two candidates at the election.
First past the post works because it is simple, understandable and it forces politicians to do the deals ahead of the election - or suffer the consequences of being ignored entirely.
Politicians and researchers hate it, because they want to trade for their favourite hobby horses after an election when they no longer have to suffer the scrutiny of the electorate and can use minority positions to drive forward change that would never get anywhere in a consensus system.
About the only improvement to a FPTP system you need is a 'none of the above' option, so that everybody on the list can be rejected.
Let's change this slightly:
> First past the post works because it is simple, understandable and it forces politicians to do the deals before voters have expressed their will - or suffer the consequences of being ignored entirely.
Your way is much less democratic.
What you like about list A can easily get traded away after the election by politicians when you have no say.
However is list A has to be approved before an election, then you get everything on that list and you know what you are going to get.
https://electology.org/blog/bloombergs-decision-not-run-demo...
In plain approval voting, you either approve of a candidate or not, and you can approve of more than one. The most approvals wins the race. In net approval voting, you vote up, down, or neutral on each candidate. The candidate with the most approvals minus specific disapprovals wins.
Net approval actually works with candidates much like discussion sites with both up and down votes for posts treat those posts. A controversial candidate may get many approvals and many disapprovals. A fairly popular candidate who's not as divisive might have some fewer approvals but far fewer disapprovals. It should feel natural for people accustomed to reddit, HN, similar sites, or call center feedback systems (where often 9 and 10 of 10 are positive scores, 6-8 are neutral, and 1-5 are actually considered negative).
Wouldn't that favour cronyism and enforce a barrier to entry to those who don't fall in line with the dictats of the ruling elite? Furthermore, it also creates a caste of professional politicians.
What we need is completely socialized education so that the population doesn't get so dumbed down that they vote the loudest, least professional people into office.
Those people had been unrepresented and taken for granted, and a major factor of their motivation in voting for Trump was to signal their anger to DC.
In the long run, it's beneficial to society that this group has gotten recognition and some of their issues are being addressed.
Career politicians tend to have a support structure that identifies their preferred base and caters to them. Simple majority voting would mean that our politics would be dominated by major population areas.
Neither of those things are so bad in the short run, but in the long run you would have significant groups who would never have their concerns and interests addressed.
That our system makes it possible for a minority to win over the majority at times is a real strength.
This country is in a fugue state or something.
Cheers :)
We also have terrible gerrymandering that ensures seats are hard to change.
Effectively no limits on political contributions thanks to Citizens United (not that things were great before that but they've gotten much worse) means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.
People pushing easy answers like this aren't doing anyone any favors. Even if somehow their favored solution got adopted, when it fails to be the panacea they've promised people will reject it and call it a failure even if it might have helped the situation.
Opposing reform because it won't magically fix some tangentially related problems doesn't make sense to me.
And in the UK the Remain campaign massively outspent Leave and still lost (the government did a mailshot to every home in the country arguing for Remain and that alone cost more than the entire Leave campaign did .... and then they did lots more campaigning on top!).
The theory of the concern about Citizens United is that people can buy elections. That theory appears to be false.
> means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.
Yes Clinton lost despite outspending Trump, but Obama outspent Romney, and lots and lots of other races go in the favor of the candidate who spent the most.
Two high profile exceptions don't prove the rule false.
Actually, they do.
I decided to be a smart-ass and check off most of the names.
It seems obvious to me that your vote should be weighted according to how much you are personally responsible for carrying the burden of government. Why should it be otherwise?
A far better solution would be for one or the other party in the US to come up with a program that more than a fraction of the country believes in.
When a member of our family becomes sick, we don't ask everyone to vote on possible treatments? We go to doctors who are trained to diagnose the cause of sickness and offer appropriate treatment.
When a scientist publishes a new study, we don't ask everyone what they think about the study? We ask other accomplished scientists to do a peer-review and offer their opinion on the study.
No matter what field we look at, we do not rely on laymen to decide the outcome but we rely on qualified experts and professionals.
But in case of establishing a government, which can have a long term impact on millions of livelihood, we ask just about anyone to offer their opinion in the form a vote. Why is this a reasonable system?
I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.
The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”
― C.S. Lewis
Here's an answer that I find satisfying but about which I think reasonable people could disagree:
In the US, at least, "democracy" works tremendously well for distributing the narrative that individual rational actors are the main and only political units.
Your example of a family is quite useful in illustrating that there are limitations to that view, regardless of how useful or destructive that view may be.
However, the utility of that view for maintaining the material situation of labor in the US is high.
That is, individualism as an idea is a useful tool for people with money and power to convince large groups of people that the division of wealth in the country is entirely the product of aggregate individual choices rather than the product of a system that is designed for the rich to get richer.
The truth of that proposition aside, I understand that utility to be the underlying historical motivation for people in the US to try and export their brand of democracy.
Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Perhaps people who are accomplished scholars in political theory and economics and a few other relevant areas?
Just like you have an elected board, who represent shareholders, overseeing the unelected executives at the top of any corporate structure.
The problem is that this setup is regularly decried by populists as being "technocratic" (as if that were a bad thing)
1. Many civil services have unionised to the point where civil servants effectively cannot be fired. Guess how competent the resulting staff are.
2. Even if they could be easily fired, their hiring processes are also frequently a joke.
To give an example, the average age of officials at the British Treasury department is 27. This is not widely known, because officials love to hide behind anonymity, especially when publishing reports that sound superficially clever and authoritative but are later proven to be dead wrong about everything. There's no accountability anywhere.
Just look at how much difficulty civil servants have in even just managing contracts with third party providers. Now imagine how much harder they find it to actually do the work themselves.
I agree with you that rule by bureaucrat is better than mob rule. But since you are in favor of limiting government power to a select few - I would choose to limit it to responsible taxpayers rather than unelected bureaucrats.