Hacker News Reader

Comment by euix | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is a common trend through the west. Here in Canada the current Federal Liberals won the last two election with about 30% of the vote which when you take into account how many people even vote amounts to something like ~5 million people in a country close to 40 million. The kind of overarching policies and rhetoric coming out of government is widely disproportionate to that level of mandate.

View on HN

Yup. In France Macron hold total power with less than 30% of voters and less than 30% of good opinion in polls. His "pension reform" has everyone against it, the unions, all political parties but his own, even the employers association, but it will be enforced anyway. Democracy is dead, and it even began to smell.

Curious to see what HN's opinion on mandatory voting is. We have that in Australia and the sense is that it tends to dull the extreme fringes of the party platforms since they need to broadly appeal to the mainstream.

  >  Australia and the sense is that it tends to dull the extreme fringes of the party platforms

even if thats true... you still have the overton window [0] to worry about (slowly lurching in one direction or another towards extremism)

still though, i feel its more fair if 99% rather than 30% of the people decide how they want to run their country

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

It is hard to disentangle the temperament of the populace from the voting system.

The UK and all former settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) all have very stable politics and that generally appeal to the median voter. None of them really have any extreme political incidents in living memory that I can think of. (maybe a few extreme incidents by their own standards but on a global standard they are still tame)

"former settler colonies". US and South Africa do not count? How about Latin America vis-a-vis Spain and Portugal?

I thought it was implied but I meant former settler colonies of the UK specifically.

The USA could be included and does have overall remarkably stable politics compared to most of the world. I didn't include it due to the length of time it has been separate from the UK, however there was substantial emigration from the British Isles to the USA in the 19th century with the settling of the West (more British went to the USA in the 19th century than Canada/Australia/NZ/South Africa combined and served as a 2nd large wave of Anglofying influence on the nation). I would lump it in with the other nations I mention as having overall extreme stable politics and high adherence to political norms that can be broadly characterised as the "Anglo model of politics".

South Africa is a bit of a unique case. Due to the Apartheid system it never had any of the sort of political stability that characterises the politics of the other nations mentioned.

The political culture of Spain/Portugal is massively different from the UK (especially at the time of the colonisation of the Americas) and the model of politics in the nations of South America is very different as a result.

I'm always going to be against adding more force and coercion. People are way too quick to reach for that as a solution to every purported problem.

I also think many of the people who are forced to vote will do so with the least effort possible and will keep voting for the same party they (and probably their parents) have always voted for without thinking too much about it or doing any research.

Agree with this, the experience of workplace Covid mandates has left a permanent distaste in my mouth that will likely never leave.

I think the Greek way of choosing elected officials - randomly - within some reasonable sampling criteria, i.e. no criminal record, sound mind, at least >=X age would be better at this point. Professional roles such as city attorney can have corresponding pools of possible candidates.

It's like when you have an actively bad betting strategy, it would actually improve your performance to bet randomly.

Proportional voting doesn't have to mean tyranny. Make the very first option on the ballot "I don't approve of any of the candidates here", and if it wins another election is held and nobody from the prior ballot is allowed to be listed.

Mandatory voting in a proportional representation electoral system feels like the best way to me. You can't force people to vote when their vote can end up worthless like with first past the post.

Not sure if you have PR or FPTP in Aus.

The system used varies across the different jurisdictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare%E2%80%93Clark_electoral_s..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Australi... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Austr... cover the majority of systems we have (most of the differences/changes are subtle, see https://antonygreen.com.au/inclusive-gregory-another-serious... for example).

Neither, it's essentially a type of ranked voting that is often referred to as "two party preferred" on the assumption that for any seat, it will go to one party or the other, and it's likely to be one with the highest first+second preference count (not exactly how it works, but you can find the details online easily enough. A fairly typical scenario is that the ALP might have something like 40% of the 1st preference votes and the Liberals 45%, but the 2nd preference votes overwhelmingly favour the ALP and they take the win). There hasn't been any serious discussion over the need to revisit mandatory voting (personally I don't think it should be over a certain age - there's an argument those over 75, who are making up an increasingly larger percentage of the population, have undue influence on selection of a government whose job should be to put forward policies etc. that determine the long-term future of our country, which is of far more relevance to those who'll be alive to see it. I imagine once I'm past 75 I wouldn't be so concerned with voting in every election on that basis. But I'll admit it's not something I feel particularly strongly about.)

It's simply ranked choice voting (aka IRV) for the house. "Two-party preferred" is a system used by polls and news to try to convey how they think the runoff voting will play out, by picking the two candidates most likely to come first and second and showing their expected final tally.

> Democracy is dead, and it even began to smell.

what's your solution?

We need better representation, and for instance designate Senators from random draw from the voters pool to make it a proposition force.

Also we need to dismantle most of the constitutional changes of the past 30 years, which created several layers of pretend democratic assemblies (city, metropolis, department, region) that nobody understands nor care about, and are only useful to feed a large crowd of professional politicians.

And most important, we must dismantle the rampant control of these by the state through the nationalisation of taxes. Almost all local taxation which used to be defined and voted by the city councils, departmental assemblies etc have been taken over by the state, which nominally redistributes the money but keeps control of it, effectively killing all local democratic processes and politics.

They had to coalition with another party to form a government with over 50% of the seats. It's more democratic than straight FPTP.

The Liberals are in a coalition with the NDP, combined the two parties received a majority of the popular vote.

A better example would be Doug Ford in Ontario. Ford's Conservatives received only 41% of the popular vote but took 67% of the seats.

The First Past The Post System needs to be retired, it is anti-democratic. Either run-offs or a ranked ballot voting system would be better.

Approval voting or proportional representation would be better, but sure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com