In a democracy, you should have two votes instead of one | Hacker News Reader

In a democracy, you should have two votes instead of one

pietrasiak.com

2 pointspmontra8 comments

This is about voting in an election... essentially voting for who will be voting on your behalf for the next x years.

I don't get it honestly, If you aren't actually voting on actual decisions yourself. If democracy isn't a dumb idea, then that is how it should be. The moment someone else is deciding things for you is when it makes no sense.

But even then, if we did vote on everything, someone else is still deciding what the voting options are. And the rest is being decided without a vote by other random people nobody voted to elect.

Giving you an extra vote just for the electing process isnt really going to improve the democratic system.

Is this different to Single Transferable Vote?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

My impression is that the article author isn't aware that this system exists and is used in other democracies. It's used in Australia, and is pretty effective IMO.

The value of elections, if they have any, is knowing why the winner won. That is why nothing more complicated than first-past-the-post can work, because it is the only thing that people can understand, and why FPTP only works if there are exactly two options on the ballot.

>That is why nothing more complicated than first-past-the-post can work, because it is the only thing that people can understand,

Except systems more complicated than first-past-the-post do work, and people do understand them. And FPTP doesn't tell you anything about why the winner won. Can you tell me why Trump won? There are more theories than there are grains of sand on a beach. All FPTP can tell us is that he got more electoral votes than his opponent. Once, that even happened when he lost the popular vote.

Why people voted for someone is different from why the winner was chosen from the votes cast. The former is impossible absent forcing everyone to write justifications, the latter though does have a range of understandability.

A lot of voting systems, mostly ranked systems, are essentially black boxes. These can't easily be understood because often, one can't publish intermediate voting tallies without compromising anonymity. These systems can't be easily audited, independently validated or manually recounted. Answering why someone won from the votes cast in these is exceptionally difficult (which of course makes them wonderful targets for election rigging).

That said, FPTP isn't the only easy to understand voting system. Approval voting is just as easy to grasp since aggregate intermediate tallies can be released like with FPTP.

> A lot of voting systems, mostly ranked systems, are essentially black boxes. These can't easily be understood because often, one can't publish intermediate voting tallies without compromising anonymity.

There are some voting systems where intermediate tallies are complex to produce, very large, or hard to understand, but I can't think of any where they would compromise anonymity.

By intermediate tallies, I mean ones that could be directly used with others to compute the final result.

This can't be done most ranked voting systems in common use in races with truly unique cast ballots - likely in races with a large number of candidates - since one can't do the aggregation necessary to ensure the level of anonymity necessary to prevent someone from verifying you voted the way you told/paid them to. Without them, you can't produce the intermediate counts (often done at the local level) that can be used to calculate the final result.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com