The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
smarimccarthy.is
smarimccarthy.is
Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? In the US, for a 3rd party to win, something like 50% of the relevant electorate has to coordinate their vote to switch to the 3rd party. It sounds like in Scandinavia, the fraction of the electorate which needs to coordinate is just 1 / num_seats, which is way smaller.
If I were a Swede, I would be tempted to troll everyone by setting up an "independents party". The seats for that party are allocated based on a separate vote, open to the public. Candidates of the "independents party" have absolutely no obligation to vote together, and act as free agents once they get elected. Sort of like a democracy-within-a-democracy.
There are thresholds to avoid too many small parties / independents getting elected. You need to win 4% of the vote nationally or 12% regionally to get a single seat, and if you do then you typically get more than one. Congrats, you’re now a collectivist too.
> If I were a Swede…
I’ve considered it. :)
Not if they can’t afford to run a campaign.
One example is the Norwegian party 'Patient Focus' which
was formed in April 2021, as a support movement for an expansion of the hospital in the town of Alta in Alta Municipality in Finnmark county, Norway. In the 2021 parliamentary election, it won one of Finnmark's five seats in the Storting (Parlament).
https://xcancel.com/justinamash/status/1486169720911020036
On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the US. Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia.
I understand a big part of the job of party leadership in the US is simply negotiating with / persuading representatives of your own party to vote for upcoming bills. So perhaps that's another sense in which party leadership is weaker in the US. The focus on local representation also creates problems though, since representatives are incentivized to deliver federal projects in the district they represent, even if that's not best for the nation as a whole.
I really wish there a method for prototyping new democracy designs. I feel that this area has been very stagnant, and radical improvements could be possible.
Whilst we do not have primary elections, you can vote for individual candidates on the ballots, moving them up on the party list. This strategy does actually work to get candidates further down on the list over other candidates that would have been selected first.
This seems to be true even if the party in question is the minority party for a given race. Instead of picking a candidate with crossover appeal from voters in the majority, they end up with some raging partisan who can't possibly win, making it effectively a one horse race. Another major failure mode is that even in pretty evenly split areas it encourages pandering to the extreme fringe of the party and winning by a narrow margin rather than winning with a broad coalition because broad coalitions with crossover appeal don't help you get out of the primary. This has been weaponized in recent years, with moderates being threatened with primary challenges if they don't follow the party line, even though this misrepresents the politics of their actual voter base.
California's voting districts are gerrymandered along party lines, so the districts are about 75% safe seats for one party, and 25% safe seats for another party, despite the last Presidential election only being 58% for the one party and 42% for the other.
Despite this, California has some of the most egregious pandering to extremes within the parties (due to the safe seats) and has a reputation for having "extreme" candidates.
I agree (as a non-American), I think the US primaries system is weird, but how does this not apply to other systems where it’s just a small handful of political insiders that select who runs?
Is it the case that this middle ground is the worst of all worlds?
Parties always have a favored inside candidate, but they have to actually convince folks of the candidate.
This happens a lot in American politics, especially at the local elections where we elect positions that are non-political. The governor appoints a Sheriff or Coroner, but they have to face an election in a few weeks.
It's not always that they're more extreme, it's largely the people who have the extra time to go to additional elections or caucusing. Ex: retirees. And this is affected each party differently.
* You can have a "heavy-tailed" congress, where extremists are overrepresented.
* You can have a "thin-tailed" congress, where moderates are overrepresented.
* You can have a "representative" congress, where the range of views in congress looks very similar to the population at large.
At first blush, for the sake of policy stability, a "thin-tailed" congress appears desirable.
But there is also an interesting argument that it's important not to disempower extremists. Democracy could be considered as a "safety valve" that empowers groups to resolve disagreements cooperatively. If some groups don't feel their views are represented, they might condemn the system and seek other ways for their voices to be heard. Something like the 60s civil rights movement in the US could be seen as an example of this. Arguably, the 60s would've been more stable, if the US electoral system wasn't as disenfranchising to minorities with "extreme" views relative to the median at that time.
I can't think of any arguments for a heavy-tailed congress though.
The weird thing about the US system is on the one hand there is the promotion of extremists, but on the other hand, authors like Ezra Klein complain about excessive "veto points" and checks and balances that prevent elected officials from accomplishing stuff. Individually these seem like flaws, but it might be bad to fix one without fixing the other.
I think the US system sucks in absolute terms, but has also worked remarkably well given that it was designed in 1787. "By our estimate, national constitutions have lasted an average of only seventeen years since 1789" https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitut...
People love to complain about "American exceptionalism", but from my perspective, it contributes to a sense of civic pride that's kept the wheels on the bus for such a long time despite a lousy constitution. So I'm concerned that it may be going away.
Makes sense, I guess.
That being said, it does not take a lot of signatures to get on a ballot as a candidate outside the parties in Denmark (a few hundreds, I believe), though only two candidates have successfully managed to get elected that way. Conversely, Denmark has a high threshold for political parties (requiring signatures amounting to 1% of the vote of the last election, so usually around 21k), but the threshold to get into parliament is only 2% (which I believe is one of the lowest amongst countries that uses similar proportional representative systems).
Returning to the towing the line (or rather lack thereof), the Danish parliament have a lot of independent MPs in parliament, because a lot find reason to quit their party after getting elected. Wikipedia has a fine table of MPs who has changed colours since the last election in November 2022:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Folketi...
And even those who are elected directly wouldn't win their local election without their party, so all of them are very beholden to their party. Continuous defection on votes will see them not get re-elected, even if they don't get thrown out of the party.
Theory vs practice makes all the difference.
Of course there's an argument to be made that it would be a lot more chaotic if every elected MP truly was only beholden to their consciousness, because your certainty of how some vote will go would be very low and you'd have to actually convince MPs that it's the right thing to do (that would open up the question of transparency, i.e. who voted for what; official German politics are fundamentally opposed to that idea).
Brokering backroom deals among party elites is far more efficient and predictable -- you can always buy agreement by offering some concessions on a different topic they care about. But then we're back to that question: why do you need hundreds of people if the decisions are made by a few dozens?
It still matters who you vote on though, but mostly from the representatives ability to influence what gets discussed. And there is a lot of 'day-to-day' politics where the details gets formed by the representatives, while the 'big lines' are set by the party.
Finaly I can't help but notice that the American political culture is significantly less diverse than the Scandinavian one. Yes, you have the odd representative crossing party lines, but in practice it seems like all this possibility for diverse opinions ends up being lost when they get squashed into two big tents.
There have been studies on this that show party line voting becoming more and more common over the years to the point where it's basically the expected norm today. Arguably the US is in an even worse position because it's usually the President who sets the legislative agenda and voting position for their party in Congress, even though the system is set up assuming Congress acts like an independent branch.
The current President keeps wanting to pass bills which simply don't pass.
Likewise, the Senate realistically needs 60% votes to pass controversial legislation, and that just isn't happening either.
You're right that the U.S. congress used to vote far more upon regional lines or other non-party interests than it does now. There is something studied in political science (I can't remember its name) that predicts that well-funded, important elections will eventually converge on being 50/50, with the winner essentially being statistical noise.
My reaction to this is to focus more on things locally.
In the American system, the cult of personality rules above all. The vast majority of Americans disagree with what Donald Trump is implementing right now. That’s clear when you ask people in the abstract. But we don’t choose that way. Personality and celebrity rules the day here.
There's a reason why so many governments with such systems one would consider "free" still have to outright ban parties from elections.
This makes me wonder: why stop at two? Some places have explicit quotas for different ethnic or religious groups as a compromise to avoid civil war. Could they use a tripoportional system?
And why not add in even more demographic variables? Age, gender, income, level of education, ... I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency.
That would be interesting, but it's not even possible to achieve one of those things by itself.
> I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency.
I'm not sure about that. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I'd like to think such a procedure could be run with a legislature of any fixed size, at the cost of the proportionality being increasingly inexact for smaller demographics. Furthermore, I suspect the representatives from any demographic would be elected partly with votes from other demographics. Anyway, the number of voters would presumably be thousands of times the number of representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law - so any voting demographic with dedicated representation would at least be thousands of voters.
That leads to very dysfunctional outcomes due to obvious reasons. When you vote for the same party/candidate just because they belong to the same religion/ethnicity (and such seats are very easy to monopolize) they a freehand to due to whatever they want. So what if they are exceptionally corrupt or incompetent? It’s not like your are going to vote for other side..
As a bit on an anecdote, I know two Canadians, and I asked them if they were voting in the upcoming election. They both answered 'Maybe, but there is really no point, since liberals/conservatives always wins my riding anyway', and that made me pretty sad. I wonder how many people live in Democracies where their vote just don't matter at all?
The best would be a simple, proportional and geographically representative system. But if we can't have all, I think dropping simple is better.
The tradeoff might be made easier by expecting less of any single elected body/office. If we had a national legislating chamber, elected by at-large proportional representation from a single constituency, and we turned instead to local government for geographic representation, and the second legislative chamber were elected by local government to exert geographic influence over legislation, then maybe voters could make fewer, easier, and more impactful choices. I don't know of any country that works like this, but Germany is close.
Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in another district.
So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.
> That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me?
As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats.
In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members.
As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.
As an American, I feel I'd
prefer this system.
A representative with absolutely zero self-interest in representing you, as it's highly unlikely you'll be able to "vote for" them the next time around? Your representation being an odd mathematical quirk?
Because that's essentially what the Icelandic system is like. The US has the same lopsided population-to-representative ratio to some degree [1].
[...]and please correct me if
I am wrong)
You can think of it as an odd way to enact something like the US Senate without a bicameral legislature.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-popul...
You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?
Then after that mini-election your vote gets to play a second role on the national level, where IF the party got a bad ratio between the number of representatives they got in, and their total vote-%, they can get another candidate. But that candidate is not 'the one you voted in'. You (possibly) voted in candidates in Alaska already, this is your votes' second chance, to get someone in from the party somewhere else (where the party had a particularly bad ratio between representatives and vote-%).
The Minnesota FLP[1] got members into the house of representatives in numerous elections.
If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?
Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland, as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.
But it's important to understand that the cart came before the horse. That purely local parties are unelectable is partly because the incumbents have shaped the system like this, to their own benefit.
In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas:
- That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.
- That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...
> If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?
Let's assume now that the Minnesota FLP won one or more adjustment seats this way, which is completely possible in your scenario. Then we figure out which riding the Minnesota FLP should get another candidate from. For this we look at all ridings where they have a candidate, and chose the riding where the disparancy between vote-% and mandates are the worst. In your example, where the party is only registered in a single riding, that will be the riding they get another candidate in from.
You CAN have a system where each riding can get in at most one adjustment seat, and then you can come in the ackward situation where there are no ridings available for a party which should get a adjustment seat if they do not have listings in every riding. But that is not an essential part of the system, you can allow to get multiple adjustment seats in from a single riding.
> Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland,
> as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.
> In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas:
- That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.
The question is, what to do with the "leftover" votes which were just barely not enough to get a candidate in? The American system is to discard them, they get nothing, they mean nothing. In the Icelandic system they get to participate in the election of the roughly 1/6th of the parlament which is adjustment candidates.
> - That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
> The list "Ábyrgrar framtíðar"
> is only represented in
> Reykjavíkurkjördæmi norður.
But yes you're strictly correct. It's not illegal to only run for election in a subset of districts...
> And this is not a freak occurent
Even new upstart parties run for elections in every district, because to do otherwise is leaving "money on the table", as in were.
The only exceptions are one-off parties with practically no following.
> This is really not the
> take-home. Remember that
> most of the seats are
> constituency seats, not
> adjustment seats.
It heavily biases the system away from one-district parties, and those parties in turn further encouraged to become monoliths where each representative is merely an interchangeable cog in the party machine, not someone voting with their own conscience.
On the other hand it's not like that wasn't happening before.
Another thing you haven't considered is that whenever you vote for a party your vote can be helping to elect someone nationwide, but you're only allowed to strike out the names of people listed in your local district.
So if you really dislike someone who's running for the party in another district, you might not vote for the party at all, least you help them.
> So most of the parlament
> will be people voted in
> with votes soley from their
> own constituency.
Your seat in parliament may not be an "adjustment seat", but you may have pushed out a more popular candidate in your own district.
There's cases like that every election, e.g. the party with 20% in a district getting 3 members, and the one with 25% getting 2 members or whatever, because the difference of 5% in that district is accumulated to elect 4 members overall.
Essentially it's the same as Iceland but party votes are done nationally, this avoids some of the weird stuff mentioned in the article that allows some parties to have more votes but fewer seats - here in AoNZ we brought in MMP after a couple of elections under FPP where one party got more votes and the other more seats. It's not perfect, but better than what we had before.
> There's an intermediate
> solution
The number of representatives is fixed at 63. They'd be around 200 if the representatives per capita were the same as in 1903, 140 if it was the same as 1960, and 105 if they were the same as 1984, when the number was fixed at 63.
This "hack" of "moving your vote around" only came about because it became more obviously unfair over time that your representative not making the cut-off left you without representation.
The other "obvious" solution of moving to a national vote isn't possible due to the entrenched interests that benefit from the current disenfranchisement being the ones would need to vote for such a system.
1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away.
There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3].
[1]: https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...
California could make this change by referendum.
Because your constituents are better represented. California strikes me as a potent place to do this because I could see a constitutional amendment passing at the ballot box.
Suppose California were to do it, resulting in a proportional allocation of seats in the House for its delegation. If this causes the House to swing from Democratic majority to Republican majority, the net effect is the opposite of what most Californians wanted.
Don't get me wrong, I get the point that it is a more fair and equitable way of doing things, and in principle, I agree. But if you play fair at a table where everybody else cheats, you lose. My state (WA) also has referendums, and if such a proposal would come up, I would absolutely vote against it - unless it was some kind of interstate compact where another similarly-sized red state were to implement the same reform at the same time.
No, it could not, because Article I, Section 3 (emphasis added): "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators." (the last part of that about choosing Senators has its effect eliminated by the 17th Amendment, but that isn't important here.)
And Congress has exercised its authority in U.S. Code Title 2, Section 2c (emphasis added): "In each State entitled in the Ninety-first Congress or in any subsequent Congress thereafter to more than one Representative under an apportionment made pursuant to the provisions of section 2a(a) of this title, there shall be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of Representatives to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative (except that a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress)."
2. That's obviously unwieldy, and so we haven't had a bump in seats since ... 1910.
3. 'Factions' were viewed dimly by the Founders. I would argue in favor of two immediate changes:
- Term limits for everything, including shorter max civil service careers. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, benefits from regular turning.
- A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up. There are copious talented alternative people to put on ballots. Do your job or face corporate punishment, say I.
This creates an obvious and huge perverse incentive to throw a wrench into the works any time you want a do-over.
How? You don’t think you could find Democrats, today, who wouldn’t roll the dice on a new Congress? The proposal essentially gives a narrow minority the ability to call no confidence.
If it gives your party a chance at retaking power? It would be an obvious trade for an administration to do.
I remind you that, under the current regime, Sen. Schumer (D-BY) played along with the GOP Continuing Resolution* not because he fancied the CR, but to avoid giving the Treasury the power of the purse that would come with a shutdown.
*And took a napalm shower for it in social media.
Sort of like the debt limit, it leads to a lot of political maneuvering but doesn't actually limit anything.
"Excuse me?" said the burgeoning national debt.
They don't call for a vote without a known outcome; politics hates surprises.
The question here is how to add enough feedback to keep the corruption minimal.
We've known anecdotally for a long time that our government has gone to seed; DOGE has both broadcast the problem and generated will to reform.
It seems plausible to me that it would decrease corruption. It is a lot easier for power brokers and interests to lobby a 435 member house, than 30K member house. Inversely, it is a lot easier for a citizen to lobby their representative when they are 1/12,000 instead of 1/800k.
30k members--that's a couple of Army Divisions--is more likely to form rigid authoritarian groupings simple to get in and out of the building in a reasonable amount of time.
People don't scale. The overhead of coordinating among so many people would be stifling.
No, the correct approach in my view is to delegate as much as possible back to the States.
Also, for all of the defects of First Past the Post, it's well-understood and supports entry-level participation.
The theoretical superiority of Ranked Choice Voting is overshadowed by the hidden assertion that everyone casting a ballot in RCV has done the homework.
Having served as an election officer for the last 12yrs, the KISS superiority of FPTP is the least-worst alternatives. I wouldn't want RCV even at the county level.
Why? There is no need to increase their number.
> overshadowed by the hidden assertion
Even then it’s still superior. Even if everyone ignores the individual candidates and votes for a party in e.g. a 5 member constituency where the vote is split ~70:30 the minority party would likely get at least one seat when now votes are effectively thrown into the thrash bin.
> Having served as an election officer for the last 12yrs
The implication being that it would make the job too hard for you?
FPTP is a horrible system any way you look at it. It results in almost 50% of the votes being outright discarded and permanently entrenches a 2 party system.
I don't see how either of these assertions follow.
The size of the mandate is important, and the connection between a 2 party "system" and FPTP is something that you'd need to elaborate upon, because there is nothing about the ballot as such stipulating the number of parties. I. Fact, other parties are frequently on the ballot, so the dominance of 2 parties is not obviously connected to FPTP as such.
RCV works and is simple to understand.
Hypothetically that was true. Until those founders started engaging in actual politics and became rabidly partisan.
There was a brief period when the Federalists collapsed and US effectively became a single party state with the Democratic-Republicans controlling everything but that was decades after the constitution was signed.
For a glance at Europe, I'm firmly in the skeptical camp.
As in?
People can legitimately disagree about what is right and wrong, or what even falls on a moral continuum. Nailing down a moment’s broad truth is among the most revered roles in any society.
If vandalizing a Telsa and vandalizing the US Capitol are both wrong and my focus is only the act of vandalism in asking this question. Overall, both acts are clear cut wrong!
Those who refuse to say both are wrong their brains are driven now by political emotional mind control babble where they've thrown out knowing and standing for right over wrong.
I guess you showed that your mind is driven/controlled by political emotional babble & narratives made up by the right (tho maybe your left or an independent who leans right) & it's media (right or left .. all make up narratives) you consume. But I don't want to jump to conclusions.
I rest my case that models that cast the world in black and white are the wrongest of the bunch, as they’re essentially a hard default for legalism and the status quo.
And I studied ethics. Meanwhile you have supporters of Trump vandalizing the capital because they couldn't accept the result of a democratic election with the goal to force their minority opinion onto the majority.
Those who don't equate the two simply realized that context matters in ethics. Example: Stealing is wrong. Not stealing when a child is starving and no one can help is more wrong. However stealing from someone whose child is starving is more wrong than stealing from a faceless multinational corporation that exploits millions. This is btw. something you can also observe in real life ethical decisions. That doesn't mean the excuse people find for themselves is always factually correct, but in US politics one side sees actively making shit up as a strength now, so that should tell us something about how much care is given for reality.
You likely tricked yourself into equating the two (vandalizing a symbol of a unelected fascist billionair VS a mob trying to force the senate to ignore the will of millions) by drawing a mental bubble around the word "vandalized" and assuming two acts are the same because their description may contain the same word. This is quite frankly an astonishingly simplistic stance to take. Words are things used to describe reality, yes, but reducing real acts down to one word, removing all the context and then equating words is not how ethics work.
Maybe you remember the trolly problem craze from a while ago. The original trolly problem premise is that murder is wrong and you have a lever where you can save 5 lives by switching the lever to a track with only one person stuck. The variations on the trolly problem are essentially a mental experiment to explore the ethical context of a decision. Our ethics prof e.g. liked to propose a variation where you have to push one person off a bridge in order to stop the trolly, suddenly everybody would deem it wrong. Turns out whether it is a lever or you have to touch a person makes a huge difference in how close to murder it feels.
Consider the point the parent of this side conversation was trying to make: What if there was a party with the guiding principal of keeping the country together and pursuing policy based on sound principals rather than "what will own the libs" or "stop the fascists"? The things you complain about are happening because of divisive politics. Trump is powerful because he listened to people who were being ignored or attacked by the political hegemony, and it turned out that was a small majority of the country. It's a shame that someone with admirable personality traits didn't think of it first.
How would you reform the political and voting system to improve the total happiness in the united states?
Another ethical question for you: that mob believed the election was rigged and that the senate was ignoring the will of the nation. Based on that belief, were they acting ethically? Keep in mind that this is bigger than the trolley problem. Sort of an iterated trolley problem, if you will.
I think AI should be the next party where people and all their b.s. cant affect it's rock solid moral and ethical code. It follows clear cut right over wrong, it is all about unity, peace/love for all human beings of all different types of backgrounds and it uses massive amounts of data to adjust how its ethics changes over time. So, it's M.O. (one i described) remains updated to per how society changes. Of course that could lead to an even worse system but just thinking out of the box as i do and getting downvoted for such thinking as usual lol
As well AI could be used to monitor all politicians day and night routine to ensure veracity in everything they do/push for and ensure those politicians are following the AIs ethical code of law and they're serving the people not the politician or any of the politicians cronies or interest groups that do not serve the people as a whole!
The closest equivalent would the a mob breaking into Tesla’s HQ while shouting stuff about hanging Musk.
The House is a mess. So is SCOTUS. My proposal for the latter is redefining the Supreme Court as one drawn by lot from appellate judges for each case. This not only solves the appointment lottery. It also incentivises expanding the judiciary, which we need to do, and removes the modern perversion which is the Supreme Court just not bothering with controversial cases.
Most importantly, the edits to SCOTUS can be done by the Congress. The edits to the House can be done by the states. (EDIT: Nah.) Senate requires a Constitutional amendment; that window isn’t open at this time.
The Senate is elected similar to a parliament from other countries. Country-wide votes for parties, with proportional representation. It would balance out the regionality of the House.
The Supreme Court justices serve terms of 12-16 years. Each presidential candidate must select 2 supreme court picks at least 4 weeks before the election, and whoever wins has their picks placed on the court. (After their term, supreme court justices retire to the DC circuit).
This is important to understand, because the 17th Amendment is an on-again-off-again political issue; Republicans have, in recent history, held most state legislatures, so repealing the 17th Amendment would basically guarantee that the Republican Party would control at least one house of Congress for the foreseeable future, and give the party greater control over who is selected to the office.
True, but...
> A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.
No, it can't because Congress itself is given the overriding power in the Constitution to regulate the "time, place, and manner" of elections to the House, and has exercised it to prohibit at-large districts (many times, with lax enforcement, but the most recent mandate, adopted in 1967, has not had the compliance problems the earlier ones often did.) The 1967 mandate was adopted under the dual specter of a some states failing to resolve districting controversies and potentially facing judicially-imposed at-large districts and several states having used at-large districts for non-federal elections to effectively disenfranchise Black voters and concerns that the same might be done to Congressional delegations as a way of blunting the impacts of new rules like the Voting Rights Act.
Additional detail at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43739929
There has been numerous proposals in the Congress to get rid of it, but they don't get ratified because two parties like the status quo.
People will have to make it an issue.
Here's a paper by Markus Schulze proposing such a method: https://aso.icann.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/schulze4.pd... He uses some very large districts, but it should work for smaller districts too.
Also one of the main criticism of people opposed to proportional system is the lack of direct representation. STV solves that and even is superior to FPTP in that way because you are more likely to find a MP who is more sympathetic towards your cause/views if there are e.g. 3-5 members in your district.
Of course I’m not talking about the system proposed in the paper your linked, but rather about how MMP works in Germany. You get both part list and FPTP style party appointed candidates.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...
Then there the focus on the left vs. the right, which is no longer as relevant as it used to be during the cold war. If you choose a single faction (such as the left, conservatives, or environmentalists), that specific faction is almost always smaller than everyone else combined. When there are multiple major issues instead of a single overarching question, political divisions become more nuanced than simple X vs. not-X.
(In my opinion, the Dutch system is one of the best implemented in practice, precisely because of its proportionality.)
the most massive political injustices, poor housing, health care, education, elderly care, affordable transportation, queer human rights, all of them despite high GDP, just to name a few quantifiable properties of a state... the worst digressions happen in FPTP systems currently.
also the article throws both hands in the air as if no mechanisms exist to further improve democracies. it doesn't mention popular vote, or some mechanisms for balance of freedom of speech vs freedom to slander and distort and lie ("hate speech", the word polemics has 'polemos', war, as root), or press codex, or application thereof on all media, including "social" media, ad engines made of letters to the editor largely left alone and unmoderated... nor does it mention panachage and cumulating of votes on lists, the right to adjust the party list proposals in the voting booth.
the article does mention the brazen influence of financial power as a problem though.
but really, proportional representation is part of the solution.
Sure. And I don’t anymore. But the casualty of that choice is social empathy.
I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the people who do it though.
The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.
What? It's for all voting systems. It just defines a set of criteria that are desirable; it doesn't describe any system.