Should voting aim to let one individual voter express their preferences? | Hacker News Reader

Should voting aim to let one individual voter express their preferences?

demodexio.substack.com

4 pointslkrubner5 comments

There are many voting systems, best of them are all good.

Among tech-oriented people there is an assumption that the voting system is the most important part of democracy. It's a culmination point for sure, but it has limited ability to make well-functioning democracy.

Everybody saying what they prefer is not enough. Deliberation is at least as important. Ability to negotiate with people with different viewpoints and weigh options before voting. Making deals (often expressed issues to be voted about). Deliberation cuts through demagoguery and propaganda, it forces people to be slightly smarter.

And the examples cited here in this article show the major problem with this dumbed-down electorate that seems to be catered to. Of the four points given in the example candidate that is being sought two of them are in innate qualities that the candidate would have no control over, one is a religious affiliation which may or may not actually affect how the candidate legislatively decides issues, and finally we have one policy issue.

This seems like a major problem to me. Shouldn't all points for considering a candidate be how they would react and vote on policy issues. They are supposed to be a Representatives after all. Your race and gender mean nothing if the policies you support aren't the ones that your electorate want supported. Maybe no one's paid attention but people of the same race and gender can support different policy positions. Selection of a representative based on race and gender seem to be a big step backwards for the idea of universal equality.

You're right that the last thing elections need right now is for identity politics to be built into the voting process, but I think the article's premise would be equally valid if it assumed that the electorate cared more about policy and less about physical similarities between candidates and themselves.

This does suggest an interesting hypothesis, though. While innate qualities are (or should be) a poor proxy for a politician's voting record, we might be at a stage in many democracies where a politician's stated policy preferences are also a poor proxy for how they end up voting. In a "market for lemons" way, voters might feel that it is best to focus on immutable characteristics of the candidates, rather than believing a word they say.

You are correct that the stated policy positions of a politician don't always align with their voting record but innate characteristics of a human aren't a policy position at all. If the electorate paid attention to the people that they elect and if they're voting record aligns with their stated positions things would get a lot better.

At least in the United States around 80% of the federal government is re-elected every two years. At local levels there is also a similarly high percentage of turnover in just a few years time. So at most if someone campaigns on something that they do not follow through with their votes in 2 years we can swap them out. The problem is when people are voting based upon identities people continue to get reelected to office based upon identities. We see this with long standing politicians that continue to get elected while rarely voting for the actual policies their constituents want.

There's some great thinking in this article, even though I'm not sure I completely agree with it.

> We should simply ask voters to send a lot of signals (by voting for any candidate who strikes them as reasonably good) and we should let the higher levels of the system do the work of aggregating together everyone’s signals, to reveal the most urgent concerns that society is facing.

The problem here is how we define "reasonably good", which is especially difficult as there is no way to really calibrate that between voters. Does "reasonably good" mean the candidate is a 7 out of 10, or a 4 out of 10?

This gets even more complicated when (some) voters realise they can vote tactically to increase the effectiveness of their vote, or are told by the candidates (or misinformation campaigns) that these tactical voting strategies are helpful (even if they end up being detrimental).

Is there any evidence that Approval Voting is any better (than other electoral reforms) at picking up and aggregating these signals to provide the desired electoral outcomes?

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