What the Founders Feared About Impeachment
npr.org
npr.org
A lot of people point to ranked choice voting to solve this, but it really isn't a lot better than plurality. Approval voting does way better, and it finally has been put into practice in local elections (in Fargo ND), and is being considered for a big city (St. Louis MO).
It's a shame more people don't see this for the mathematical problem that it is, since it is relatively easy to solve.
It's a little harder with the presidency, because of the electoral college (a state may be at a disadvantage if they used approval while other states use plurality...it does not good to pick a middle ground candidate if they can't actually win). However, changing the way we elect representatives/senators would go a long way.
https://www.electionscience.org/ces-updates/making-approval-...
In practice, of course, that theory broke down almost immediately. Political parties started coalescing around Hamilton and Jefferson practically before the ink on the Constitution had dried, and the gentry whose disinterestedness the Founders had placed so much trust in turned out to be just as flawed and venal as everybody else.
If you're interested in why the Founders thought the way they did and the process of how reality broke their worldview in half, I can't recommend Gordon Wood's book The Radicalism of the American Revolution (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6956.The_Radicalism_of_t...) highly enough. It's a great read that will change the way you look at the Revolution and the early republic.
For instance Duverger's Law, which didn't even get a name until the 1950s or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
I will check out that book, thanks.
Doesn't that also follow from the voting method? A faction will make the political compromises it needs to reliably get past 50% in order to active power, but won't go much past that because it would be an unnecessary political sacrifice.
Senators were elected by state legislatures until 1913, for instance, not by popular vote. And the President was elected by the Electoral College, which in its original conception was supposed to have been a kind of grand assembly of the landed aristocracy, much in the same way the Constitutional Convention had been. In line with this conception, Electors were originally (and technically, still are) completely free to vote for whichever candidate they liked, without reference to who won their state's popular vote. And the Electoral College votes by state rather than by a raw count of the votes of the electors, adding a further layer of indirection.
That looks a lot more understandable and straightforward than ranked-choice voting, which is a big plus to me. Vote counting systems should be so straightforward that even a simpleton can understand them, as the more complicated they are the less I think they'll be trusted.
Even with such a system, I think I'd still like there to be a final runoff election for important offices. It gives an opportunity for correction if a crazy somehow unexpectedly comes out ahead, and it will give a majority endorsement to someone.
One system I've been looking at recently is "For and Against", which is also easy to understand. You get to vote for one candidate and against one. Against votes count as a -1, although in theory you could "phase the system in" by having the against votes count as -.5 or the like, the first election with the new system. That gives parties and other structures a bit more time to adapt.
For and against is interesting in that it simply cancels out the vote splitting effect of plurality. You no longer have an incentive to hold nominations to eliminate candidates, since similar candidates will split against votes.
I'm not specifically advocating for For and Against (at least not compared to Approval), but I think it has interesting properties that can be used effectively for explaining vote splitting and Duverger's Law to those who don't quite grasp it. (I also think the fact that it could theoretically be phased in gradually is very interesting, particularly to those that worry about politicians who were elected with plurality being reluctant to endorse a different method)
To the best I can test it, though, (I've been working on a graphically based voting simulator), For and Against comes up with remarkably good results compared to Approval, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Let me know if you want to see the graphical voting simulator, I'd be interested in your ideas about the assumptions made (there are lots of ways to tune it). I guess the way I'd put it is "yes it still has vote splitting, but that vote splitting doesn't result in Duverger's Law")
Interestingly, For and Against is less expressive than Approval if there are five or more candidates, but more expressive if there are only 3. (e.g. you can say "Nader>Gore>Bush", rather than just "Nader=Gore>Bush" or "Nader>Gore=Bush")
But again, I think the main value of For and Against is using it to explain how vote splitting results in a duopoly, ultimately opening people's minds to Approval or for that matter STAR (which I see you are the inventor of?).
If you weight it toward "against" (e.g. count the against votes as -1 but the for votes as only 0.1), it has the exact opposite effect as plurality, in the sense that parties would want to have many candidates running, to dilute the against votes directed at their candidates. If you count them equally, though, the vote splitting effects effectively cancel each other out. The tunability of the method, as well as the way its strategy sort of directly derives out of Plurality strategy, has a lot of pedagogical value to me. Approval addresses vote splitting and Duverger's Law, but I personally find it harder to clearly explain how it actually accomplishes that.
Honestly, I think there's too much focus on expense nowadays. We shouldn't feel forced to pursue the best cheapest system, or feel limited only to systems that are no more costly than the ones we have today.
If an idea results in a more trusted and effective electoral system, I think it would be worth it even if it costs significantly more.
A different style of voting might have lead to different election results though, due to the huge number of people who either abstained or voted for Trump because they disliked HRC, and the people who only voted Trump because they are registered republicans and that's that. It would not have lead to people voting in a non-partisan way.
It's gotten so bad that there's a top subreddit, r/ENLIGHTEDCENTRISM, dedicated to making fun of people who don't vehemently subscribe to either Democrat or Republican ideologies.
And how did this happen?
With a voting system that elects the first choice of the median voter, there wouldn't be two opposing parties. There would more likely be people who organize around specific candidates, or that support specific issues, but not an artificial "right vs left" or "republican vs democrate"or "conservative vs liberal". And there wouldn't be big surprises on election day.
A good way to visualize it is a hypothetical situation where you are voting for a number. Say it is a big office, and everyone votes on the temperature to set the thermostat. You could imagine a bad voting system, where the cold natured people and the warm natured people start to cluster into groups for strategic purposes, and they end up hating each other.
Or a good system where everyone just writes down their preferred temperature, and the median temperature is chosen. Never a surprise after a vote, no one is particularly disgruntled. The ones that are extremely cold natured might dress warmer, etc, but that makes sense, right?
That's how it could be. The problem is we are so used to it the way it has been for a long time, it is hard to realize it mostly comes from the voting system.
Obviously it would take a bit of time for the effects of partisanship to fade, but that's expected.
Why wouldn't people game the system by entering temperatures as low or as high as allowed? If I want 68F but think the mean will be 72F, I can vote for 45F, or whatever the limit is. Likely this would spawn cool and warm "parties" that will campaign for others to do the same. You might find the votes bifurcating into the opposite extremes.
If you put no limit on the temperatures the warmists would win, because the coolists have a hard limit of zero Kelvin. But if you actually follow the results of that election you may freeze or incinerate everyone.
Isn't democracy great?
Because it is median, not average. That does nothing. Demonstrated here: https://pianop.ly/voting/median.html
I think you are wrong about parties forming, there would be no benefit whatsoever. There is no reason anyone would have any incentive to do anything other than vote for their preferred value.
I think people would quickly come to see voting for their preferred value as wasting their vote, as is often the case with presidential elections. Good point about median vs average, I missed that. But there would be benefit in converging the votes on popular numbers to make them the median. E.g. if I want 70 but think the contest will come down to 72 vs 76, it may make perfect sense to change my vote to 72.
Also, why would it come down to 72 or 76? It's not going to bounce around like that, it will converge on a center value. Regardless, it would make no sense for you to pick anything other than your preferred value. Any value you pick is going to move it the same amount (if it moves it at all). And if you pick 72 when you prefer 70, you are taking a risk of your moving the result in the opposite direction of where you want it to go (as would be the case if the median was around 71)
"But there would be benefit in converging the votes on popular numbers to make them the median."
"Popular numbers" don't matter with a numerical vote like this. We aren't voting for discrete "candidate values". Again, the best strategy is to vote for you preferred value, full stop. Trying to guess how others are voting would accomplish exactly nothing.
It is very different from presidential votes where it may well be wasting your vote to vote for who you actually want. All of the things you say apply there. This is not that.
There's no reason for temperature preference to form a normal distribution. In fact I'd think that sexual dimorphism would generate a bimodal distribution at a minimum. Women tend to prefer it warmer than men. That's an incentive for two parties at least.
Any form of syndication will fracture the normal distribution, and we are political animals. We frequently vote at odds with our own interests in politics. I would expect the same behavior when voting to set the thermostat.
However, let's imagine a slightly more realistic case where 45% of the room prefers exactly 65 degrees, 46% prefers exactly 75 degrees, and the other 9% are evenly spread in the in-between range. That's far from a normal distribution curves, it is two big spikes and a very low area connecting them.
The median preference is probably going to be around 70/71. A reasonable middle ground. The only way it won't arrive at that result is if people are consistently acting against their own interests.
If people attempt to get strategic about it, and form parties and agree to vote in a particular way, it won't change the result at all. I'm not sure where you are thinking these incentives come from, but I'm saying they don't exist. What is the incentive for an individual voter of doing anything other than voting for their exact preference? If you are one of those closer to the middle, preferring, say, 72 degrees, your vote will have exactly as much upward pull if you vote for 72 compared to voting for 75. Joining the 75 party doesn't help you (but it potentially hurts you, if you were wrong about the median being lower than your preference).
I'll refer again to this, where I built a demonstration app you can play with, or you can just watch the video. If you want it done with polarized distribution, let me know. (it would be easy to hack it to do so) https://pianop.ly/voting/median.html
That does not sound right. The average would be around 70/71 but the median would be 75. So instead of a moderate compromise, 46% of the room would be happy and (at least) 45% unhappy.
So if there are 100 people, 45 like 65 degrees, and 46 like 75 degrees. Then -- assuming they are truly spread evenly in between as I said -- the other nine would be: One person prefers 66 degrees, one person prefers 67 degrees, one person prefers 68 degrees, one person prefers 69 degrees, one person prefers 70 degrees, one person prefers 71 degrees, one person prefers 72 degrees, one person prefers 73 degrees, and one person prefers 74 degrees.
The median will be 70.5, since the 50 percentile falls between 70 and 71.
Now if I am the 101st person, I can move it to 70 degrees by voting for 70 or less, and move it to 71 degrees by voting for 71 or greater. If I vote for any fractional number between 70 and 71, I will get my exact choice, since I will be the 50 percentile voter.
There is no reason I can get better results by lying, whether or not I am good at guessing how others will vote.
>Now, in a hyperpartisan environment, reelection could often be the motivating factor, with little incentive to cross sides.
Oh no, thanks to democratic elections of senators, senators risk their voting decisions being scrutinized by their constituents...yikes!
The problem is when representatives have more allegiance to their party than to their constituents. That's a long term side effect of plurality voting (which forces everyone into two opposing sides, lest they lose due to vote splitting). It's also very solvable, such as with Approval voting [1] that is not subject to vote splitting and tends to elect the first choice of the hypothetical median voter.
1. now in Fargo ND! :)
More democracy more directly is not a salve that cures all problems. Election of judges is pretty crazy, for instance.
IIRC, senators were originally appointed by state legislatures, and were understood to be representatives of the sovereign state governments themselves. Sort of like how the US government sends a representative to the UN rather than having the people elect one.
Senators appointed by state legislatures could be counted on to oppose any attempt by the federal government to harm the states. Today we have huge problems with unfunded mandates and with funding being used to coerce states into making state law.
Example: states don't get highway funds unless they make the drinking age at least 21
That kind of stuff is all over our law. With senators being chosen by the states, it wouldn't happen so much.
BTW, regarding the constitutionality: our constitution prohibits a state from losing representation except by consent, but not all states ratified the 17th Amendment.
Edit: I suddenly realized maybe "originalism" isn't some obscure synonym for "originality". My bad :)
The opposite of originalism is the "living document" philosophy (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Constitution), which argues that the meaning of the document has to be interpreted by each generation in the light of their own experience.