Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
- 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
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!!
;)
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
Yes, I've often thought going back to that would be a good idea. Not only might it, as you say, inject a degree of civility into the campaign; more importantly, it would mean that the opposition party's candidate would be the President of the Senate, and thus able to cast tie-breaking votes. It would be a nice addition to the list of checks and balances. (Of course that wouldn't mean much if the Senate were dominated by either major party, but it would certainly be interesting in situations like the current one.)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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
Pardon me, but racist? Kindly explain how you got that from my comment!
Anyway, your response indicates that you judge the success of a political system based on economic results. I must point out that the two are not necessarily related. However, since you're the original poster, I'll play on your playing field.
Yes, China is currently growing very quickly. But keep in mind that it's much easier to achieve a high rate of growth when your productivity is lower (in this case, GDP/population).
China is a totalitarian state (political system) that is beginning to realize that capitalism (economic system) works better than communism (economic system) in the real world. We have yet to see whether the economic freedom the Chinese government is beginning to allow will cause the populace to demand political freedom (some form of representative democracy; a family of political systems) as well.
If the USA is considered to be a political-economic experiment at ~225 years, then the political-economic environment in China right now (~10 years old?) certainly qualifies as an early-stage experiment and any assessment of their ultimate success or failure should be considered to be, at best, a guess.
Also note that I mentioned the Soviet Union in my reply to your post. I don't see you touting their growth rate.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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