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This is so much BS. There is nothing stopping voters from voting from candidates they like (or from joining a party and actually becoming a candidate).

Well, yes, but the present balloting system effectively marginalizes third parties. I've commented on this on slashdot before-- there are other balloting systems, such as approval voting, in which third parties are not marginalized.

If local politics actually worked better than state and national politics, I might believe it, but (in my experience) they are often worse, with even more blatant favoritism and abuses of power.

And that's a major problem, because local elections are the step for candidates to enter state and national elections.

OK, [! soapbox-mode off]

... The difference is here in the USA we have a flawed system. A system that while it makes sense with a small federal government and a small-ish state government, is fundamentally broken. A system that gives you two choices, either A or B, a system that is designed not to give you a third choice.
When you are advocating a third choice in a system designed for only two choices, its very hard to get a third choice accepted.

Indeed.

Look up Approval Voting for a balloting method that does not squeeze out third parties.

Wikipedia article on Approval Voting
Citizens for Approval voting
Approval Voting and the Good Society

It wouldn't solve all ills, but I think it'd be valuable to encourage "Approval Voting". Third parties have basically no chance to get any traction under the current voting system. In approval voting, you can "vote for more than one candidate if you so choose. The winner is the candidate that collects the most votes."

It's not perfect, but it has lots of advantages. Existing voting equipment can be used (including paper counted by machine), and it's easy to understand. I think it's much better than our current system, while still being simple to understand and apply.

Citizens for Approval Voting and Americans for Approval Voting have more info, if you're curious.

The pointlessness of a two-party system based on false antagonisms and dichotomies. Sadly, there seems to be no hope in sight.

Either approval voting or range voting (aka score votingwould break the forced two-valued dichotomy of the current system.

(In fact, approval voting is just one version of range voting-- in games theory, they are identical).

To illustrate the benefits with an extreme example, suppose you have an Sunni militant, a Shiite militant and a moderate running for office in a district in Iraq that is 60/40 Sunni/Shiite district. Imagine that this district is essentially our current popular conception of Iraq: all 60% of the Sunni's prefer the Sunni supremacist but would settle for the moderate; all 40% of the Shiite's prefer the Shiite militant but would accept the moderate. IRV would elect the Sunni militant. Approval voting would elect the secular moderate. It's easy to see how approval voting couuld arrest the devolution of governments toward civil war.

Getting back to our more fortunate country, consider the case of a district 55% Democrat and 45% Republican, with a third party "spoiler" candidate who is be the first choice of just under half of the Democrats. With plurality voting, the third party candidate is a spoiler and the Republican wins. With Instant Runoff, the democrat wins. With Approval Voting, it depends on the nature of this third party candidate. If the third party candidate is someone who appeals only to Democrats, then the mainstream Democrat would win, just like with IRV. But if the third party candidate is also acceptable to enough Republicans (even if not first choice to them), he may garner more approvals than either of the other two candidates.

Also, approval voting means that having a majority committed to vote for you does not guarantee victory. It is possible for someone to be beaten with 55% approval by someone with 75% approval. So the only way a politician could have a "safe" district would be to have a majority that is committed to voting for him or her _exclusively_, which would greatly reduce the number of safe districts.

I'm not saying that Approval Voting would create a Utopia. It's only one of many political adjustments that I'd like to see experimented with at municipal, then state, and then federal levels, but I'd encourage those interested to get involved here and, if you're a US citizen, here.

I'm voting green from now on.

The fact is that in a first-past-the-goal system like we have in the states, if you don't vote for the lesser of two evils then your vote is wasted. What we need is a change in how we count votes, such as Condorcet, ranked pairs, or approval voting. None of these is perfect (Condorcet is the most fair, but is complicated), but all of them are more fair than what we have in the states.

--- SER

I did my research this election, and I found several alternative party or independent candidates who had very good ideas. I also found quite a few who were plainly kooks. I told people about the candidates that I like as well as the other alternative ones. Most people's reactions were, "but they have no chance of winning. You are throwing away your vote."

I'll forgo modding to post this. It's not a shame, but rather, our voting system is broken.

Voting for the guy you truly like does INDEED work to put the guy you hate the most into office, with our CURRENT voting system. But it doesn't have to be that way!

Look here for a better (simple) voting system: http://www.approvalvoting.org/

Your problem is viewing that the vote for the third party is throwing it away in the short term.

In the states, we have a first-past-the-post voting system -- possibly the worst voting system possible. In such a system, people are encouraged to vote for the lesser of two evils, which they do. Just listen to the rhetoric that comes out of the parties when elections come around and this becomes obvious.

To fix the system the US uses, we need a better voting mechanism. Condorcet and Approval (2) are good candidates.

Another thing that would really help would be serious campaign finance reform. Corporations should not be allowed to lobby, or contribute, in any way. It wouldn't hurt to have independent media in the USA again, either.

As long as we have first-past-the-post voting, though, nothing is going to change. People will continue to vote against candidates they don't like, rather than for candidates that they do. Those who don't vote this way will continue to be marginalized.

--- SER

You've also got a very good point that Condorcet at least has a method to solve ties, while other methods simply hide the problem under the carpet. Ties are not a problem of Condorcet, it's a fact in the voters' intentions that has to be dealt with (should it ever occur).

This does not mean that it would be easy to sell Condorcet. The media is not always rational... Hence, it might useful to support Approval now, while still supporting Condorcet for the long run. What are the ways to do so? I know of Citizens for approval voting, although I'm not sure how active they are. Any other proposal?

The short of it is that you change the directions from "vote for one" to "vote for any". The whomever has the most number of approvals wins. It doesn't let people express preference between two candidates they find acceptable but it makes up for that in that it's simple for people to understand and it should be possible to use our existing style ballots.

There is a technically superior voting method, similar to IRV, called Condorcet but it's more complicated and therefore would be less easy to understand by the general public and I think it's important that people be able to understand the election process as much as possible.

While everyone is scrambling to prevent another Florida incident, these people are questioning the results even if we get it perfect. They want to measure the accuracy of the voting system itself by comparing it to a virtual election using approval voting.

IRV has its share of problems, though. According to
this Approval Voting site,
IRV only helps avoid the spoiler effect when there are exactly two viable candidates. Once a third
candidate becomes viable too, you're back to the
same old problem.

The real solution would be a better election system, a good compromise being Approval Voting. Approval Voting uses the same ballot format as the current system but allows a voter to approve any number of candidates, effectively allowing a vote for or against each candidate. Approval Voting is a simple reform that gets rid of the spoiler and lesser-of-two-evils problems and would result in a level playing field for all parties and candidates.

The real solution would be a better election system, a good compromise being Approval Voting. Approval Voting uses the same ballot format as the current system but allows a voter to approve any number of candidates, effectively allowing a vote for or against each candidate. Approval Voting is a simple reform that gets rid of the spoiler and lesser-of-two-evils problems and would result in a level playing field for all parties and candidates.

The real solution would be a better election system, a good compromise being Approval Voting. Approval Voting uses the same ballot format as the current system but allows a voter to approve any number of candidates, effectively allowing a vote for or against each candidate. Approval Voting is a simple reform that gets rid of the spoiler and lesser-of-two-evils problems and would result in a level playing field for all parties and candidates.

First, Math Against Tyranny is a great article that demonstrates much of the value of the electoral college. It was enough to convince me of the value of it, and convert me from anti-EC to pro-EC.

Second, I agree that IRV is more complex than we'd like to see in a voting system. I would rather see approval voting implemented, as it is just as simple as the current method, and gives much more valuable results.

Note that you don't need to remove the EC to implement a better voting system like approval voting.

Whatever your opinion after either set of debates, why not express your opinion like you never have before...

In the weeks leading up to the Presidential elections, many Slashdot users as well as some third party candidates (Badnarik) have advocated the use of better voting systems such as Instant Runoff Voting, Approval Voting and Condorcet Voting. There is a new web site which has just started a worldwide campaign to promote such alternatives, and it has just come up with an unexpected endorsement for the US 2004 election. What's much more interesting is a new service which is, as far as I am aware, unique on the web: a MOD of the popular software phpBB allows users not only to post messages like on any other Bulletin Board, but also to create their own polls, with their own choice of candidates, using a variety of voting methods. Users can thus create their own polls, cast their ballots and talk about the results all in the same forum.

American voters should use this unique opportunity to cast the alternative ballot that they will not be able to cast in November, and maybe also create new polls corresponding to other local elections in their states. It would be very interesting to see what the result would be if voters were given the opportunity to voice their true preferences.

Well, this article submission was too much (or not enough) pro-whomever for their taste:

In the weeks leading up to the Presidential elections, many Slashdot users as well as some third party candidates (Badnarik) have advocated the use of better voting systems such as Instant Runoff Voting, Approval Voting and Condorcet Voting. There is a new web site which has just started a worldwide campaign to promote such alternatives, and it has just come up with an unexpected endorsement for the US 2004 election. What's much more interesting is a new service which is, as far as I am aware, unique on the web: a MOD of the popular software phpBB allows users not only to post messages like on any other Bulletin Board, but also to create their own polls, with their own choice of candidates, using a variety of voting methods. Users can thus create their own polls, cast their ballots and talk about the results all in the same forum.

American voters should use this unique opportunity to cast the alternative ballot that they will not be able to cast in November, and maybe also create new polls corresponding to other local elections in their states. It would be very interesting to see what the result would be if voters were given the opportunity to voice their true preferences.

I'd rather approval voting was suggested rather than the hard-to-understand instant runoff voting.

The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.

Approval voting.

IRV still has spoilers.

I prefer Approval Voting. Thats where you vote for as many of the people available as you wish.

It is simpler for the average person to understand, and would be easier to implement, and does not have the flaws that the more complicated voting methods have. (At least as far as I know. I've been meaning to do a mathematical proof that it is best. Has anyone out there already done that?)

Also, voting methods are determined by the state. I don't even think it is part of the State Constitution but either laws or procedures. Because of this people in states that allow Ballot Initiatives can get the voting method changed themselves without, or in spite of, the actions of elected politicians.

You can also change the distribution of your state's electoral votes from winner take all to proportional. (At least one state in the union does this.)

I'm not sure but I think it would require a federal constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college altogether.

The main problem in the USA isn't how we gather votes, although there are problems in some states (Florida). There is a more fundamental problem in that we aren't using the right voting mechanism. In the US, we use plurality voting -- a.k.a "first across the line" -- to determine who wins an election. This means that a candidate for whom only 30% of the people voted can win an election simply because there was no other single candidate with more votes.

This has a number of problems, but they can all be summed up by saying that plurality is one of the least fair, if not the least fair, way of determining the winner of a democratic election that you can get. Consider:

• Say 40% of the people vote for candidate A
• 35% of the people want candidate B
• 25% want candidate C

This situation encourages strategic voting; that is to say, voters for C have to decide whether they want to vote honestly, for C, or whether they should vote for B just to make that they don't get their least favorite candidate, A.

This is why we only have two parties in the US, and why -- despite the large number of Greens and Libertarians, neither party has a chance of winning. We don't even know what percentage of the US population is Green or Libertarian (or anything else, for that matter) because they aren't voting honestly. They're voting for the lesser of two evils. This system practically guarantees alienation of the largest number of people -- the majority ends up with a candidate they don't want, unless they lie when voting and vote for the candidate that they dislike the least who also has the best chance of winning.

There are voting mechanisms which allow people to vote their true opinion without being alienated. The most popular are Condorcet -- complex, but the most fair; Approval Voting -- not as fair as Condorcet, but much simpler, and can be implemented with existing voting technology; and Instant Runoff -- less fair than approval, no more simple -- but better than plurality.

Many democratic countries do not use plurality voting, although plurality is the most common. For example, Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote[1]. In fact, 68 countries (~2b ppl) use plurality, 31 countries (~400m ppl) use single transferable vote, and two countries (~18m ppl) use IRV (instant runoff) -- this is according to International IDEA Handbook.

There is a huge amount of information about Condorcet and Approval Voting available on the web. The Citizens for Approval Voting page is a good start, if you're at all interested in improving voting in the US. If you're interested in the mechanics and mathematics of the systems, start with Condorcet -- most sites that talk about Condorcet are less about how to get it implemented politically, and are more about how it works, fairness tests, and how it compares to other systems. The Wikipedia entry for "voting system" is particularly useful.