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Comment by dangerface | Hacker News Reader

> UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES

Every one has a bias at least they own it. As long as they are not pretending to be unbiased I'm fine with it.

If promoting voting or identifying the disinformation campaigns of nation states is considered bias, than consider me happily labeled. However, I think there's something categorically different about such tools as they are not so much promoting a specific outcome as allowing for a more representative outcome, aka a functioning democracy where people are exchanging ideas not click rates.

Our representative democracy is setup as a two party system (first past the post elections) if we want a more representative outcome we should switch to a direct democracy or implement the alternative vote.

Free exchange of ideas is my ultimate goal but the average voter doesn't share this goal, they get their information from "authoritative" sources such as "their" party or the mass media.

We did have a vote to bring in the alternate vote but every major party (left and right) and media outlet (left and right) slammed it as anti-democratic.

We can't depend on the average voter to get informed and vote representatively because the system intentionally prevents this.

"alternative vote"

If you mean switch from FPTP to some form of RCV for executive positions or proportional representation (PR) for assemblies, then I agree.

For RCV, I strongly prefer Approval Voting, which best balances fairness and simplicity.

But we'll get the most benefits from PR.

"alternative vote" is the term the UK ended up using for instant-runoff voting when it had a referendum a few years back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...

Not quite. I think the proposals only affected the top two ranked candidates in the first round, i.e. arguably no better than First Past the Post.

Approval Voting would be simple, easy to understand and a vast improvemnet.

> If you mean switch from FPTP

Yup don't really care what the new vote is. I live in Northern Ireland where we have single transferable vote I think its great.

It hasn't fixed our two party system but I have noticed a dramatic change in the way people think about voting.

For the most part people no longer feel the need to vote against some one and now vote for who they want, I have also noticed people seem to feel their vote is worth more as a result.

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