To Build a Better Ballot: an interactive guide to alternative voting systems

Nicky Case is one of my software idols, and this guide is a big part of that. It's a really light and engaging way to present this sort of information, but it's also deep enough that I generally recommend this whenever I end up in a discussion about different voting systems. This had a big impact in making me excited about technology as a tool to inform and explain, but also a significant impact in regards to my passion for electoral systems.

I also really like the page about fireflies, which is much simpler (mainly just a playground that you can play around with) but also just really fun.

This is a fantastic exploration of one set of concerns with candidate voting systems.

I am personally most concerned about the ability for a result to be verifiably correct in any voting system. As far as I can tell, most aspects of this have been solved with cryptography, but the progress on doing so in the largest and most important elections is zero or negative.

Once we have a verifiable system, the options expand greatly. Candidate representative voting is not the only option. For instance, poll voting becomes possible. Delegation voting can become more specific to topic area. One idea I’ve been thinking about is interest voting, where each voter registers an interest area and is randomly selected to to something like jury duty.

While classic voting has it's drawbacks it does produces a winner which has the clear majority of the voters. The problem with many of these alternative voting systems like "ranked choice" is that they are very complex and this allows a sufficiently sophisticated entity to game the system to such an extent that it produces a surprise minority result without a clear mandate of the voters.

Cautionary Examples

Another example of this problem is demonstrated by what happened in Australia (which uses ranked choice voting) in the 2010 election. The liberal Labor Party won the Australian House despite receiving only “38 percent of first-place votes on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition [the center right choice] captured 43 percent” of first-place votes.

In other words, more voters wanted a center-right government than a left-wing government, but ranked choice made sure that did not happen. Or consider the mayor’s race in Oakland, California, in 2010, in which the candidate that received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes” after nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.6 This also happened recently in Maine. In 2018, the first-ever general election for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice voting in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D) was declared the eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) received more votes than Golden in the first round. There were two additional candidates in the race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However, the Maine Secretary of State, Matt Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not ranked all of the candidates."

Source: https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/IB4996....