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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."
Actually, it is the US with the obsolete voting system. Check out most of Europe, Australia, just about anywhere that has a newer democracy than the US. That's where you find such inovations as party list for legislatures and ranking systems or approval for presidents.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
There is a live Condorcet Presidential Poll. Source code is available too.
Seastead this.
A sibling post mentioned Borda, and he is correct, this maps to Borda.
Another issue with Borda-type systems is voting strategy.
If you run a scare campaign, you can convince people that it is vital your campaign succeed. Of course, your opponent will do likewise.
Of course, just about every presidential campaign in memory has been that way: vote for me OR ELSE.
So how does Borda deal with this? If it's vital that your opponent lose, you have to put the maximum vote on a candidate likely to defeat him. In your system, that would mean putting all 5x the available options onto one candidate. Any other option would reduce the strength of your vote.
So, Borda devolves into our current system.
You want to use a system that does not punish you for stating a preference. Condorcet does this. IRV does this better than the current system, but not as well as it could. Approval voting doesn't punish, either (though you could argue that it doesn't reward).
A large part of the issue with any voting system is you have to consider how it will be used. You will have some very intelligent people out there attempting to manipulate those votes.
In disclosure, I believe in doing either Condorcet or Approval voting, preference to Condorcet in the future, Approval today.
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd make the President of the U.S. elected via Condorcet, Senators also elected per state via Condorcet, and the House of Representatives elected proportionally. For the House, I'd use Single Transferable Vote (STV) and it wouldn't be one big nationwide proportional pool, but rather, multimember districts of 5-9 seats.
Rob
(who's lying...if he could wave a magic wand, there's a lot of other things that would be too much more fun to do than change the electoral system)
During the time period of the Great Depression, many economies around the world were suffering greatly, and the agricultural sector in particular was hurt globally. Countries responded by passing extremely harsh anti-trade legislation to try to protect their own economies through "screw-your-neighbor" terms of trade. After WWII, politicians wised up and starting relaxing these trade barriers, but many countries were afraid to expose their agricultural sector to greater risks. Effectively, farmers had suffered enough, and they hadn't gotten a big jumpstart from the industrial war effort. As such, trade liberalization occurred primarily in the manufacturing sector.
All the crap you see today with agriculture is a legacy of that ultraprotectionist era, and developing countries still pay the price today. There is some hope with the latest Doha round of trade talks, but don't expect any major changes soon.