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An Analysis of Various Election Methods
An anonymous reader writes "David Cobb talked about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as the best choice in electoral methods in his interview here, but is it really? The folks over at electionmethods.org seem to think it isn't. They favor Condorcet voting, which is another ranking style method using simulated one on one elections. Here is an evaluation of various methods, including IRV and Condorcet."
Much as we need a better system, it won't catch on if it can't be explained in one simple sentence.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
One mechanism I've not seen discussed is one I'll call a "voter economy". It probably has a real name, but it's not on that site and it seems like a reasonable system to me.
In this system, you get a certain number of votes (say 5x the number of candidates) and you can "spend" those votes however you like. So if you really like candidate A, you spend all your votes on A. If you like A a little, hate B, and would prefer C, you can spend 75% of your votes on C, 25% on A, and none on be.
This, to me, seems much better than ranking systems, since you can specifiy how much you prefer one candidate over another. It should be easy to explain, since people are used to the idea of spending.
Mathematicians, tell me whether or not this is a workable system.
The biggest problem that I can see with systems such as approval voting is that it is not non-repudiable. In other words, it would be impossible to verify that election results were not changed. A recount would not be able to detect changes made after a voter made his/her marks.
With a one voter, one vote system, it is easy to count the number of voters and the number of votes and ensure that the results were not modified.
I believe that this is a pretty important characteristic and I am a bit skeptical about who is pushing approval voting.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Actually the only thing I can't decide on is, which is the sillier idea:
To be honest, i dont think our voting msystem is going to change. Between public apathy and the unwillingness of the establishment to change what benefits them -- not saying they're necessarily evil, but come on, for them it's not broke, so why fix it?-- there's never going to be enough inertia in the movement to move it onto either the systemic or institutional agendas. And frankly, if the 2000 election fiasco wasnt enough to get people to go after their elected representatives, nothing will.
Or maybe i'm just Apathetic.
Look, our current system is as simple as it can get, and people in Florida still had problems with it. Anything more complicated and people's heads will explode in the voting booth.
Also the reason that there are two parties is, well, because no other perspective has garnered enough voters to perpetuate itself. Back in the day there were multiple parties, but most of those points of view are long gone.
As time goes on and people see what works and what doesn't, the field narrows. What's left are single-issue parties, which don't have enough momentum to survive, and local parties with strong organizations like the greens.
Greens survive locally because the issues they face locally aren't likely to conflict with their beliefs. On a wider stage, they tend to be unwilling to compromise, and tend to be marginalized pretty easily by the dominant parties.
Single-issue parties tend to get their issues co-opted. What can you do?
Condorcet and IRV both use the same style of ranked ballot, so the 'number of choices' would be identical. The difference is in how the votes are tabulated, and in how the winner is determined.
Or am I missing something?
Scary, isn't it? As much as Mr. Condorcet deserves the recognition, it is not a very comfortable name for a voting system. Instant Runoff sounds so nice, so American, so instant!
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I totally agree.
Anybody who advocates one system as more platonically better needs to read Arrow, but anyways, in my analysis, I prefer IRV/STV voting over Condercet voting, especially in multi-seat elections. Why? If all seats were chosen by condercet voting, all seats would be the kinda middle of approval. It doesn't provide for proportional representation, _at all_.
The multi-seat form of IRV, called Choice Voting (generally called Single-Transferable Voting (STV)), is preferable to Condercet if you aren't doing a straight party vote for bringing forth a diversity of representation. STV allows any minority group that can reach the election threshold (VotesTotal / (NumSeats + 1)) at least one seat of representation.
Further, in a representative system where there are multiple seats and they are all elected singularly, IRV would be preferable for the same reason (more likely to provide minority representation to increase the dialectic, because it heavily penalizes the person who can't get first place votes (if you got second place votes on all ballots, you may not win), giving third parties much more representation. In a single seat non-aggregate position (such as the Presidency), Condercet voting would probably be the best system.
However, we should all look back to Arrow's Theorem and remember that all voting systems are merely ways to reduce the input from direct democracy to a "managable" level for the elites, and thus they are flawed because OF COURSE they are losing data by "downsampling". Thus, if you want to really be heard, be active, get out, vote, be involved, write letters, run for office yourself and work to integrate real democracy, not just temporary dictatorships.
The two major parties haven't "stacked" anything. The current voting system was around from the beginning of the country, before either party existed.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
mostly sane? I guess if the two candidates from the two parties are consistantly both consumate and demonstratable liars and large segments of the population tend to vote for one or the other out of fear of one or the other is sane in your eyes, then you have a point.
But I think this is just plain nuts. Electoral college was great before TV. We need something to dilute the power structure. We need better representation. You know, too many Americans don't vote at all, because they don't think it will make a difference or feel represented. Changing to a system that would give 3rd parties a chance, might re-enfranchise more than a few people.
This system is broke. Neither Kerry or Bush, democrats or republicans represent me. And I am far from alone in feeling this way.
It occasionally comes up as a subject on the election-methods mailing list. I haven't followed the discussions there so much lately, but my recollection is that there's never been someone emerge who's a big champion of the method in the eight years or so the mailing list has been around.
Rob
freaking pen and paper? Does everything have to be "e-something"?
I only want to point out one thing that isn't quite accurate.
I know it's not your main point, but you say "too many Americans don't vote at all, because they don't think it will make a difference or feel represented."
Actually, this is one of the mystifying things about democracy. The plain truth of the matter is that we don't *know* exactly why more people don't vote. There are a number of theories, but for each of them there is a body of data suggesting they are wrong. Which is to say, for every piece of evidence suggesting people don't vote because they are disaffected, or whatever, there is another piece of evidence suggesting people don't vote because they generally think things are fine the way they are.
- Alaska Jack
Y + N + A = T*C
Y = total number of "approve", N = total number of "disapprove", A = "abstain", T = total voters, C = number of candidates.
Although, I would go for IRV personally. Yes there are contrived conditions where you can show that some mathematically disproportionate fraction of the populace would be "happier" with a different candidate, but look at the reality of voting in the US. 90-99% of the voters split their votes relatively evenly between the two major parties. The rest split them fairly unevenly between the remaining minor contenders.
As shown in 2000, this can be a factor in pushing a "dark horse" candidate to the top, even if that candidate represents the views of fewer voters. The classic example is: A gets 30 votes, B (similar platform as A) gets 30 votes, C (diametrically opposed to A) gets 40 votes and wins. Clearly, either A or B would more closely represent the views of more voters than C.
IRV fixes this problem. Realistically, in IRV, you would have people generally voting for the "left" candidates, and people generally voting for "right" candidates. You would not have preference lists of "Cobb", "Bush", "Kerry". These are the types of contrived preference lists that are purported to show that IRV is poorly designed.
In more realistic situations, IRV allows voters to unequivocably state a true "first choice" candidate/platform, and also state a "safe" vote for someone more likely to win, whom they could live with. With plurality voting, many times the smart choice is to vote for the "safe" candidate, thus giving the candidate the potentially mistaken opinion that all who voted for them did so as their first choice.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
So, would you then prefer to live in a dictatorship? Seriously, democracy has its flaws and this is one of them, but the alternatives are much worse because they take away our freedom.
Furthermore, this attitude is seriously elitist. Joe Voter may know more than you give him credit for. Of course most people don't understand the technical details of how to run the country, indeed, no one person really understands that. But the population as a whole should determine things like general direction and basic values, which is what you're supposed to be voting for when you vote for a candidate.
Joe Voter doesn't know what's best for the whole country, but he often has a pretty good idea what's good for him, and since the country is just Joe Voter in aggregate, its interest is just his interest in aggregate.
The problem we have in our system is not so much that the voters are stupid, but that their opinions have been deliberately manipulated so as to be contrary to their own interest. But this doesn't always work: "you can't fool all the people all the time," and democracy is still the best chance we have to get a government that represents the interest of the general population. As it is, we have an oligarchy representing the interests of the priviledged few. Moving in a more democratic direction would help to correct that.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
In my experience, the only thing that electoral bias in favour of rural voters does is to artificially inflate farmers property values by turning them into into welfare recipients (in all but name), while indulging their worst tendancies to blame people who aren't WASPs for the world's problems and tell everybody else what they can and can't do in their own bedrooms.
The subsidy for American farmers works out to about $20,000 per rural job - yep, those salt of the earth folks you love so much have a huge proportion of their income paid by those city pagans. That's what the electoral college, and 2 senators per state regardless of population, does.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The number of ballots has not changed - it's still one person/one ballot. But Nader's vote total has been increased by one, and there is no way to determine that that extra vote of approval is fraudulent.
live(free) || die;
I don't know what universe you're talking about, but the America I live in is ruled almost entirely by corporate interests, with the population only having a marginal say about mostly irrelevant social issues. In the America I live in, most people don't seem to think government represents them very well, nor that their parties represent them very well, but they are forced to vote for what they regard as the lesser of two evils. In the America I live in, polls consistently show that people lack confidence in our leaders, either government or corporate, and yet they continue to vote for them because they have no real choice. I'd say that's pretty severely broke.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Oh it's easy to count, eh?
That's why there has never been voting fraud using those systems? Notably the US 2000 theft? I doubt approval voting is any less verifiable. The truth is your verifiability criterion has never been exercised. Non-repudiable this, buddy. A real system needs to be implemented for auditing instead of twisting the scheme itself to accomodate.
http://www.truevotemd.org/
On the motivation: Some people think that since plurality voting causes as an artifact a two-party system, that there's an oppression of truly alternative choices. Also, the counts will better indicate candidate viability and thus the sentiments of the voters (instead of what we have with plurality voting--the voters have to game the system and if Nader gets %1 it's not a reflection of how many people actually approve).
Most voting methods are preoccupied with voting strategy and how it best reflects the will of the voters.
Well, there is one method that is overlooked: continuous voting.
Ok ok, it is overlooked for a very sound reason, continuous voting requires the election to be constantly held, this is difficult in our physical world. And yet, what other method would better reflect the will of the voters???
VeniVidiVoti LibraryArrow's theorem and its relevance to these voting systems is a much more complicated matter than it seems at first. For instance, one of Arrow's "reasonable requirements" is the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterian (IIAC), and it's been shown in many scenarios that failing the IIAC is actually what you want.
Condorcet fails Arrow's Theorem as do all other methods, but only when there isn't a Condorcet Winner. When there is, Condorcet is perfect. When there isn't a Condorcet Winner (like when there's a defeat loop, A over B, B over C, and C over A), then there are plenty of tiebreaker methods people can use that are "almost perfect". But in large elections, it's actually pretty rare that there isn't a Condorcet Winner.
So the Arrow argument isn't the smackdown that people take it to be.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Er, if there are five candidates, and X voters, and each voter says "Yes" or "No" to each candidate, you have 5X votes cast.
Sure, that's a big number. Good thing we have calculators.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Start with all the names below a line. The voter grabs a name and drags it up into the vote area above the line. The voter can drop a name above or below any other name already in the vote area and the existing names move appropriately to create the numbered list. Any name left below the line is not voted for (which is OK -- everyone you voted for is preferred over the names you didn't move, which all tie for last place in your estimation).
This would make it easy to see who you've ranked so far, and let you easily move the names around into the proper order without having to manually renumber anything or twiddle a bunch of buttons.
..wayne..
However, when all the numbers are added up, you still have an arbitrary number that has nothing to do with the number of voters and therefore lacks a general credibility.
As one of the previous posters pointed out: for each candidate on the ballot, you either mark them as "approve" or "disapprove". Make it clear to the voter that they must not skip any candidates. So, as long as every candidate is represented on every ballot, then the numbers will add up. If there are 10 candidates and 100 million people vote, you should be left with 100 million ballots with 10 yes/no choices each, adding up to 1 billion total votes. So of course: votes = (number of voters) x (number of candidates)
Additionally, by forcing voters to mark the "disapproves" as well as the "approves", you reduce the chance of someone changing a ballot by trying to approve another candidate on that ballot later (I say reduce, and not eliminate, because there are bound to be a few foolish people who don't fill out the entire ballot as they are supposed to).
I can't believe the amount of defeatist rhetoric in this thread. I guess Americans just don't realise [don't bother correcting the english spelling] that there are many countries around the world that use alternative voting methods. I know because I live in one.
In New Zealand we used to have a two party system , not completely fucked like yours but it was pretty bad all the same. People pushed for electoral reform. Getting to the point of holding a binding referendum was a struggle but we got there in the end. Now we use a system called MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) whereby everyone has two votes. One for a party and one for a local representative, like a senator.
Each party wins a percentage of parliament based upon the percentage of the party vote that they manage to get.
This has lead to a much more balanced goverment. People vote strategically knowing that their vote is not wasted. If I like the specific policies of a small party then I can vote for them. Viva democracy. MMP wouldn't work in a presidential election though. IRV would be perfect. We use something similar (called STV - Single Transferable Vote) for some of the local body elections. It isn't a complicated thing to do. Monkeys can rank things in order of preference.
It's time you lot got together and created a more democratic voting process for your country. Before you idiots let some demagogue convince you into raping any other defenceless countries.
Like some I saw around here said, if you keep on voting for the lesser of two evils you are going to keep on getting evil.
Cheers
Hansel
I don't agree with you. If you believe people are so stupid that they can't comprehend to rank candidates in order of preference (Condorcet) or simply put a mark on the ballot for all the candidates they approve (approval voting), how the h*ll do you think they are going to make an informed decision as to which politician best represents their interests?
Yes, there's always going to be some dofus who doesn't get it (Florida anyone?), but for the most part the electorate understands perfectly well how to vote.
Now, the real reason why any of these better voting methods aren't implemented is simply that the current incumbent parties are in power partly because of the current system. As they are the ones with power to enact new laws, why should they enact laws which reduce their own power? Ain't gonna happen, sorry.
In many other democracies, such as in the Netherlands (where I live), there is no single powerful leader. The government is in practice always a coalition, and the most powerful person, the prime minister, in some way has to represent the whole coalition instaed of only his own party. In this way, just about any party has a chance to enter the government; for example, one of the three parties in the government right now is D66, a party which presumably would be the Libertarians if we were the US, although they only have somewhere around ten of the 150 seats in Parliament. This must sound very appealing to a great deal of you US-based Slashdotters (I'm not a fan of D66 at all, but that aside). Yet, how is the parliament elected? With a simple single-vote system.
In short, maybe all these complicated election methods are only necessary because of the need to elect a single person. This may be a more flawed thing than the election system itself.
We've been dealing with this for years in the computer world using checksums. I don't see why that wouldn't work here.
For instance, let's say we have a punch card ballot with a machine operating it. It marks each person you wanted to vote for, then it marks *the number of people voted for*.
Suddenly, it is easy to detect tampering. People can still invalidate the vote, but they can do that when there is only one hole in the card as well by punching another one for another candidate.
That is, of course, assuming that a punch card is actually used. Printed bar codes, etc, are also options.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
So why doesn't the slashdot poll use this method...
/. has a decent sized community.
:)
/. implements something other than plurality, I don't want to hear any complaining that the US Government should.
If we want to argue that alternative voting isn't complicated, the best step in that direction is to implement it ourselves in a very simple manner.
I propose the first poll on the new system ask what poll is best.
Until
Karma Clown
There have been less than 50 US presidents, and I believe that a President has been elected while not having a plurality of the popular vote before 2000. So I do think it's a big deal. There have been a few more than 50 Presidential elections, but many of them weren't close enough for the system of voting to matter. Even if it's never happened before 2000, 1 out of 50 Presidential elections going against the popular vote seems like too many to me.
However each individual election goes, the fact is that we no longer view ourselves as a collection of states, but as one nation. The number of electoral votes per state is based on number of congressional seats per state which is based on state population. Determination of state population can be politically influenced in the same way that redistricting is (in the most recent census there were disputes about which regions and types of ares were undercounted and overcounted, and ways to make the data accurate; these disputes were at the Congressional level and in one case consisted of Republicans arguing that urban areas were overcounted and Democrats arguing that they were undercounted). A party or group of parties in power can and will try to perpetuate their position in power.
Only by counting the vote of each person who chooses to vote equally can the politics of perpetuation of power be removed from the selection of the President. Whether we continue to vote using some kind of plurality-based system or move to a ranking or approval system of determining a winner, the electoral college must go.
The arguments against the Electoral College simply dismiss the College out of hand, without staring the best reason for having them in the first place. Our government is a federation of sovereign states (e.g., "Federal" government and "United" States). We are not a monolithic governmental body. The purpose of the Electoral College is to intentionally skew the numerical advantage of smaller states to make them more equal in power to the larger states when the states are acting as equals, such as in the Senate and Presidential elections. This is a negotiated settlement of state vs. state power that is fair and balanced and has stood the test of time.
Properly speaking, our President is elected by the states, not by individual voters. (In fact, in the beginning, the President was directly elected by the state legislatures, and there was no direct, popular vote.) There's nothing "un-democratic" about the Electoral College. It's just the states' way of voting.
In my opinion, any proposed change in a voting mechanism must address the need for state vs. state balance of power, or it simply won't fly. The reason the Electoral College is in the Consitution has to do with the way our Union is is organized, not with some supposed desire to "keep women and minorities down" as electionmethods.org would argue (*sigh*).
It may be that changing the voting mechanism could help states select Electors better, especially in a tight race with more than two close contenders. But in the end, it will always be very much to each State's advantage to award the Electors as winner-take-all, because this maximizes their leverage against the other states in the Union.
In fact, without the Electoral College, the effect of winner-take-all would be even more pronounced, only, it would be the winners of just a handful of states.
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