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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

We can't count paper "yes/no" votes in a way that everyone is happy with.

Something more complicated that requires math? How're we going to convince anybody that the results are fair? Let them calculate the totals themselves?

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We can't convince them.

People will spend a lot of money to convince them of the opposite. I wonder where they get the ROI from that? Presumably they steal it from the voters they successfully disenfranchise.

The same team that convinced the UK that cutting trade links with the EU was a price worth paying for liberty, also convinced them that changing to a more representative voting system was too expensive. Children will die in hospital as a result of wasting money on more democracy was one actual argument advanced.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/14641/production...

You have a system that, according to the natural balances of the incentives, sets up two sides to fight with everything they've got. And everyone, mysteriously, is fighting tooth and nail. Switching to a system where everyone can cooperate and agree to elect one person may actually make everyone happy, even if people don't understand the maths that well.

The natural state of America isn't two divided halves. It is either one rather united entity or 100s of rather crazy squabbling tribes. The 2-party thing is wildly artificial and would probably dissolve without the support of the voting system.

I don't think the two-party system necessarily leads to strong polarization. The US has had mostly two parties for a very long time and yet polarization has ebbed and flowed. I highly suggest reading the following link about how transparency actually might be causing the polarization, not the voting structure: https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html

America has historically been a group of people that so disliked where they were from that they would rather face death than remain there. As a result, the descendants of these people are bred to be pugnacious. Further more, the power of any government has been historically weak. This allowed people to have a live-and-let-live policy by default.

Since FDR/WWII, the Federal government is a behemoth. It is also the new god of the many of the people. This leads to the factions within the priestly class trying to grab as much power as possible. If you want to create natural balances that fit the psyche of America, you need to shed 20 trillion in debt, and collapse the Federal government to a size last seen before WWII (scaling for population growth of course).

Are you fine with giving up the current Hegemony, then sure.

I am. We could also form alliances where the costs are spread out.

Unfortunately, people don't trust what they can't understand easily either, which is why I think math based voting techniques aren't so popular.

Trust is a requirement of a voting system (or any other system that is entrusted with controlling who will government) if we want a stable society.

So we either need to teach people to understand it or find a way to make them trust something they don't understand.

The religion playbook is useful for the latter approach but if the goal is to make people trust what they don't understand but we've been doing pretty much the opposite real hard for the past ~10yr.

Our current system is stupidly simple and yet a quarter of the country still doesn't trust it.

It's not the mechanics of the system it's the institutions executing them that are distrusted.

> We can't count paper "yes/no" votes in a way that everyone is happy with.

That reminds me, for some reason the US doesn't have referendums. Why is that?

The US as a whole does not. Individual states do. The federal system isn't set up for referenda. I don't believe they're mentioned in the constitution anywhere.

Technically the federal system has referenda, but it has to be called by the states, as mentioned in Article V.

> The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

We've never had a constitutional convention so exactly how it would work is unknown.

Oh, we can count just fine. There are no actual "fairness" concerns. Just since the system guarantees two parties and expanding the voting pool from making it easy to vote has been assessed to benefit one party over the other, there is an obvious incentive to not make it happen. You get the same crap with lowering the voting age in other countries.

If it produces results that more people are ok with, then they will be less likely to need convincing in the first place. Pretty much the only reason we have the fiasco we do is because things have become so extreme and polarized.

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