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Mathematicians: Elections Flawed
Nader-licious writes "Science News Online reports: 'With recent reports of malfunctioning voter machines and uncounted votes during primaries in Florida, Maryland, and elsewhere, reformers are once again clamoring for extensive changes. But while attention is focused on these familiar irregularities, a much more serious problem is being neglected: the fundamental flaws of the voting procedure itself. Mathematics are shedding light on questions about how well different voting procedures capture the will of the voters.' The verdict: the U.S. system might be the worst of the lot."
US the worst? You don't need math to figure that out, you just need to look at the results.
Do not forget that the foudner sof this country never intedned the common man or women to choose our president..
Thats why we have delegates to pick president instead of popular vote..
The founders felt that the common man or wome was to stupid to effectively pick a president of a country..
and the funny part is that they are right..when was the last time the common man and women of this country rejected what media and lobbyists tell us and vote with our minds and hearts? Not in the past 50 yearsd has this happened..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
A proof, I believe, is located here. Interesting reading, considering that it says that a fair election is mathematically impossible.
Having said that, and assuming one day democracy decides to rear it's head again, technology will not hold the key for the voting / tallying process. Small election halls with big chief tablets and number 2 pencils, and rotating citizen audits of the results, relative transparency - posting of *results* in hard copy and electronically. There is no other way. The current system is not trustworthy, adding technology to the mix just gives more excuses and less transparency for regular non ninja bit nerds. Follow the yellow brick road boys and girls, and mind your heads.
I'm an Australian, and we use the "instant runoff" system described in the article. My view on it is that rather than putting the most popular candidate into office, it keeps the least popular candidates out of office.
There is a problem that the article neglected to mention - "how to vote" cards. Each candidate will generally recommend how they think people should vote - themselves first, naturally. The same sheep mentality that leads to 70% of the population voting for the same party every election leads to many religiously following these how to vote cards.
The end result is a heap of wheeling and dealing between candidates for these "directed preferences." It even becomes a stick in between elections that the minor parties can use to beat a major party with; in a marginal seat, having a minor party favour you over your primary opposition can be the difference between winning and losing.
Other voting systems abound. One alternative is the instant runoff...
And it's very popular. I was just reading about it because of some person's sig on slashdot in support of it. Hopefully the person will post to this story....
-Robert.
Also, from the faq:
"Who uses IRV? Many places. Ireland to elects its president, Australia to elect its House of Representatives, and the American Political Science Association to elect its president. Cambridge MA uses a variant of IRV to elect its city council, and literally hundreds of jurisdictions, organizations and corporations use IRV around the world."
I'm quite partial to the Australian system (although I may be biased since I'm Australian). It is a variation on the simplistic British 'first-past-the-post' system. Basically, you number each candidate in the order you prefer, with #1 being your favourite candidate. When the votes are counted, they first tally all the #1 votes. If after that nobody has a clear majority (50% of the vote plus one), they count the #2 votes and add them to the #1 tallies. They keep doing that until someone gets a majority.
What I like about this system is that you are not tying yourself to one candidate. Your vote won't be wasted if you vote #1 for a minority candidate, since if they don't win your next preferences may count. This also means that you're not necessarily guaranteed a win if you're in one of the larger parties.
In the end (generally), you don't get an electorate that's split between people who did and didn't vote for the winner. Since everybody's preferences are taken into account, you get a decent compromise.
OLPC Australia
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all. The Founders did think the electorate was ill-equipped to select Senators, and made special provisions in the Constitution for Senators to be elected by State legislatures as opposed to the people.
If what you're saying was right, we'd see the President selected the same way. No, the Electoral College exists because of a concern they had in those long-ago days, a concern which is still very valid today: a concern that with pure direct election of the President, metropolitan areas would overwhelm rural interests and we'd wind up with a government "by the cities, of the cities" instead of one which represented the whole nation. If we had direct popular election of the Presidency, do you think the President would ever care about what concerns citizens in Montana had?
Take a look at the county-by-county election returns from the 2000 campaign. It's an absolute sea of red, except for a few small blotches of blue up and down the coastlines and other small blotches in the Midwest.
County-by-county, it was a Bush blowout. Not even close. We hadn't seen a county-by-county blowout like that since Reagan sent Mondale packing in '84.
It was only in terms of pure popular vote that Gore nudged ahead. But, as it turns out, pure popular vote doesn't matter in Presidential elections. It's pure electoral vote that matters.
Neither would be happy if the system would allow more than 2 parties to exist, so neither will ever agree to a substantial reform.
The point of having elections is not so that we can measure the will of the voters. Rather, we have them simply because they're a fairly orderly system for choosing people for public office. Remember the phrase, "democracy is the worst possible system, except for all the others." There's much truth in it. Ours is a very a stable system, survived the Florida fiasco with barely a hiccup. Trying to make it more "just" would probably make it less stable... for examply, should we make it so Democrats think it's more just, or so that Republicans think it's more just. Either would be a disaster. What we do have though, is something that's fairly good at guaging public opinion, and which is respected and obeyed, if not loved, by all the participants. Democracy isn't an end unto itself, it's just the best method of preserving liberty.
See the article here
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Political scientist have known for years that the US election system does not capture the "will" of the voter as well as a proportional representation system. This math is certainly not new. However, there are a number of drawbacks to other forms of election that should be expounded on.
1: In proportional representation, there are more likely to be minority parties with elected officials who have extreme/radical viewpoints that are dissimilar to the viewpoints of the "average" voter. Because of the US' election system, no candidate can choose to isolate a significant portion of the population with his views and yet still be elected, to a large "smoothing out" extremist policy. While many feel that this is a bad thing, almost all extremist policy is not realistic to implement, and partial or full implementation of this policy can cause a good bit of damage.
2: In proportional representation, the government is generally unitary in nature, meaning that the entire government is controlled by one party. Although there are more parties beyond the controlling party and another party represented, they still have a HUGE capability to control government policy. If the party in charge changes (and they often change), the entire government policy may change as well. Imagine if a country implemented social security, and then cancelled it 12 years later because the Socialists were replaced by Libertarians!
3: Most other countries do not implement a form of federal government. While this may work for countries where there country is roughly the size of a US region, it makes interests associated with a geographical locale very difficult to achieve. While every vote should be equal (or as equal as possible), the reality is that interests are largely decided by the environment of the voter, and partitioning the environment, and tiering government, means more interests of more voters are going to be met without completely missing the interests of other voters.
4: Most unitary governments do not have a strong set of checks and balances; i.e., judges and execute officials are appointed via the parliament/prime minister, and the prime minister is elected by the parliament. The effect of this election policy is similar again to point 2: a shift in political power can cause a dramatic shift in policy in a short period of time because there are fewer roadblocks between the will of the current parliament and the implementation of that will.
Out of all of the election policies I've studied, IGNORING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE (because it's a system with several undescribed states, if we were to somehow reach one of those states by having an election of an official "tied" in enough ways we wouldn't know what the next step would be), I prefer the US government system. It's not designed to reflect the will of the people right now. It's designed to reflect the long-term interests of the people after filtering out extreme views. Its perponderance of gridlock has prevented so many stupid things from happening it's totally uncountable. That being said, I like the way Australian government is structured, except I REALLY do not like the idea of being able to put multiple candidates on a list. Political scientist mathemeticians have shown that by being able to list multiple candidates on a piece of paper, it increases the voting power of a citizen to > 1, and they can use these voting lists to perform elaborate tricks to achieve an end result which might not effect the will of the voting populace at all.
Tired of rambling, so I think I'll stop here.
Unless mankind redesigns itself
From the site:
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Since democracies have started people have pointed out the flaws in the voting system. One specific critique was done by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carrol) which talked about the British system. Unfortunately, it was ignored.
The University of Virginia, has been working with the Lewis Carrol Society of North America to print his many works (up to 3 of 9 last I checked). The third book, which is mathematical approach to politics, is availible here and here.
Have you read my journal today?
In my not humble at all opinion, the biggest problem is that our elections are from 7amto 7pm on TUESDAYS! They need to move the elections to Sundays and open the polls for 24 hours. As it is, alot of people are simply unable to vote because of work and commutes.
Derek Greene
What do you expect from a flawed society? Seriously.
Let's take the Presidential campaign of 2000. What choices did the people have. Let's take the two mainstream candidates first for example. Here's the story that was created by the media. You have the straight-talking cowboy with a heart of gold vs. the lying politician who can't even make up his mind on himself. And oh by the way, they will do exactly the same thing once they get in office. The people didn't stand a chance.
Nader:Not a viable option. Not to the fact that he's a third party, but the fact that Nader was more concerned with burying the Democrats than actually convincing people of things. (I'm a strong supporter of the Green platform, so cut that one off at the pass)
Buchanan:A viable option in my mind. People knew what he stood for. They just didn't like what he stood for.:)
Libertarian:The Libs. have the same problem as the Greens, in getting out an actual platform. With the Libertarians it's a bit more ingrained because the platform sometimes falls into hypocritical thought. (Drug Laws Bad, Property Laws Good!..BZZZT)
The problem in the US is not the voting systems. Well, the voting systems are a problem, but not quite in the way listed. The problem with US voting systems is that different areas use different voting systems with different margin of errors, which creates some differential in the actual vote count.
The problem in the US is the entertainment base of the media. They try to create a horse-race out of EVERYTHING. They equivicate the Democrats and the Republicans on everything, and pretty much ignore anything that would pretty much end one of the parties. For example, a massive coverage of the Pitt/Webster scandal right now would in essence make the election next Tuesday unwatchable. Why? The result would not be in question. It doesn't make for good TV.
News as entertainment. Sorry, I get enough of that from Jon Stewart. I want the rest of my news to be damn serious.
Anyone who has even a minimum grasp of basic voting theory knows that Kenneth Arrow proved in 1952 that there is no consistent method of making a fair choice among three or more candidates. Thus all voting systems are, in some respect, flawed.
Short intro here. Couldn't find a link to the proof itself, unfortunately.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
This is yet another in a long line of 'physical science rules misapplied to the social sciences.' A mathematical analysis designed to produce the guy who is everyone's best friend is all fine and good, but that's at best tangential to the real business of elections. Most people seem to have this vision that an election is a beauty pageant where a bunch of leaders are picked who then get to make all the decisions based on sweet reason. The real business of elections is to form mandate, consensus and acceptance.
Mandate: The winner points to a large number of votes as a justification for his / her agenda.
Consensus: The process of elections is designed to determine what kind of compromises among winners (remember that there are hundreds of elections at once) must be made to govern. Dozens of factions have to work together, and this is how the horse-trading happens that lets the hippies work with the union workers work with the trial lawyers.
Acceptance: OK, you disagree with the results of the elections, and you can't find other factions that you are willing to work with. You want to be ideologically pure and go your own way, and you don't have the popularity to make it on your own. You at very least have to accept the process that got you there. Acceptance is what keeps us from breaking into violence after the election.
OK, so how does our system fare?
Well, that article addresses the question, "what is the best way to measure my Mandate" to the exclusion of all else. In other words, it measures elections as if they were opinion polls. I'll come back to it.
In terms of Consensus, we have the best system in the world, which is why our government has only broken down into fighting once. In a parliamentary system, you get elected and then (as is happening in Israel) you form a coalition government by compromising with other parties to form a majority. So the people's will is measured, then a compromise is formed in a back room by elites.
In our system, the 'spoiler' factor that the article describes as a bad thing actually helps. In the end, you pretty much have to be in one of the two major parties, or your vote is useless. That means you have to compromise with the religiously orthodox, small businessmen, and engineers on one side (broadly) and lawyers, teachers, union officials, and students on the other (again, very broadly). You have to do the compromising, so you decide exactly what kind of deal to cut in the primaries. The two parties meanwhile have to be as inclusive of compatible points of view as possible. So our system rocks at building consensus. People who hate compromising, of course, love parliamentary systems, which are more entertaining in academia or on TV, but are notoriously unstable.
Finally, acceptance. Well, I think that our system has that, too, though it was strained in 2000 with the election fiasco, and events in NJ more recently.
Anyway, that's what the point of our election system is. Remember, even in physics, examining a system is reflexive: it changes what you're looking at. Our system isn't a measurement, it is a way to arrive at solutions that get the most popular viewpoints across, a good compromise if your faction didn't win the primary but won the general, and at least confidence in the process if you didn't even win the general. I'd say our system is the best I've seen, compared to either paper plans or real life.
In the long run, math does not lie. The one with the most votes win. Period.
Here in Venezuela we just count all the votes from every part of the country, and add them up. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
In Article 2 - Section 1 of the US Constitution, the framers had a good idea that has since been changed through amendment ... perhaps we should consider going back to that original method? Here it is:
"The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President ... after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President."
Basically, the candidate with the most votes becomes President. You take his votes out of the pool, and the candidate with the most votes after that becomes Vice-President. Seems kind of simplistic, but this was written in a time when they wanted to keep the election process simple so that we didn't have the mess we had in 2000. I suspect the campaigning would be much more civil if the person you were knocking down could end up after the election as your boss ... or your second-in-command!
Doesn't sound too bad to me.
-jh
Do you know, that every true Democratic system bears the possibility of its own destruction?
The fact, that the US system didn't produce dictators and Europe did several cannot be reduced to it's election system.
The difference of the US and Europe lies more in social, economic and historical problems.
Various quarrels between European nations, pride, bad economy, comes to mind.
The reduction know of the result on the voting system is uninformed, to say the least.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
By no means was this to be a popular election or anything close to it. This is a lot closer to the original method of selecting members of the Senate than it is to the method of selecting members of the House. In fact, it seems to say that the Founders felt that not only the common people but also state legislatures were unqualified to choose a president. The members of the Electoral College were originally not supposed to cast their votes according to the popular vote or even the vote of state legislatures; they were to select the president based on their own best judgement.
Most other countries do not implement a form of federal government.
We (USA) don't have a federal government, at least not in the pure sense of the word. We have a national government.
What's the difference? Whether power resides primarily on the state or national level. A federal government represents and is controlled by a federation of smaller political entities (states, in the USA) where the true power resides. A national government represents and is controlled by a single national political entity that might or might not be comprised of smaller political entities.
The single best way to determine whether you have a federal or national government is where the primary power of taxation resides since a government can do nothing without revenue. The political struggle between the federalists and anti-federalists in the USA centered mainly around this point. Oddly enough, there was the same confusion between the terms "federal" and "national" back then. Apparently, the Federalist marketers got their mits onto that confusion first, because the Federalists were actually for a national government and the Anti-Federalists for a federal government.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
The problem with partisan elections is that the political parties have all the power, and constituencies are not properly represented, as constituency representatives are forced to act along the party line - in effect, the party chief has *ALL* the power.
Worse still, in a britshit-type parliamentary system, who holds the power has often nothing to do with the totality of votes expressed: our current assembly has one party with twice as much members than the opposition, yet the ruling party had less than two percent votes more than the opposition.
Here is my proposal to eliminate this:
Here. It's pdf. Google's html transcription behaves weirdly, but it should be located here.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
Wow! It's official, the USA voting system is fundamentally flawed!
I've been saying this for years. The `winner takes all' system used in the USA (I suppose it's also used in other places...Brittain?) results in two Bad Things:
1. It is possible for one candidate to be elected, whereas the other got more votes. This happens when one candidate gets the majority of votes in many small states, and the other candidate gets the majority in a few large states. It can also happen when more than 2 candidates are involved, but see the second point.
2. It's problematic when more than 2 candidates are involved. A third candidate will take away votes from the other two. Naturally, these votes will come from the candidate whose program is most like that of the third candidate. Therefore, it will reduces the chances of the candidate whose program corresponds _more_ to what people want.
Of course, these are flaws only if the goal of the system is to elect the candidate whose program corresponds best to what the people want. I think that, often, what the people want is not what is best for the country as a whole, or even what is best for them. Arguably, people are often ignorant of what effect certain measures can have, and some decissions would be better left to experts (although they are often wrong, too).
What, then, is the best system? A system where the people decide what happens? A system where a limited number of alleged experts decide what happens? A system where the power is ultimately in the hands of one person? I don't know. They each have merits and drawbacks. I guess it depends on the situation, and to some extent on personal taste.
---
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-- Oscar Wilde
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
- Student A: A, A, A, D, F.
- Student B: A, A, B, B, B.
- Student C: A, A, C, B, B.
Which student do you think should be ranked first in his class of 3? Well, plurality vote picks student A - is this fair?The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Another is the Borda count, a point system devised by the 18th-century French mathematician Jean Charles Borda, which is now used to rank college football and basketball teams.
Oh, that's just brilliant.
Because if there's one thing that everyone can agree on in the US of A, it's who is the top ranked college football team. Yep... that'd remove all ambiguity and uncertainty from the whole election process for sure and we could always be certain of a clear winner.
Outstanding.
I still say that we should get rid of elections and just have the candidates fight for their position in a no-holds-barred cage match... "Let combat be the judge" and all that. Heck, at least it would boost the CSPAN ratings.
The verdict: the U.S. system might be the worst of the lot.
Shocking! And here I clicked on a Slashdot story thinking I would find that the US was the best of the lot! This is so unexpected!!
;)
It isn't news or a shock that the American election system does the worst job an election can of measuring opinion. The American system has too large of a "seat bonus," where 50%+1 of a district gives you all the power from it. Imagine a party sweeping through every district in the Union with 50.1% of the vote, taking the entire Senate, House, and White House. That, and not the ability to vote 3rd Party candidates higher is the flaw in our system.
The most representative is probably Israel. You vote for parties, it's one nation-wide race, and then the parties put a government together. It's extremely unstable, gives DISPROPORTIONATE power to minority views (all the 3%-5% parties in the Government can get unreasonable concessions with the threat to collapse the government), but it is the most representative.
In the US, the rules suck but the system works. Both parties have "moved towards the center," where the party meets the voter, instead of the voter choosing from many parties. Both parties are pretty close to parity, and ALL leaders have to bend to the will of the masses.
The system is stable, elections are every 2 years without fail, the system holds. Even in the 2000 tie, where a party stole power from the other by bribing a senator to switch parties (regardless of any partisan happiness from it, it is pretty scary that Senators can switch parties for the best offer... too close to a coalition government if we have 5-10 independants offering their services to make a majority), the system held surprisingly well.
Exactly though, Democracy preserves liberty, the government stays stable, and we all try to get by with the least government interference in our lives.
Alex
...or mod him down as hopelessly naive!
You do realize that this is essentially what was used by the Soviet Union and is currently in use by China (except the decision is made by those with party influence, not academic credentials)...don't you? Does it really look like either of those two have done particularly well?
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
What I said:
:)
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all.
The Founders permitted a popular vote. As in, "each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct..." In other words, popular votes to determine electors are permissible; it's up to the individual states to decide precisely how their electors will be appointed. A legislature could decide that their electors would be appointed by random lottery and it'd still pass Constitutional muster.
There's a world of difference between something being permitted and something being proscribed. Popular votes to determine electors are permitted; but nothing is proscribed beyond "it will be determined by the state legislature".
I have no objection to being told I'm wrong, but I get a mite bit annoyed when the cause is really someone not reading what I write, as opposed to what they want me to have written.
In Autumn 2000, I wrote a rant about this, in which I defend the general scheme of the electoral college (winner take all per state, small states with extra weight), but call for Condorcet voting within the states.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
The huge glaring flow in the US system is the fact that it is done in one single turn.
...
When it comes to naming individuals (e.g. presidents), most countries use a 2-turns system.
Usually, you can have as many runners as you want for the first round (16 at the last French election), then only the 2 highest scores are selected for the second round.
This means that all ideas can be represented at the election, and influence the big parties, without hindering their chances.In a 2-turn election, Ralph Nader would have been ejected at the first round, and the world's future would not depend on a man that watches Korea through closed binoculars !
Yet Nader's score would have prompted Al Gore to make small changes in his program in order to reap some of Nader's voters. Everyone would be happy: the most popular candidate wins, but the minority candidates can still express their views and actually influence government.
This system has one big default, however: it is so efficient that people tend to rely too much on it. E.g. in the French election, 99% of voters were absolutely certain that the 2nd round would bring the good old traditional Center-Left vs Center-Right showdown (Jospin-Chirac in that case), so many people didn't even care to vote. This is even more true for center-left voters, because their candidate (Lionel Jospin) was leading in the polls for the 2nd round.
And then they (we) saw Jean-Marie Le Pen's face on TV that night
Ever heard about those people who buy highly sophisticated cars with all security options and then start driving like devils out of their boxes, thinking that with such a safe car you don't need to be careful anymore ? One day or another, they end up bumping into a tree or a wall. The 2-turns direct voting system is a very safe car. But the French are notorious for being awful drivers.
Thomas Miconi
Got any references for this claim, by any chance?
--Dan
First, if everyone prefers candidate A to candidate B, then A should be ranked higher than B. Second, voters' opinions about candidate C shouldn't affect whether A beats B--after all, if you prefer coffee to tea, finding out that hot chocolate is available shouldn't suddenly make you prefer tea to coffee.
Okay here goes.
1) Rank the candidates in the order of you preference: Nader, Gore, Bush.
2) Count all the first choice votes. Nader: 20 Bush: 42 Gore: 38.
3) Take the one with the lowest number of votes out of the election and recalculate. (Gore: 51 Bush 49).
How does this not meat the criteria? It can't be that easy I must have over looked something I'm sure.
The funny thing is most people I know do this already. They think: I really like candidate C but if A wins I'm leaving the country so I'll just vote for B because I can live with him. This system would just do it for them.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
The current electoral system has a number of flaws, as any electoral system will have (per the article.) But the particular flaws that whatever the current system has are exactly the ones are that most likely to favor those who are currently in office- why should they change it?
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Who do not have enough time to read each candidate proposal,
only watch the 30 min. TV debate 1 month before the elections,
who do not understand 75% of every single phrase politician tell and
who honestly think that whoever is elected, it will be about the same?
I used to be idealistic, but I now think that government is just another business which happens to control my life.
"Democracy" sounds great... That's about it.
I'd rather be sailing...
A lot of these comments assume that the US system is flawed because that their views have no chance of being properly represented. The system isn't flawed because people aren't getting the people they want in office; the system works because the canidates that people fear are kept out of office.
Libertarians and Greens constantly complain that their views aren't reflected by either of the mainstream parties. For that matter, on many issues my own beliefs are closer to the Libertarians or the Greens and I personally haven't voted for a mainstream Presidential canidate since 92 [1]. However, the same complaints come from Lyndon LaRouche and the KKK. If only a small minority likes your views (and in the case of the libs and the greens that IS true [2]) and the vast majority of the country would be terrified by some of the changes you would enact, then you should not be elected under any system.
Think back on the 2000 election. Imagine now that instead of being a heavily contested race between two extremely similar middle of the road boring canidates, it was between David Duke and Ralph Nader. When the chads were being counted, there very well might have been violence instead of the, "I really hope the person I voted for wins, but if don't I'll be willing to grudingly accept it," attitude that we got. The vast majority of the population wasn't scared by either Gore or Bush[3]. This is proof that the system works for at least one definition of working.
What if you are one of the people who has the 2-5% views? In my opinion running canidates for office is a valid action, but the focus shouldn't be on somehow winning the race or even on getting matching funds. Instead focus on the attempt to get your views out. Slow dramatic change on the beliefs of the electoriate is much more frustrating than hoping your third party canidate can win somehow, but it's a fairer approach to the people who would disagree. One look at the drug legalization debate and the people willing to speak out about it now is proof that it can work. Our system[4] isn't fast about accepting change but remember. The same reasons why we have stupid copyright laws and pot continues to be illegal make it so no one could deport all Arabs on 9/12/01. It's not about getting our wishes; it's about not getting our fears. What's wrong with that?
[1] I used to live in Maryland. Now I live in Washington State. If the Democratic canidate doesn't carry both of those states easily, he or she is going to lose the election. In either case, I don't worry much about my own vote.
[2] That's disguised some by what I like to call the Fallacy of a Large Population. In a country of 260,000,000 people, 2% of that population is over 5 million people. It's easy to exist almost solely in a population that big. When all of your friends agree with you, you're much more likely to overrepresent the degree to which your views are believed in the population at large. The internet (which lets people converse based on beliefs or interests instead of geographical proximity) is making this much worse.
[3] If you're going to respond to this with a rant about how Bush is a facist and we should all fear him in the wake of 9/11, take the time to study real facists. I don't like aspects of the Patriot Bill either, but imagine what he could have railroaded through in the weeks following and be glad that boring middle of the road people win.
[4] Yes I'm being UScentric in this post. The article itself is about the US style of elections. Deal with it.
Ever since 2000 when Gore lost, it has been fashionable in leftward leaning circles to find fault in our system of voting. Many people are under the impression that the electoral college is flawed, when in fact it has been shown mathematically to increase voter power.
In a nutshell, removing the electoral college would be like deciding the outcome of the World Series on the basis of the total number of runs scored by each team over the course of the seven games.
The EC forces issues to be decided locally and forces politicians to campaign locally. If we didn't have the EC, then pols would campaign only in the most populous geographical areas. Why? Because a single set of issues is common to those areas: Immigration, urban issues, etc. The rest of us would be out of luck and would be underrepresented. The founding fathers knew this, and the constitutional justification for the EC is tied closely to a discussion of the importance of limiting the power of factions.
As for the article, everyone who voted for Nader would have chosen Gore as a next-best alternative. Most green party members are as disgusted with the Democrats as they are with the Republicans, and would have felt the need to send a message to Democrats that it's time to find a worthy candidate. The Borda Count allows voters to avoid making any tough decisions, and it forces third parties to attack a broad issue-base instead of aligning themselves 90% with one of the mainstream parties.
Amazing magic tricks
History books might also refer to the various subsequent presidents of both the United States of America as well as the Confederate States of America. That is, up until around the 1950's, where the names change to National Socialist States of America, with the primary political party being the National Socialist Workers Party of America, a branch of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, after a political (but probably not too violent) conquest by an unchecked (because of a lack of power from North America) Nazi Germany that would have risen to control all of Europe by the mid 1940's, Russia and the Middle East by 1950, and set its sites on North America thereafter.
Or perhaps the history books might refer to a brilliant statesman that averted a possible civil war (something that Abraham Lincoln failed to do), only to see that possibility break out repeatedly every 20 or so years until the mid 1900's when slavery would finally be outlawed.
We really don't know for sure just how history would have played out.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The founding fathers were concerned with creating a country of thirteen colonies that did not trust each other, did not communicate with each other, and were most of the time attempting to jockey for unequal representation. See the debates over the resulting house/senate compromise. The founding fathers, in fact, creating a system in which the president was specifically not chosen in a popular election.
There is nothing in original constitution that says the election of the president requires a popular vote. The relevant text, Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, is
Clause 2: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
In other words, the state can pretty much choose electors as they wish, and further text indicates that electors can vote as they wish. Furthermore, it is argued that the populous would not even have to be aware of a presidential candidate. The electors would choose the best man for the job.
This system rapidly evolved to a system of somewhat popular vote, in which most of the electors were chosen by the people, and the electors would probably vote for a specific candidate. By the mid 19th century the few people who were allowed to vote in general were also allowed to vote on the president.
Jusy my two cents.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Here in San Francisco, we have a 200+ page voter's manual-- just for the CITY elections. There is another 80 or so pages for the state elections. The voting cards are a travesty and all, but make it a lot easier to sift through the information that reading 300 pages of polarly biased advertisements framed as providing the voter with sufficient information to make their own decision.
'NO' for everything!
Myself I like the idea of a system that allows you to weight canidates with 0 being neutral. 1 postive. 2 strongly positive. -1 negative. -2 strongly negative. This evectively lets you vote for only those your interested in while also allowing you to rank you selections and also vote against those you don't want in office.
I'm interested in trust-based societies that allow any citizen to rank any other citizen in this method (being able to change their opinion at any time of course) and selecting the political leaders based on whom is trusted the most. Of course a good system of this nature has short-circuit support that keeps public opinion from swinging back and forth. You have both the real ranking and the effective ranking. The effective ranking follows the real ranking but can only move up or down so many points in a day. This would, for example, give a political leader a cushion if they made an unpopular decision that pleased voters in how it worked out.
Such a trust system removes voting as a one day event and makes it a way of life which can have interesting additional properties. An example would be if your economic system was tied to the voting system. Those that are above median income are taxed while those below the median income are awarded payments. Both taxes and awards can be based on the citizens trust ranking. A citizen that is highly trusted would be taxed the least and awarded the most. A citizen that isn't trusted would be taxed the highest or awarded the least. This would enable the citizens to punish a rich merchant that rips off a lot of people by giving some of their money to poor charities. If enough people actually did like Linux more than Windows they could vote and for every dollar Bill Gates makes Linus might get $.5 of it. It'd certainly be an interesting change to tax laws.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The question arises who will those third party candidates be? In a world where a third party candidate might win, will the same interesting third party candidates be allowed to run? In such a world, would we not have the same drab candidates in the third parties as in the two parties? When the status quo is really challenges, do we think that the parties will not be given donations to induce a move towards the tradition corporate values?
scary speculation onWe also must ask about bogus third parties. Right now, the two party system keeps the main parties somewhat in check. The third parties can help form issues in the two main parties, but aren't often going to win a major race. This system keeps certain extremely wealthy individuals from directly buying an election. However, if a third party can win, then what is to stop a very rich consortium of corporation from buying a house seat. Set up a party, fund it, advertise and pay people to vote for you candidate. We are talking like 0.5 million for the primary and a few million for the actual election.scary speculation off
I am certainly not saying this does not happen now, but the party system keeps it in check.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Here's a fun example from John Allen Paulos' excellent book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper:
55 voters are voting in a primary between 5 candidates.
18 of them prefer Tsongas to Kerrey to Clinton to Harkin to Brown
12 of them prefer Clinton to Harkin to Kerrey to Brown to Tsongas
10 of them prefer Brown to Clinton to Harkin to Kerrey to Tsongas
9 of them prefer Kerrey to Brown to Harkin to Clinton to Tsongas
4 of them prefer Harkin to Clinton to Kerrey to Brown to Tsongas
2 of them prefer Harkin to Brown to Kerrey to Clinton to Tsongas
Who should win?
Under our current plurality, "winner-take-all" system, Tsongas would win because he had the most first place votes.
If a single runoff election was held between the top two candidates, Clinton would win the runoff by a landslide.
If instant runoff was used, dropping the candidates from the running one at a time depending on who had the fewest first place votes, then Brown would end up winning.
If a Borda count was used, giving each candidate 5 points for a 1st place vote, 4 points for 2nd place, etc., then Kerrey would win.
Finally, if Condorcet voting was used, Harkin would win, since he would win a one-on-one election against any of the other candidates.
Who do you think should win, and why?
This, by the way, fails to illustrate why I think we need Condorcet voting: not because it's criteria necessarily produces the best candidate, since in an election like the above it isn't clear by any means who is the "best". The appeal of Condorcet voting is that in all but the most degenerate cases (e.g. where most people prefer A to B, most people prefer B to C, and most people prefer C to A) Condorcet removes any incentive to make the election even worse by not "throwing your vote away"; in every other method mentioned, there are voters who can improve the outcome of the election (according to their own preferences) by voting something other than their own honest rankings. There's a nice discussion of Condorcet voting and the criteria like this that it meets on electionmethods.org.
We need something like that.
Why the hell didn't we go over this in the 8 years I wasted in French class? Je deteste la classe de la France!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
There is nothing in original constitution that says the election of the president requires a popular vote.
It's awful lucky, then, that I never said there was anything in the Constitution that said the election of the President requires a popular vote. I only said direct election of electors was (and is) permitted. I sure as hell didn't say it was proscribed.
You'll never get the will of non-brainwashed voters.
Is it fair? to turn on the news, and be told how you think?
It's crazy. Most of the election issues are decided by the media with pre-determined polls. Questions by pollsters are desinged to determine the outcome of the poll. The poll is then presented on the news without actually telling you this.
How can we have fair elections with that?
And, Ralph Nader. That's another one. Yeah if it weren't for him, Gore would be Prez...
But, don't forget, it was the same thing with Ross Perot. If you want to change the rules so that AL Gore would've won because he would get Nader's votes, then you would have to go back to 1992 and George Bush Sr. would've won. He definitely lost due to Perot.
The final solution is... Pick the system and stick with it. No changing the rules! Enforce the rules as best you can without bankrupting the system.
What wasn't mentioned at all in the article is that the US Presidential election is a two turn election. First we have primaries, narrowing each parties multiple candidates down to one party representative, who then goes on to campaign for and run in the presidential election.
The most interesting aspect of election reform in my eyes would be the elimination of primaries. Why not have a presidential election with multiple candidates from each party, if we could vote for more than one? Certainly there are some republican candidates I would vote for above some democratic candidates, though this isn't usually the case. This kind of voting system would help me vote by valuesparties.
Most importantly, with several candidates from each party, none would get a windfall of PAC contributions funding media blitzes. As a result the free press, word of mouth, and (dare I say it) the internet, would have a much greater relative impact on voter education and commentary.
This would be a very good thing, far outweighing the additional benefit of a more accurate election day.
Kevin Fox
Ah, you Americans would love the Canadian system. I've lost count of the number of political parties we have. Each constituency is pretty much guaranteed a Liberal, a Progressive Conservative, and an NDP candidate. And then, depending on if you're east or west of Ottawa, you'll have either a BQ candidate or a Reform party candidate. And then there are the various minor parties (The Green Party, the Natural Law party - Yogic Flying, it's all the rage! - the Pot Party, etc), and the independent candidates. So we're talking 6 + candidates per constituency, and it's a plurality vote. So, we end up with a party that had maybe 40% of the popular vote controlling 60 to 70% of the Seats in the House of Commons. Which is why we get a leader like Jean Chretien threatening to cram Kyoto down our throats without even consulting his First Ministers, and those damn grits are gonna NEP us Albertans all over again. And don't even get me started about the Senate!
A One that isn't cold is scarcely a One at all.
Thanks. I figured it was too good to be true. Condorcet voting does look pretty cool though.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
While the article criticises the "plurality" vote taken from the popular vote, they fail to mention the overwhelming influence of "Single Member Districts" (SMD) and the "Electoral College" (EC). SMD consistently over-represents the top candidate's electors, and this is repeated in the EC as the electors' votes are aggregated at the state level, converting all of a state's electoral weight to favor the candidate that mustered a simple majority in a simple majority of electoral districts.
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/Census00/FedRep.phtWhat you're inclined to assume when reading articles like Election Selection is that the goal of "voting" and "elections" is to accurately represent the aggregate "will of the people." Actually, the goal of the Presidential Election in the USA is to select the candidate without giving the choice over to a few voters in a close race. It's designed to make one candidate pull far ahead of the others early in the count at the expense of accurate representation.
The worst-case scenario is that a miniscule number of votes (even smaller number of eligible voters if turnout is poor) will decide against a clear popular majority. If you get votes from 51% of the people who turned out for the 2000 Presidential Election in the 11 top electoral states (plus Wyoming) you will win the election with 272 Electoral votes and only 40,278,397 popular votes. That popular vote is roughly 14% of the voting-age US population. If you assumed perfect turnout, that's still 30% of the population represented as an absolute majority in the electoral college.
The bottom line is there's lots of parameters in the voting system function, so you have to do more math than they mentioned in the article to make any conclusions. The problem is, Poli-Sci departments are often poorly funded, so who's going to do the research? Lobbyists! Be very wary of this whole voting reform stuff.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Significant change occurs in only one of two ways:
The people in power typically have control over the slow method and those not in power over the fast method.
So, no, we're not going to see either the Republican or Democratic parties do anything truly dramatic (though their spin doctors will make it seem so). They'll fight over the political center, which is where their path to power lies, and continue to slowly turn up the heat on the rest of us frogs.
However, occasionally there will be opportunities for real change without revolution. They will typically be when something so shocking has occurred that a general (though usually directionless) unease occurs in the voting population. Jimmy Carter was the result of one of these opportunities...caused by national outrage at the abuse of power by Richard Nixon. Ross Perot capitalized on another. Whether either of these were (or had the potential to be) successful and lasting acts of change I'll leave to another discussion.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
Well, not in federal elections.
.
What happens is that the ballots which nominated the candidate with the least number of first preference votes are redistributed, with this repeating until one candidate has a clear majority.
And our system was mentioned as one of the alternatives to the US one in the article - they called it a 'runoff' system. I rather like it, myself, though I reckon proportional representation might be better . .
Though proportional representation might have seen Hanson and friends in federal parliament . . . . A scary thought.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
I've done some simulation work on this topic. http://bolson.org/voting/
Compares current model against several other models, one of which is being implemented in a few places, Instant Runoff Voting, and turns out to be the worst thing better than the current way!
Start Running Better Polls
and overplayed what is arguably the worst -- instant runoff voting (IRV), which not only has the ability to lead to more counterintuitive situations than plurality voting, but also becomes very complex to manage for large elections, because ballots are not "summable". You can't add up all the votes from one voting precinct and send a total on to the next tier up (ultimately you do want to collect all of the physical ballots together, but summability allows decentralized counting for faster results).
But the article completely ignored the Condorcet voting method, which is pretty universally considered to be the best system from a technical point of view. Like IRV and Borda, Condorcet voting asks voters to rank their choices, which is very important because it allows a voter's entire set of preferences to be applied, but unlike them it has far better mathematical properties (mainly because it "discards" almost *no* information from the ballots); is much more "stable" in the sense that changes to votes don't do counterintuitive things; manages to satisfy a slightly relaxed version of Arrow's criteria, which no other voting system can do; and is "summable".
In fact, it's quite arguable that Arrow's criteria were overstated and that the slight weakening of one of his axioms is correct, even though it destroys his proof. Thus it's possible there *is* a perfect voting system, and, arguably Condorcet is it.
Condorcet's clever idea was "pairwise" evaluation. When you only have two candidates, simple majority is a perfect system, so Condorcet applied majority voting to multiple candidates by just taking them two at a time. Since each voter ranks all of the candidates(*), each ballot expresses a choice about any pair of candidates, and you can easily tally up the public's actual preference between that pair.
If one of the candidates is preferred over each of his opponents, then that candidate is the winner, which is very logical if you think about it. It's easy to show that this will happen most of the time, the only time it won't happen is in a three or more-way race where the candidates are all fairly close and where the electorate is seriously divided. What happens is you get a "cycle".
For example, suppose you have three candidates, A, B and C and suppose a majority of the voters ranked A over B, a majority ranked B over C and a majority ranked C over A. Mathematicians have devised some moderately complex but very accurate ways of resolving such issues, basically by looking at how badly the candidates were beaten in their losses. The result is a very stable, very predictable system that accurately reflects the electorate's will and pretty much completely eliminates any possibility of successfully "gaming" the system by casting an insincere vote.
If you'd like to read more about Condorcet and a technical evaluation of the various methods, look here. If you'd like to play with it a bit, I have a Java implementation that you can find here. It's very rough, since I just hacked it together a couple of days ago to evaluate votes for a new name for a SCUBA diving club I'm involved in, but it works pretty well. Just make a file called "rawballots.txt" that contains one ballot per line, with the candidates listed in order, separated by commas (there's a sample on the web site), place the file in the same directory as Condorcet.java, and compile and run (javac Condorcet.java; java Condorcet). My code also abuses the Condorcet system a little by trying to construct a complete ranking of all candidates rather than just finding the winner (it does this by finding a winner, then adjusting the defeats matrix to make him a loser, then finding another winner, until all candidates have "won").
(*)It actually isn't necessary for every voter to rank every candidate. Essentially, any candidates a voter chooses to leave off the ballot are considered as ranked equally and below all of the candidates that were listed. For example, if there are candidates A through E, and I cast a ballot like:
A,B,C
That means I prefer A over everyone, B over C-E, C over D and E and I don't have a preference between D and E.
Actually, although it would probably make voting interfaces to complicated, the method even allows me to express the fact that I don't have a preference between higher-ranked candidates. Something like:
A, (B|C), D
Would mean I like A over everyone, prefer either B or C over D or E, and prefer D over E.
When we're figuring out who won in the pairwise election between B and C, this ballot is a "tie" and effectively doesn't give a vote to either. When counting up the election between B or D and any of the other candidates, however, this ballot expresses a preference.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If an alternative vote / instant runoff system
Dammit. Hit ctrl-enter by accident and Mozilla went and submitted the form. Stupid web browser. let me try again:
If an alternative vote / instant runoff system were in place, Al Gore would certainly have won the last election (and Ralph Nader would have gotten a large enough percentage of the vote to receive public clean-election money next time around).
It looks like we may have a similar situation in Massachusetts, with Jill Stein of the Green party able to get enough votes to "swing" the close election between Romney and O'Brian (the extremely ridiculous and childish candidates fielded by the Republicans and Democrats). If O'Brian loses, she'll certainly whine a bit about how Stein "stole" votes from her (how she *deserved* those votes is beyond me), but if this happens enough times, eventually the Democrats *have* to see the light and will support an instant runoff system.
With a major party backing that, we actually have some chance of serious vote reform. For that reason, I highly recommend voting for Stein if you want to see an improvement in the future, no matter what your immediate-term politics are.
And not coincidentally, switching to a instant runoff voting system is one of the issues Stein has been pushing.
This'll also work voting Libertarian in some cases, but in MA I think coming at it from the left is more likely to be effective.
Oh yes, it's so /terribly/ hard to do . . .
.
Which is why no one here in Australia has any difficulty with it . . .
Or maybe we're just smarter than your typical USAian? No, more likely we've just been taught how to do it.
Claiming that it's too hard to set up a proper electoral system, or that it's too hard for people to make use of one, is just plain stupid.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Is it just me, or do other people get a bit jittery when they read quotes like this in an article in mathematics? That quote is in the first half painfully obvious and in the second half just wrong, and it's the simplest math in the article, so how should I know that the more advanced math isn't equally as screwy?
The biggest problem I can see with this method is all the people out there who can't do single-digit arithmetic. I suppose an electronic voting machine would help out there.
Dyolf Knip
It then proceeds to cite a ridiculous example
Not at all. This scenario just describes an election in which three candidates have nearly equal support. I guarantee you it would happen eventually. The paradox was when a candidate loses the election because he gained support. The cases where a candidate wins the popular vote but loses the electoral is bad enough.
The instant runoff does seem to be the easiest to fix, though. It's just a matter of figuring out how to combine all the preferences into a single winner. I was thinking something along the lines of having the voters 'spend' 10 (or however many) points on the candidates of their choice. Can put all 10 on one guy, or split it amongst them as they like.
Dyolf Knip
If the Democratic Party wins in California, then it sends *all* 54 electors from California. Nominally, those electors can vote for whomever they like. Of course, if they ever want to work in politics again, they will vote for the Democratic candidate. The only time that I know of this not occuring is one of Reagan's electors in one of his elections voted for his opponent. It didn't matter, he won in a landslide.
This gives rise to a system in which you could win just enough states to get the presidency, but if you only win them by a low margin, while you lose every other state by a huge margin, you could be president even though your opponent had a much larger popular vote. It's never happened quite like that, although this last round, Gore's popular vote was slightly larger, and there was another election when something similar happened, a long time ago.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
99% of voters were absolutely certain that the 2nd round would bring the good old traditional Center-Left vs Center-Right showdown (Jospin-Chirac in that case), so many people didn't even care to vote.
:P
Yet, france had a 70% voter turn out, Far higher then any US elections
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Duh.
Also I would like to voice my objection to slashdot's 20 second rule. It is teh suk.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The parent points out (with the math) that the individual Montanan's vote counts TWICE as much as the individual Californian's, as clear a violation of 14th Amendment as can be found, if the USSC actually were interetested in that old rag.
A trained chicken could participate in a plurality vote (obviously, even the sub-chicken constituency gives it their best try) while you'd need to think about what you wrote down before you went to the polling place if we had anything even slightly more sophisticated.
Can you remedy that?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The President is elected by popular vote, to represent individual Americans (at least when the US is trying to sell Democracy as the best policy to other nations).
The interests of individual states should be adequatly represented by the state's advocates: Congress.
Well it would probably do alot less for Montana farmers & other rural farmers, who get scads of welfare under the current system for growing crops where no crops have grown before (or should ever be grown) Farm Subsidies That Kill.
But for the individual American it would do alot more to relizing the dream of equality & make US claims to be a Democracy and an example of Free Market success much more accurate.
The Science News article left off my top choice (actually a class of choices) of voting schemes - Condorcet voting schemes. I gave a speech at my local Toastmasters group on this topic, which I'm adapting for this forum. I'll probably get around to writing the editor of Science News also. - Dara
Why do we need a new Single Winner Election Method?
When minority candidates do run in single winner elections, they are criticized for the spoiler effect they may have.
Typical Spoiler Effect: (Note these examples are speculative on voters second and third choices, though the percentages on their first choice are accurate
1992:
43 Clinton, Bush, Perot
37.5 Bush, Perot, Clinton
15 Perot, Bush, Clinton
3.9 Perot, Clinton, Bush
2000:
47.9 Bush, Gore, Nader
48.4 Gore, Nader, Bush
2.7 Nader, Gore, Bush
Potential Solution - Voting Schemes that allow each voter to rank their preferences.
Caveat: Kenneth J. Arrow showed in 1951 (Nobel Prize in 1972) that reasonable criteria for a voting scheme are unachievable:
1) Let each voter rank all candidates in order of preference.
2) Form an overall ranking from the data above such that: (Note: in a single winner, only the first name on the list matters)
a) if voters prefer A to B, then A should rank higher than B in the overall ranking,
b) introducing another candidate into the election should not change the winner, unless it is the new candidate who wins.
It can be shown that no overall ranking scheme exists (assuming there is more than one voter).
Nevertheless, it is possible to relax criteria 2b to get solutions that many people think are better than plurality.
Scheme 1. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
If there is no one with more than 50% of the first place votes, the person with the least first place votes is dropped and the second place votes from all the ballots picking that person are then apportioned to the remaining candidates. Repeat as necessary.
Scheme 2. Condorcet voting schemes (my preferred choice)
Condorcet, a French philosopher, formulated the following method around 1785: Form a matrix of all possible pair-wise elections and fill it according to each ranked ballot. If there is one candidate who wins against all others, this is the (Condorcet) winner.
Example: Hypothetical election where Nader gets enough support to knock Gore out in the first round of IRV.
# Ballot
4 B G N (i.e. 4 voters out of 9 prefer Bush over Gore over Nader)
3 N G B
1 G N B
1 G B N
wins)
Plurality: Bush clearly wins (4 to 3)
IRV (after one round): (Bush wins again, 5 to 4)
Condorcet Voting Matrix (row preferred to column)
B G N
B X 4 5
G 5 X 6
N 4 3 X
Gore now wins since he is preferred over Bush and over Nader in separate pairwise elections. Doesn't it sound more logical that he should be elected in this case? There is a benefit of Condorcet schemes over IRV that may not be apparent from an example with only 3 candidates - statistics from a precinct are easily tallied and presented by the above matrix. With IRV, every permutation that arises must be tallied - with 20 candidates, this could be quite large.
2b. What if there is no Condorcet Winner?
Find the Smith set where each candidate in the set wins against any candidate not in the set (could be everyone). Of course the winner should be chosen from the Smith set. There are several ways to do this, but the simplest to describe is Condorcet's original method: Form a ranked list of the margins of defeat for all contests within in the Smith set (e.g. in a race with 4 candidates A, B, C, D):
D/B (60)
B/C (50)
A/B (40)
C/A (30)
C/D (25)
D/A (20)
Then eliminate the lowest contest on the list from consideration and check to see if there is now a Condorcet winner. Repeat as necessary. (e.g. If D/A is eliminated, no one is undefeated. But after the race C/D is eliminated, D is now the undefeated winner).
Conclusion
San Francisco passed IRV (via referenda, starts in Nov 2003), so change is possible. These schemes may sound more complicated than what we have, but they are more fair, computers can do the work, and they might even eliminate primary elections.
References
condorcet.org and electionmethods.org (very thorough coverage of the details of Condorcet methods), outlander.com/condorcet (allows you to vote in 2000 and 2004 elections and see results), fairvote.org (advocates the IRV method), www.idea.int (lots of statistics on US and international elections), civilrights.org (search for "Florida" to find stories on voting rights problems).
Why should I vote for a human when a Mynah bird is just as skilled at parroting lobbyist propoganda?
Any more than you have to think about fluid dynamics before you step on an aircraft.
You just have to remember: "Rank the candidates you know and have opinions about, in order of preference". If you'd only heard of Bush, Gore, and Nader in the last presidential election, you might vote for those three in that order, and then Browne and all the other candidates would be automatically put into a tie for last place.
If you happen to be a trained chicken, you can vote for just one candidate, and it simply works as "I prefer this guy to everyone else", without requiring you to specify what you think of everyone else relative to each other. Condorcet voting would give you the opportunity to express a more complicated vote, but wouldn't make it a requirement.
There are lots of other reasons to want a more accurate voting method:
Third parties in the US don't just fail to represent their constituents' opinions in Washington, they can actually cause a reduction in representation of those opinions as well. Even counting the number of Nader voters who would have voted for Bush or not at all in a 2-party system, it seems clear from exit polls that Gore would have won if the last election had been a one on one race. Plurality voting requires you to "throw your vote away", i.e. forgo your ability to express a preference between the two leading candidates, if you want to vote for a minority candidate. The most popular minority candidate is almost guaranteed to take away votes that would otherwise have gone to the major candidate that most closely reflects the minority's views.
Third candidates don't have to be third party candidates. More moderate or more widely appealing candidates from the major parties would be benefitted as well. The winner of the last election might have been John McCain, for instance, if the Republicans could have fielded more than one candidate in the final election without splitting their own voters.
Polls on elections reflect the system of elections, and so the feedback which the major parties get is automatically subject to the constraint that issues which both parties have similar viewpoints on don't affect the poll. Unless an issue becomes a point of contention between the Democratic and Republican candidate, it can't affect the final vote, so it doesn't get discussed. Some of the public apathy towards intellectual property issues and the public domain may be a result of this, for example.
Europe's political elite have banned pro-white speech is because they can't win a debate against it.
That is just one of many moronic positions you can't beat in a rational debate. Never argure with a moron, they'll just drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
On the other hand, I'm all for protecting moron's freedom of speach.
I particularly love the irony of "I am only thirteen years old and I really do not need your hateful thoughts in my head."
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Proposition: the US elective system is the worst possible alternative.
It can't be because we've managed to maintain a stable democratic system with only 1 civil war in 225 years.
It cannot be because there is no credible threat that there will be a military junta, or an overthrow of civilian government.
It certainly can't be that the US Constitution is one of the most admired documents of governmental philosophy the world over.
It can't be that the United States is not only the world's remaining superpower, but has the highest standard of living* of any country on the face of the earth.
* (not measured by some theoretical rating of quality of life, but measured by the number of people in the world who are risking their lives every day just to come here- I don't see shiploads of Chinese immigrants paying $30,000 each to get to Sweden or Denmark.)
Obviously France's system is CLEARLY better - wait, how many governments have they had?
Naturally, Italy's system is clearly better - wait, how many governments have they had?
Wait, Germany's must be better, right? Yeah, their political experiments have gone just spiffy.
You can philosophize all you want in your Ivory Tower, for me, I'll be hard pressed to support changing something THAT OBVIOUSLY WORKS BETTER THAN ANY ALTERNATIVES EXTANT.
Let Djibouti try some goofy election system. When they become a world class power, then we should think of switching. Until then, your theories are like the Amway version of politics: you preach good results, but I haven't seen anything aside from YOUR word proving that it's actually so great.
The longer I live, the more I respect the Founding Fathers' wisdom in what they did, why they did it, and why they protected it from change. There's always some goofball selling something, somewhere.
-Styopa
... is that in both the instant runoff (as we have in Australia - we call it two-party preferred) and Borda systems, the final result *tends* to be either the first or second choice of the majority of voters. Of course, as the number of candidates increases, this obviously becomes less the case as votes are further split. But in any case, the final result will be from the upper half of the majority of voters preferences.
As the concocted example shows, this is much less likely to occur in a plurality system. In fact, the plurality system actively works against this being the case where there are more than two candidates.
Gawd, I've been trying to tell Americans this for years; if you had a preferential system like we do in Australia you would have eliminated most of the problems that plagued the last presidential elections.
1) Writing NUMBERS instead of the overly complex punch-card system. We generally get our parlimentary election results on the same day as the poll when people write numbers, so I don't see that using punch-cards increases your efficiency at all.
2) The preferential system will stop all the whinging about 3rd party candidates and lets true democracy take it's course. As this article says, people would vote [1] Nader, [2] Gore; when Nader doesn't get enough votes to make it "past the post", he gets knocked out and all the [2] Gore votes turn into [1] Gore votes.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
"the fundamental flaws of the voting procedure itself."
How about the fundamental flaw of the article itself, in which it (and most people) assumes that "democracy" means nothing more than voting every few years? Where does it say that being a concerned citizen is limited to voting regularly? How can a politician "represent" someone they only hear a "yes" or "no" out of once every two years?
If democracy is nothing more than voting, then the rest of the world has no right at all to turn its nose up at the elections in Iraq last month.
Bah. Two more days until I get off this soapbox of mine.
I think the best way to reform the system would be to amend the constitution so that election results cannot be counted until sometime around 8:00 Hawaiian time. Of course, this would never fly, because the press would start screaming "First amendment!".
This sig no verb.
Your points are reasonably good ones, but they have little to do with the article, which isn't about proportional representation at all. We can stick with a system where we choose our representatives geographically, on a seat-by-seat basis, have two houses, and where the supreme executive is also elected more or less directly by the people without necessarily sticking with the evils of a plurality voting system.
The article is about voting systems, not representative structure. It's about how we *choose* those representatives, not about how we structure their power and influence.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The article says that the US system does not represent the will of the voters best because of the Electoral College. Duh! It's not supposed to!
The Electoral College was set up to prevent the raw unfiltered will of the populace from ruling. It's purpose is to process and filter the will of the populace. This is a Good Thing(tm). The Electoral College is there for exactly the same reason that a President is being elected to begin with: the US political system is a representative republic, not a direct democracy.
The whims of the poplulace changes daily. A look at pre-election polls over a period of a few weeks demonstrates this. The Electoral College helps filter these mood swings out.
I realize that I am the last living person in the US who still likes the Electoral College, but that does not necessarily make me wrong.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
For once, I have to respond to the moderation on my post. I think there is merit in voicing approval or disapproval with a suggestion. Merely labeling it redundant is irrelevant when the point I wished to make was support, not elaboration.
The field is more complicated than that. Saari has made a career out of pushing the Borda count. There are useful applications for it, but I pretty firmly believe public elections are not
It's a pity that Condorcet is ignored here, because he was da man. Condorcet's method kicks butt when compared to Borda and Approval (Approval is simpler to implement, though).
There's a whole bunch of links to articles like this one in the Voting System category in Netscape Open Directory.
Rob
http://memory.loc.gov/const/fed/fed_68.html
It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.
Madison does not describe the problems involved with taking a general vote. Further, it is clear that today's electoral system has NOTHING to do with what the Founder's actually intended. Indeed, the State Legislature choosing candidates would be closer.
The POINT of the electoral college is to provide a body with the qualifications of electing the President: not to create a winner takes all view. The fact that this provides a protection for smaller states is a secondary point to the overall design.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
In the other hand, the congress elections use the proportionality principle. The number of votes is divided by the number of chairs, and it is the "electoral coefficient" (e.g., 180,000 votes). All the votes are grouped by party (it is possible to vote in the party, or in a candidate from that party). After the elections, each party earns a number of chairs that are distributed in order of votes to its candidates.
With this system, if a candidate makes 1,000,000 votes and the coefficient is 200,000 votes, it brings in another 4 candidates from its party, regardless of their votes. It happened this year in São Paulo, where Enéas Carneiro got over 1.5 million votes and the second place was almost a million votes behind. Enéas elected another 5 or 6 fellows, and one of them became a congressman with less than 300 votes.
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
... if there was one primary for everyone, republicans, democrats, indepents, greens, reform... Then the top two vote getters in that election go head to head, with no other canidates in the mix.
I personally think this would be a great way to handle things... But I also think that the current system is so entrenched that it isn't going anywhere...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
If you are going to bring margin of error into it (which I think we should).
Then of course Fla. was also a tie, with or without hand counts.
Change can happen. San Francisco recently adopted Instant Runoff for local elections. It is being considered elsewhere. In particular, the Center for Voting and Democracy is working to bring fair, accurate, modern voting systems to the United States. If you go into the voting booth Tuesday and find yourself frustrated with the lack of choice, please help to make the system better.
...is the huge potential for fraud that could swing a preferential ballot vote.
Let's suppose in an imaginary example the 2004 US Presidential election is done by preferential ballot on the Federal level. After the primary season we end up with these five main candidates:
George W. Bush (Republican)
Albert Gore, Jr. (Democrat)
Pat Buchanan (Reform)
Ralph Nader (Green)
Harry Browne (Libertarian)
What would stop Al Gore campaigners from offering underhanded and possibly illegal incentives for Nader and Browne supporters to drastically lower the level of preference for Bush, effectively swinging the election to Gore?
For those not farmiliar with it, the Condorcet method works roughly like this. Voters rank each candidate. If one candidate wins a majority of the vote in every head-to-head pairing they belong to, they win (i.e. A is ahead of B in 65% of ballots, ahead of C in 90% of ballots, and ahead of D in 51% of ballots). If no candidate win every head to head matchup, there are a couple of methods for deciding the winner that give roughly equal results. Basically the winner is the candidate who wins the most head-to-head matchups between candidates that win at least one head-to-head matchup. A complete description of the Condorcet method along with comparisions to other methods can be found at electionmethods.org.
The only real drawback to the Condorcet system is its complexity, both in that voters must rank every candidate and that the methods used to determine the winner in close races is difficult to understand. Personally I like methods that require voters to understand all of the candidates, so I do not think the ranking process is a drawback.
I also thought that the article failed to mention a serious fault with the Borda count. By allowing the candidate rankings to count as points rather than as head-to-head matchups, voters are encouraged to place viable second best choices last to improve the standing of the first place candidate. In the Condorcet system there is no advantage to this, ranking candidate B second or tenth makes no difference if the race comes down to A vs. B if A is ranked first on your ballot, A wins the head-to head matchup the same either way. In this manner the Condorcet method is the only method I know of that truly makes the voter vote their conscience, rather than voting strategically to elect the lesser of evils (e.g. voting for Gore when you really like Nader but really hate Bush). Instant runoff has the right idea in this sense but is fundamentally flawed, as the article states due to an increase in support for a candidate possibly causing that candidate to lose.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
not Republic vs. Democracy.
In history, both have devolved to dictatorship.
The unique thing about the US was that the power of the Govt. was supposed to be limited by the Constitution, & those limits were supposed to need much more than a simple majority to change.
How to capture the will of the voters ... well that's easy. Measure how happy every voter is with every candidate (for example on a scale of 0 to 10), sum, and the highest sum wins. The answer follows straight from the question.
One of the Nazis main complaints was how the greedy Jewish capitalists were exploiting the poor honest German workers. Jews *were* over represented among German capitalists, and they were obviously not among any "free-wheeling capitalists" who got very rich.
Fact is, Nazi Germay was a planned economy, not in any way a free market. As opposed to Russia, the government didn't outright take over ownership of most factories, but it was made certain that they produced what the party commanded in many other ways. Some of those involved making some of the owners rich. I don't think that was by being in any way "free-wheeling" way, but by being useful for The Party.
That the workers got "fucked" is very typical for leftist totalitarian regimes.
I do believe you're referring to John Quincy Adam's election, wherein he didn't win the popular vote but carried the EC as well.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
But it doesn't fit nicely with my scenario, for the same reason I don't like it:
To cast an optimal vote under approval voting, you have to carefully study the polls and figure out how to cast a "strategic" vote.
Let me see if I can turn my scenario into an example (especially considering my correction to the Clinton ranking of Tsongas supporters).
Assume, for starters, that each voter "approves" of his favorite candidate and "disapproves" of the bottom four. Then under approval voting we have the following vote tallies:
18 approve of Tsongas
12 approve of Clinton
10 approve of Brown
9 approve of Kerry
6 approve of Harkin
So, Tsongas wins.
But wait! Everybody else hates Tsongas, so perhaps people who see the polls a week before the election will start approving of more candidates. Perhaps the non-Tsongas supporters will all approve of their two favorite candidates instead. Then we would have:
18 votes for Tsongas
26 votes for Clinton
21 votes for Brown
9 votes for Kerrey
18 votes for Harkin
But wait, why would the Tsongas supporters let that happen? They hate Clinton! So, they see the polls the next day, and decide to approve of their top two candidates two. That brings Kerrey up to 27 votes and puts him in the lead.
So what happens when the next day's polls come out? The 10 wily supporters don't like Kerrey, and would want to at least see their third place choice in the White House, so if they're smart they'll start approving of their third place choice too. That brings Harkin up to 28 votes and puts him (the Condorcet winner) in the lead, in a stable situation.
But man, what mental gymnastics everybody would have to make to get there!
I should point out that if all you want is an approval vote, you could cast one in a complete Condorcet system, by simply casting a "tie" vote ranking all your approved candidates in first place and not voting for anyone else.
How do they count the votes in Finland?
That should say "two candidates too" and "10 wily Brown supporters"
No more than you on the right liked it in 1992. Thanks for pointing out that election reform is a non-partisan issue -- people of all political stripes stand to gain from fairer, more accurate election techniques.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
What kind of "union" is it that a member cannot leave?
As far as why folks can't understand why we are not a democracy, that seems to be a common mistake of Americans, so many of us great and small think we live in one:
FDR, 1941
Mebbe it's cause in the wars and conflicts of this century so often being termed battles of "democracy" vs. "fascism" or "communism", folks just thought "Representative Republicanism vs. Fascism lacked a certain ring?
But don't feel bad, I often get frustrated by folks who don't seem to be able to tell the difference between democracy and capitalism...
Look up the 10th Amendment. The Constitution is a limit on the rights of the Government, not a limit on the rights of individuals. IOW, the rights mentioned in the DOI are self evident , they are therefore guaranteed above and before other rights, specifically by the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution. In fact the concern that folks might think that the Constitution only guaranteed the rights mentioned therin was the REASON the 10 Amendment was WRITTEN!
Not that anyone ever reads the thing anymore. Hey, Jim Crow was built on the fact that most folks don't get what you don't get.
But you are misinterpreting what I said above: the measure of equality is not that every person gets a vote for president. The measure rather is that every person's vote is given equal weight. Again, the evidence for this is in the defintion.
Or do you hold it as a self evident truth that all might be
created equal but by moving to another state they can modify their equality points????
The founders also wished to restrict voting rights to white land-owning male citizens, so I wouldn't be too quick to adopt something merely because of their stamp of approval.
/. posts, most U.S. citizens lack the mathematical sophistication and the objectiveness to recognize deficiencies in the process and to evaluate alternatives).
The 12th Amendment was ratified shortly after the "Crisis of 1800." In 1800, the U.S. government came precariously close to falling apart when the presidential/vice presidential balloting produced a tie. Jefferson and Burr tied in the 1800 presidential election with 73 votes apiece in the electoral college. The vote moved to the House to resolve the tie. 9 states were needed to win, but in ballot after ballot, Jefferson got 8 votes, Burr, 6. The succession procedure defined by the U.S. Constitution appeared to be failing, and one can only speculate on what chaos would have ensued had the Constitutional crisis not been resolved by some careful maneuvering of Jefferson's chief rival, Alexander Hamilton. Only after Hamilton persuaded key Federalists to vote for Jefferson were the President and Vice President selected. Hamilton was thanked for his service to the country--he was shot dead in a duel four years later by, you guessed it, Aaron Burr.
Bad design in the succession procedure almost destroyed the United States once, and the People, reconizing inferiorities in the process, were moved to change the way the system worked. A quick perusal of the list of amendments to the Constitution shows that changes in the election process have been made many times when what was in the highest law of the land was understood to be inferior or obsolete. One wonders if it may be possible for this to happen again in light of advances in voting theory. (I'm doubtful of the practicality of this, however. As one can tell by a quick read of the
I must admit that when I moved to the UK from Australia I was stunned at how "primitive" the "first-past-the-post" voting scheme employed in the UK (and from the article, US) is compared to the "preferential" scheme used in Australia.
The thing I find strange is that when I try to explain it to friends in the UK, they think the preferential system is too complicated, yet at election time commentators endlessly discuss the problems of "splitting the vote" and people even set up web sites so that voters in different electorates can "trade" their votes to avoid the problem! It's crazy.
"Right" and "Left" is a crude one dimensional mapping of what does in fact have several dimensions. It doesn't work well for even mainstream ideologies, and falls completely apart for the odder ones.
Personally I define a free market capitalism mainly by the absence of government intervention, so every totalitarian regime is by definition socialistic, in the sense that the state controls the individual.
If your focus is on other aspects, you will of course get different classifications. I think that as long as you make your definitions clear, you can still have a meaningful discussion. But that's very rare.
Hmmm. Very good point, I hadn't thought of that. And it had seemed like such a nifty solution! Ah, the hardships of peer review...
Dyolf Knip
So, you're still allowed to not bother ranking everyone. Fair enough- most of the pages I'd read on the subject led me to believe otherwise.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey