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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.
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.
Actually there have pretty much always been 2 major parties and other minor parties. Whenever a minor party has gained strength it didn't create a multiple party system in America but simply replaced one of the two major parties at the time.
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
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.
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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?)
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.
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Arrow'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
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.