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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
Speaking of voting methods, how about giving us soldiers in Iraq a chance to vote. Read this: http://www.thetoxic.com/a_soldiers_opinion.html
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
Voting systems are one of those things people will ALWAYS disagree on, because the set of "reasonable" desirable properties that most people would like in a system are contradictory, as shown by Kenneth Arrow.
Condorcet would work well in your presidential elections. But if you were to try to use it in a situation like our Australian Senate elections (with dozens of candidates on each ballot), the number of choices to make would place a burden on the voter. You could use Condorcet in the presidential ballot and preferential (IRV) in bigger ballots, but I believe that it would be less confusing to use the same method of voting in every type of election, so I suggest that IRV is still the better option.
The attractive thing about runoff elections is they make it more viable to have more than two parties. Unfortanetly, the two major parties have stacked things to make it difficult for a viable third party to establish itself.
The Bolachek Journals
Actually the only thing I can't decide on is, which is the sillier idea:
I think the idea is to have a yes and no bubble after every name. I don't know what it means to skip a name. Permision for poll officer to vote for you?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
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?
I think the idea is to have a yes and no bubble after every name. I don't know what it means to skip a name. Permision for poll officer to vote for you?
That does not address the problem. It only ensures that a fair re-count has the opportunity to be fair. 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. The modification to this scheme proposed as economy voting in a previous post is an example of how to make approval voting add up right. Give the voter 5 votes that he must spend on the candidates in any way they like. Something like that.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
The ballots would be the same as in instant runoff voting. Only difference is a more mathematically reasonable outcome.
He has made a simulation that is open source.
So hack away. Look here and here.
I am more concerned by the level to which misinformation and spin has weakened our democracy. I am not sure how we can curtail the 30 second attack ads without stepping on first amendment issues, but there is no doubt that money and marketing have taken precedence over meaningful discussion of the issues. I had high hopes for the McCain/Feingold capaign finance reform bill, but I was evidently niave. Anyone out there have ideas on how to fix the current broken system.
The Bolachek Journals
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?
I don't see how this solves the problem: voting third party still "wastes" some of your vote. Letting someone vote 10 times will simply mean that they put 10 votes for one of the major parties since anything else would be a waste in their mind. A ranking system removes this problem but is imho too complicated.
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
Most election methods operate under the assumption that the popular vote is what matters. In America, that simply isn't the case. What matters is which candidate will most accurately reflect the needs and desires of the nation, not only of its population centers.
Additionally, a charismatic candidate can sweep the popular vote by carrying a handful of major cities. Popular voting in America implies that only the inner city vote matters, which disenfranchises the rural voters - you know, those who produce oil, wheat, beef, milk, chickens, pork, corn, soybeans, potatoes, and other things that you like to have in your life.
Quite simply, the Electoral College is a very effective compromise that has kept our Presidential elections mostly sane for more than 50 iterations. It ain't broke - don't try to fix it.
Mod parent up! The Slashdot story covering the Libertarian and Green debate says that Freemarketnews will be "streaming it and providing a download afterwards". Great. Click on the "Click here for schedule of all upcoming programs", and you are told to "JOIN NOW [...] its FREE". Fine, I'll register, verify my damn email address, and sign in. The schedule links to http://63.223.15.84:443/freemarketnews/09-30-04-pe oplesdebate.wmv. Hope this helps. (A non-SSL HTTP server on port 433, odd.)
Talk about inaccessible. The Republicrat debate was inescapable; streamed live on just about every station and rebroadcast several times. You have to jump through all these hoops to find the minor party debates. I can understand that it won't be as easy to find as the major debate, but this sort of inaccessibility is inexcusable.
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There supposed advantage of IRV is that its a more of a grey scal e vote that allows voters to vote for a wider spectrum of candidates without worrying about voting for a spoiler. It supposedly remedies the complaint that we have a bistable system that only supports two parties.
In actual fact there is no evidence that a bistable system is bad. Indeed the entire point of our electoral system in that the winning person enters witha strong mandate to govern, not be voted in as the lesser of multiple evils as a third choice candidate everyone could agree upon. You want a candidate that can enter office and govern with a single uncompromoised point of view for an effective period of time. You get the balance between point of views ergodically over time not by having a compromise up front. There is an old sayng that there is the right way, the wrong way and the army way. Its a joke and a truth. What it means is that in war waiting for the perfectly thought out plan is not effective--its better to have an acceptable plan than none at all even it it sometimes is couter productive in specific instances.
one can contrast and compare our 2-party system with another gray scale system: parlimentary systems. in parlimentary systems there is more of a grey scale of representation, however that is not how the voting occurs. What happens is that a consenus coalition forms a govenrment and rules with complete authority. compromise happens only within the coalition not the entire body of elected officials. So once again a strong leadership emerges and can govern effectively. In our system the same sorts of intra-organizational consensus happens but it happens at an earlier stage. If the greens get too powerful the democrats move to co-opt their positions. That might piss off the greens as a party but basically it means the greens won if your opponents adopt your platform issues. So assimilation at an early stage replaces overt inter-party consensus at the end stage. In some ways this is better. For example, a single issue minor party that joins a parlimentary consenus can in return giving up all other issues create disporotionate havoc if it does not get its way on its single issue, say mandatory prayer in schools. In contrast a two party system is less beholden to fringe elements.
A final system is our electoral college. Many people mistakenly believe it somphow is wrong that someone could win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college. Wrong. To govern effectively a president has to be able to pass bills in both the house and the senate. there is a deliberate small-state bias in the senate. Therefore the best candidate for president is not the most popular one but the one whose popularity is spread out over the greatest number of states. willing a large popular vote in CA, NY, Ohio, texas and florida might win the popular vote but would make for an awful presidency. the person who is favored by in more states is actually going to be able to work more effectively with congress.
SO basically, while I support IRV systems because I like the idea of getting more diversity in candidates, I also recognize that it is not gaurentteed to produce a more stable or more representative or more efffective from of government.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We should not change the US constitution..i have a better way. patition your state govenment to reform where you electorial votes go...most states have a system that the winner takes all, that is that when a candidate gets a majority even if it is only 51% all the electorial votes go to that one candidate. In some state (i don't know which all i know is i don't live in one) allow its electorial votes to be split...ie if your voting district for house representitive wins for the candidate that didn't win the states popular vote the candidate will still get the electorial vote.... the advantage here is three fold first: this does not require a change in the constitution nor a vote on the federal level...you just have to get your local state government to change it. second: this in no way risks a change to the checks and balances contained the electorial college which was intended to protect the rights of minority states with smaller populations. third: it will give more power on the local level to individual voters and increase the chances of third parties to get electorial votes and therefor more national recognition...it will also increase the representative voice of minority republican and democratic voters in states which are predominatly the other party...ie democrates in democrat dominated districts in Texas could give electorial votes to a democrate candidate and republicans in eastern washington could give electorial votes to a republican candidate. the best part of this is that it could actually be done...rather then pie in the sky run off elections that would require a constitutional amendment and perhaps have very bad unforseen unintended consiquiences inharent in any tempering with the constitution. stendec@gmail.com
"Instant Runoff" works, because it sounds like some new kind of lottery ticket.
The number of ballots should equal the number of people who cast ballots, though, should it not? And would this not provide the number you're looking for?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The ancient Greeks used to fill a lot of their governmental positions by lottery. Also, Bill Buckley is famous for noting that you'd getter better government out of the first 200 names in the Cambridge phone book than you would from the faculty at Harvard. These two things got me thinking -- Could you really construct a workable modern system around that concept?
Imagine, just for fun, a legislative body chosen by lottery.
* You'd probably want to exclude felons and the legally insane.
* You couldn't, of course, compel anyone to serve, but you'd want to make serving an attractive proposition, so you'd have to make the experience a financially rewarding one.
* Bribery would be a big problem. You'd have to try to ameliorate through a combination of a healthy salary, draconian punishment, and probably a healthy guaranteed pension for life for those chosen to serve.
* Currently, legislatures are full of strong personalities which tend to cancel each other out. In a randomly selected body, strong personalities would have a much greater tendency to influence the weak.
* Legislators would (at least at first) need to rely to a greater extent on professional bureacracies of expert wonks. On the other hand, the U.S. government is sufficiently complex that it's not like any one legislator can master all of it anyway, so I think it's arguable as to how much of a change this would be.
* Randomly choosen legislators would not be accountable through the mechanism of elections, though I suppose they could still be impeached.
* One could make the case for choosing members of one house by lottery, and members of the other (presumable the Senate) by election. But that's no fun.
* You would probably want to hold the lottery every year, but not for every seat, so members would hold overlapping terms.
* You might also want your selectees to serve a one-year period of apprenticeship, learning how the system works before they're actually able to vote or anything.
Anyway, it's kind of a fun idea to toy with. It would certainly have its drawbacks, but I'm not convinced those drawbacks would be anything worse than what we have now. At least it would stop everyone from bitching about the influence of money on elections.
- Alaska Jack
There is a live Condorcet Presidential Poll. Source code is available too.
Seastead this.
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
The Condorcet website says " It [Condorcet] allows voters to vote for the candidate they agree with most rather than against the major-party candidate they disagree with most. In other words, it eliminates the need for defensive or strategic voting." Unfortunately, this is wrong, and demonstrates a lack of understanding on someone's part.
Nobel prizewinning economist Kenneth Arrow proved a neat little theorem in the 1950s. He showed that, under some very minimal and reasonable requirements for what a voting system is supposed to do, any voting system will sometimes require strategic voting in a 3 (or more) candidate election.
If there were a close race between two candidates A and B, with other candidates trailing far behind, then the best strategy would be to allocate all votes for whichever of those two is preferred, regardless of how much the voter might like C, D, etc. In other words, the 'wasted vote' problem does not go away; rather, it applies just as forcefully to each of the several votes that the voter now has to spend.
freaking pen and paper? Does everything have to be "e-something"?
Wouldn't the simpler method be to have an extra field on the ballot that you punch/mark indicating how many votes you've cast?
As the webmaster of ElectionMethods.org, I am thrilled to see this link on slashdot. Please tell your friends and relatives too!
I would just like to clarify a couple of points. We believe that Condorcet voting is the best system if properly implemented. However, as you will see at our site, the proper implementation gets very technical. Therefore, we realized a long time ago that Condorcet is simply not practical for actual implemention on a large scale in the forseeable future. It's just too darn complicated.
However, Approval Voting is very simple. It's the same as our current plurality system except that the voter is allowed to vote for more than one candidate (no ranking). When people first hear about Approval Voting (myself included), they think it is defective because it does not allow you to rank the candidates (as in IRV and Condorcet). But this is misleading. IRV lets you rank the candidates, but it does not properly count your preferences. Technical analysis shows that Approval Voting is a surprisingly good system given its extreme simplicity. And it requires no new voting equipment. It could be implemented very quickly once a consensus is reached to do so, and the only objection I can see is to protect the two-party duopoly.
Think about it, folks. We could revolutionize our political system by simply letting voters vote for more than one candidate. This will have a far more profound effect than term limits or campaign finance reform, for example.
What effect it will have cannot be predicted exactly, of course. Perhaps the Republicrats will still remain dominant for a long time, perhaps not. But it's definitely worth a try, perhaps starting at the local level.
Oh, one more caveat. You must realize that *no* alternative voting system can make the US Presidential election fairer for minor parties as long as the Electoral College is in place. Trust me: it just can't be done. That's why I'm for aboloshing the EC. Unfortunately, many of my fellow conservatives are dead set against that, and it requires a Constitutional Amendment.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
There's a fairly good rebuttal of this on the electionmethods.org website.
Rob
What if the voter marks the wrong number? the ballot would be tossed just because someone can't count. This might be trivial, but requiring the voter to count does add a level of complexity that could eliminate some voters. Counting is more complicated than choosing amongst options. Not all voters have a normal preschool education..
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
The winner of the debate was... Cowboyneal?!?!?!?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Well, we could rely on our friends at Diebold to help out :P
Given that IRV is non-monotonic (i.e., voting a candidate higher can cause them to lose the election), how is it better than what we have now?
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
The Wiki article says: "With a narrower definition of "irrelevant alternatives" which excludes those candidates in the Smith set, some Condorcet methods meet all the criteria."
Doesn't this mean that no system is perfect, but some Condorcet methods get close? Doesn't that make the Condorcet method superior?
Also, I agree totally about proportional representation. However, couldn't there be some way to modify the Condorcet method to provide proportional representation without violating the Monotonicity criterion? I'm not sure how to do this, but it seems to be worth looking into.
IRV would certainly be an improvement over the current system. However, the Monotonicity problem makes voter choice an almost impossible multilemma, since you might actually be hurting your candidates by ranking them higher. To really vote properly, you would have to watch the polls like a hawk and sometimes make odd choices that do not conform to your preferences in order to create your desired outcome. Seems to me that it would be better to sacrifice the "irrelevant alternatives" criterion, since in reality nothing is really irrelevant anyway, everything is interconnected.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
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
If people ignore you and continue to create these theories, shouldn't you "STFU" and not post these replies?
It seems everything you wrote about them, could be written about your reply.
Rob
Really it seems like the choice between IRV and Condorcet/Approval is a question of which sacrifices you make.
One one hand, there is the Condorcet Criterion: A candidate which beats every other candidate in a pairwise election (they call it an IDW) "should" win the election when it involves multiple candidates and people vote sincerely. On the other hand, there is Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: Spoiler Candidates "should" have no effect on the election.
As it turns out, rigid adherance to the IIA criterion is unworkable; Arrow's theorem shows that it can't be applied in all cases without introducing other even more undesirable stuff (like a voter with absolute power). Once you realize this, there are two solutions.
1. Accept that IIA can't always be satisfied, and try to minimize the effect of spoiler candidates as much as possible. This will lead to occasional violations of the Condorcet criterion, but that is a sacrifice IIA supporters choose to make.
2. Castrate the IIA criterion by making it only apply to the so-called "Smith Set", itself a generalization of the Condorcet criterion. On the plus side, the Condorcet criterion will ALWAYS be satisfied.
The makers of the linked site prefer the latter, but they don't seem to realize that there was a choice made in the first place.
Take a look at the technical analysis, and at the criteria they choose:
The "Condorcet" criterion is: If there is an IDW and people vote sincerely, the IDW wins.
The "Generalized Condorcet" criterion is entirely based around the Smith Set, a generalization of the IDW.
The "Strategy Free" criteria really mean: If people vote honestly and there is an IDW, the IDW wins (almost exactly the same as the Condorcet criterion). Note the difference from the standard definition: Here they ONLY concern themselves with Condorcet winners!! An IRV supporter would say: No reasonable system satisfies the Strategy-Free definition, so we will try to violate it as little as possible. Here they just change the definition to make it match the Condorcet condition.
On the other hand, other criteria seem just about worthless except that they're not satisfied by IRV, so they make IRV seem more evil. Take the two "defensive strategy" for example, which state that for each pair (A,B) such that a majority prefers A to B, that majority can choose a strategy so that B is not elected no matter what the rest of the electorate does. The thing is, the "defensive strategies" for two different candidates can't be employed simultaneously, so all such a strategy guarantees is the ability for the population to choose between the two candidates they dislike the most. Again, note that this "defensive strategy" has been defined in terms of the same pairwise voting used to define the Condorcet criterion.
All their complicated "technical evaluation" seems to show is that Condorcet is preferable to IRV if you consider prefer 2) to 1). In other words, if you're willing to focus mostly on the Condorcet condition, the Condorcet method is the way to do so. What a surprise!
I want to see some serious change before I get old.
However, our existing system has it's merits, given it is run properly.
Making each vote cast added to a fair and unbiased tally is the top concern right now.
It is possible for third parties to gain traction, as the Libertarian party has been doing, within our current system.
Blogging because I can...
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 agree there can be some improvements to the voting system, but I think these issues are less significant than the more important problems plaguing the structure of power in the United States.
This may not seem obvious until you examine a country like Switzerland and their democratic process and power structure. In the U.S., we vote for a President, who in turn appoints people in charge of key areas of government: defense, transportation, agriculture, education, etc. More often than not, these appointees are not even modestly qualified to hold the positions they're given. The president doles out these assignments as rewards for those who are loyal in their service to his campaign.
In contrast, Switzerland divides the management of the government into a set of distinct areas and there is a vote for the best-qualified person for that particular specialization. This is the Federal Council and it allows the people to select the best-qualified person to manage defence, foreign affairs, communications, etc.
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).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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 LibraryI was thinking that in fact there are 4 ways votes get to determine who gets elected.
First, there is the machine. Here it is an actual box with levers. In FL punch cards. Some places are trying to get touch screens.
Second, there is the counting method, e.g. IRV, approval, or Borda. That then consolidates everyone into one or more candidates.
Third, there is the transference way. Is an Electoral collage used? Is it popular? Is it with distrecs?
Finally, there is how can get elected. Are there multiple chairs with the top 3 winners used. Is it alternating every 2 years or so.
Any one of these can be changed without changing the others. The Senate is elected for example with machines in NY, a highest method to see who wins, no EC or indirect way just popular vote from the whole state. And about every couple of years a new senator comes for 6.
I am personally a fan of machines because I am used to them. Approval because it is easy both to compute and have people deal with. Popular for small things and an EC of some sort for large like the president. And generally one winner except for important races or ones where a group is better.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
All of this also leads to an interesting question: should we also change the way votes are cast in Congress? If the winner-take-all system we have doesn't work well for electing candidates, doesn't it have the same problems when it comes to those candidates making decisions?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Nader is accused of having this effect on the current race, and many fear that his candidacy will contribute to the election of the "greater of two evils." With approval voting, this wouldn't be an issue, as the Nader voters could instead vote that either of two choices (Nader & Kerry) would be better than the third (Bush).
All of this leads to an interesting question. If the winner-take-all system doesn't work very well for the population selecting candidates (and I think reasonable people can agree that this system is severely broken), is it also similarly broken for legislatures? Should we implement some sort of Condorcet voting for creating laws?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
immediately after you've marked your vote on the slip it'll be placed on a lamination machine. after that it's pretty hard to tamper with it.
That said, I think the positions they take are correct. There are some great theoretical results showing how poorly IRV performs in situations where Condorcet is a stable, rational system. Though there's not many elections that you can analyze to see this "in the wild", a recent Debian project leader election was a great example of where IRV would have been bad.
IRV isn't so bad, but it's also sadly inferior to many other better choices.
Rob
Isn't that just what he said? And didn't he write the web site you're linking to?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Wow, that is complicated, too complicated. There is another voting system that does much the same thing, STV (Single Transferrable Vote). 1) All voters number their choices in order of preference (easy to understand). 2) All 1st preference votes are counted, if someone has > 50% they are the winner 3) One candidate will have least votes, they are now out of the race so for all those that voted for him preference 1 redistribute the #2 preference. 4) It one candidate has > 50% there is a winner, stop 5) Repeat from step 3 until there is a winner using the appropriate #nth preference. This system can also be used to elect several winners from a basket of candiates. Something like this is used in Australia amongst other countries.
I suggest browsing http://wikipedia.org/ for all the voting systems. There is no perfect one. With Condorcet, it's flawed in the below way. A beats B. B beats C. C beats A. Tie. I think IRV is the next logical step, but in time, maybe we'll find a better method. Such as the Avy method of IRV.
If people can't punch 1 hold in a ballot, how the hell do you expect them to punch multiple holes . . . .
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The fact that equal ranks are valid seems to be a notable, easily explained advantage of Condorcet over IRV. As Australia jailed Albert Langer for the crime of advocating assigning equal ranks to candidates, perhaps voters there would be especially receptive to switching to Condorcet.
My home province, British Columbia, Canada, is currently going through a unique, citizen based review of our provincial electoral process. About 160 people were chosen randomly from the either the voters or the residents list (I can't recall which) to take part in debates and forums which will lead to recommendations on how we elect our provincial reps. I think that these recommendations will then feed directly into a referrandum by the general population.
We currently use a first-past-the-post system for our provincial elections, just like most (?) US elections. The early feedback from the group pretty much rejects FPTP as an fully representative and ideal system. It looks like BC will sooner or later have a referrandum to switch to either a Single Transferable Votes or a "mixed" format of elections. True, there are many cynics who doubt that politicians will allow the recommendations to ever be followed through to a vote or law. However, whether they are or not, it's quite an interesting experiment.
Again, these are regular folks with regular jobs, not academics and not politicians.
Some info: Citizens Assembly
You must have pretty low ambitions to consider what the Libertarians have "traction". Given the amount of effort made and the sizable minority that considers themselves Libertarian, there's nothing even close to proprortionality in representation or even influence. As third parties go, Libertarians are the most successful, but that's "as third parties go".
Rob
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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!
Skip to 48:00 for the actual event.
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).
What happened to good ol' democracy?
Everyone's vote counts equally. All votes are counted individually, not grouped by region, race, religion, or party. The canidate with the most individual votes wins.
The most important part is to destroy the concept of 'the state' voting. It is the primary reason why we have a bipartisan political system, wherein both parties aren't that different upon close inspection. Because the majority of your state already votes for a particular canidate, it's futile to vote otherwise. Catch-22, or mere monopoly lock-in?
Most of the time, the best solutions are the simplest ones.
http://pixelcort.com/
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 love how they describe their favorite voting method, while making sure to say things like, "unless that's too complicated for public acceptance," then we would pick method B, but if you're not equipped for that, then method C, which is certainly better than method D. . .
Which of course leads me to wonder. When you have a whole bunch of experts in a room choosing a voting method, and they can't quite agree, and they say, "OK, we'll vote on it," and someone says, "yeah, but what kind of vote?", does time just freeze up at that point?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Are there web resources that clearly explain the technical details of how to arrive at this conclusion? While I suspect you are correct, it would be nice to have a URL that I could point people toward.
Also, what are your thoughts on the assertion that combining presidentialism and multipartism leads to political instability? E.g.:
Party Fragmentation and Presidential Elections in Post-Communist Democracies
(The topic of the paper is somewhat tangential, but it's the best web reference I have found.)
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 voting systems, Arrow's impossibility theorem, or Arrow's paradox demonstrates the impossibility of designing rules for social decision making that obey a number of 'reasonable' criteria. The theorem is due to the economist Kenneth Arrow, recipient of the Bank of Sweden Prize , who proved it in his PhD thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values. The theorem's content, somewhat simplified, is as follows. A society needs to agree on a preference order among several different options. Each individual in the society has his or her own personal preference order. The problem is to find a general mechanism, called a social choice function, which transforms the set of preference orders, one for each individual, into a global societal preference order. This social choice function should have several desirable ("fair") properties: unrestricted domain or universality: the social choice function should create a complete societal preference order from every possible set of individual preference orders. (The vote must have a result that ranks all possible choices relative to one another, and the voting mechanism must be able to process all possible sets of voter preferences.) non-imposition or citizen sovereignty: every possible societal preference order should be achievable by some set of individual preference orders. (Every result must be achievable somehow.) non-dictatorship: the social choice function should not simply follow the preference order of a single individual while ignoring all others. positive association of social and individual values or monotonicity: if an individual modifies his or her preference order by promoting a certain option, then the societal preference order should respond only by promoting that same option or not changing, never by placing it lower than before. (An individual should not be able to hurt a candidate by ranking it higher.) independence of irrelevant alternatives: if we restrict attention to a subset of options, and apply the social choice function only to those, then the result should be compatible with the outcome for the whole set of options. (Changes in individuals' rankings of "irrelevant" alternatives [i.e., ones outside the subset] should have no impact on the societal ranking of the "relevant" subset.) Arrow's theorem says that if the decision-making body has at least two members and at least three options to decide among, then it is impossible to design a social choice function that satisfies all these conditions at once. Another version of Arrow's theorem can be obtained by replacing the monotonicity criterion with that of: unanimity or Pareto efficiency: if every individual prefers a certain option to another, then so must the resulting societal preference order. This statement is stronger, because assuming both monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives implies Pareto efficiency. With a narrower definition of "irrelevant alternatives" which excludes those candidates in the Smith set, some Condorcet methods meet all the criteria.
Because it's irrelivant for the most part. In most presidential elections, the popular vote matches the electoral vote so there's no reason anyone would care. What happened in the 2000 election has happened before, but not very often. Thus mos just don't care.
While "continuous voting" might seem like a good idea, it's important for an administration to have stability despite any "fad" changes in public opinion, for implementation of policy. 4-year terms and impeachment are both decent methods of ensuring the "will of the voters" is sufficiently recognized, IMO.
The real problem is that control over our voting system is in the hands of the same people that used it to get into office, and they don't want to change that. It is a fundamental problem that has allowed corporations to "own" candidates all over our government. Just as it is imperative that our voting system be changed, it is also imperative (and related) that money be seperated from power. People should never be allowed to profit (directly or indirectly) for occupying a government office. Government positions should be considered "terms of service" similar to jury duty, not avenues for gaining wealth or power.
Waaay down here in little ol' New Zealand, we've just had our "local body elections" (city councils, mayors). We voted using the Single Transferable Vote system (STV). ( Unfortunately, for our "general elections", we use another nowhere-near-as-good system called MMP, but that's another story .... )
STV is something of a misnomer, as there's nothing "single" about it. It allows you to rank the people, and is **VERY** easy to understand.
Even better - it means that those who are elected will be a very good reflection of the "people's will".
Sheesh - when it comes to electoral systems, what is it with the US system and these "primaries" and stuff? Weird ..... :-)
If you simply dismiss everyone that live outside of cities as worthless of influence, then you really need to be looking to yourself for bias problems, not our election system. You bitterness at those that live a rural lifestyle is a sign of ignorance, not superority (I live in a city by the way).
One thing that many city dewllers seem to forget is just where all the food comes from. The supermarkets don't magically generate it, it's grown/raised on farms adn ranches, ie rural America. Well, this requires people to make it happen, and it's very important that we have them. If America's food generation shut down it would lead to a global food crisis, and all those in cities would suddely be crying since there would be nothing for us to eat and no easy way to get it.
You also seem to forget that the US is a unites group of states. The idea, and the law as written in the constution, is that the states have a great deal of rights and powers. They are unified and subordinate to a federal government, but still very free. Well, that requires the states to ahve equal power. If larger (either population or landwise) states got all the votes, they could simlpy dictate to smaller states, thus destroying the idea of states rights.
When you get down to it there are good historical, legal, and practical reasons why rural state have more power than their populartion would imply. Now I'm not saying it's perfect or that maybe it's not time to change, but this hatred for those that live out there is just ignorant and, when you get down it it, racist. You do need to appreciate that there is a reason for those states to exist. If you think that you can make a city self-sufficient in terms of food, be my guest and try, but you'll fail.
If people are interested in alternatives, check out the edible ballot society. Their site is a real laugh, yet their analysis is dead on, and very serious. Their alternatives section has some interesting ideas including deciding elections through sumo wrestling.
Desclaimer: I help them out sometimes.
Deconstruct the State
Constutional monarchy: a well-tested and widely used system. Also has an advantage of being the simplest possible: no elections, no ballots, no recounts, no nothing. And even an absolute moron can understand how it works. =)
In case you didn't explore the site fully, this page explains their arguments against IRV. Personally, I find them very compelling.
What you say here leads into their arguments:
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 long as the minor parties are quite minor, IRV will just provide more interesting protest votes. And there is probably some value in that, but it isn't enough. As soon as a party or candidate becomes big enough to challenge the main two, the spoiler effect comes right back into play.
But please read the above linked page for a much clearer and more thorough explanation.
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
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.
I've already posted in this discussion, or I'd mod you up. I agree completely with all that you said.
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
what a load of crap, tasmania almost had a hung parliament like 10 years ago, with 1 or 2 independent members having to ally with a party to form government with a weak mandate at best
THe authors of the article clearly are biased against IRV. And whenever a 'scientific paper' invokes 'common sense' (as this article does, numerous times), alarm bells should start ringing in your head. What IRV aims to achieve is to minimise dissatisfaction of voters with candidates. That it does. IF that is your aim, THEN IRV is a good method. IRV also doesn't bring you your slippers when you need them, therefore, is it not a good method?
And in our current system, marking another vote will get that ballot thrown out. This has the same effect as marking an extra person on an approval ballot. In other words, this is no different from the situation we're already in. It is true that extra marks won't be noticed as quickly as lots of incorrect ballots, but that can be fixed easily: Have people mark both "yes" and "no" votes, so all that can be done is to mark both and make that ballot invalid. Then it really is no different from the current system in terms of problems. There's a reason ballot counters have a lot of oversight.
No, there could be counter-measures involved stopping such actions from happening. Its morning, I am half-awake and I can think of a handful already.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Ah, but with approval voting, the lamination will be easier to remove than our tried-and-true current system! Seriously, I get the feeling the grandparent must be an executive in one our beloved two parties or something, as his post was basically the definition of FUD.
The nice thing about condorcet is that it can emulate a plethora of other voting methods. So, if you have a condorcet system in place the voter could be allowed to choose which voting system he wants to use. They would essentially all be the same, only the interface would be different. So, some voter could vote for "candidate X" while another voter could order all candidates by preference, and some third voter could vote for "candidate Y and party Z".
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.
Why wouldn't you have preference lists like that? If I had to rank those three, I would rank them as "Kerry", "Bush", "Cobb", which is the same as you stated, just backwards. (I would also put the Libertarian guy who's name I can't spell at the top, making for an even more ideologically-incorrect order.)
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I would just like to point out that condorcet voting would be inoperable if there is more than a tiny number of candidates. Remember, you have to make a choice from every single possible combination of pairs of candidates.
, 382,746,624 votes, for just one office.
With just 5 candidates to choose from, you would have to make 32 decisions. Yikes!
In the recent California recall election, I believe there were approximately 150 candidates for the same position. In that case, condorcet voting would require each voter to make an inumerable number of individual votes.
Specifically: 1,427,247,692,705,959,881,058,285,969,449,495,136
IRV would only require 3 choices.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't see why electing someone to an office will guarantee that the person who is chosen will be fit for that office. After all, I can almost guarantee that whoever wins this year's presidential elections will be unfit to be President. I don't see why that would be different for Secretary of Defense or Secretary of Transportation or any other post.
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However, I cannot imagine where a circular preference really makes sense - I know it come about e.g. if you rate a candidates on 3 topics, and every candidate beats another on two topics and loses in one.
Example, topics are A, B, C
Every candidate beats another here. Still, I feel people should get their preference straight and assign weights to topics.
After all, this is something for the Simpsons: Better to have Bush than Rush. Well, then better to have Lush than Rush, well then better to have Bush than Lush, etc. etc.
I think the condorcet system simply allows circular preferences because the matrix of preferences is the tool used to compute the winner, and circular preferences emerge anyway, even with several voters where every single one votes in order of preference(just replace topic A,B,C with voters A,B,C).I must say a voting system which does not even allow to determine a winner of the voting when there is only one persons voting(with circular preferences) doesn't seems to make sense in practice - I guess this would need to be hacked(fixed).
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
The only hope for the system to be change if you actually get altruistic people in, or really stupid ones.
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.
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Let's look at this from the perspective from the average middle or lower class American citizen.
Joe Schmoe grew up in suburban wherever, perhaps a bit closer to the countryside than the city. He went to school, did all the things the average country-boy kid does and eventually grew up to be a somewhat bright teenager. During his teenage years his mind starts developing more into the world around him, taking in various experiences and beliefs to form opinions on all the issues on everything he's experienced.
Let's step back a second and also assume Sally Dally is doing the same thing, Sally is Joe's future wife, although neither know it yet. Alright, getting back to Joe (Assume Sally does most, if not all of the same in her own way):
Joe turns 18, and is now mostly considered an adult, albeit a young one. He registers to vote, and for the first 3 or 4 years of his young adulthood he actually does research, watches debates, debates with his friends, hell he might even be in college doing some kind of political forum thing with his peers. He feels pretty confident in his votes, even though he might not like who ends up getting elected or what they do in office.
Somewhere along the line he starts paying more attention to what's going on outside the United States, how our government interacts with other governments and how those other governments work, how their people are involved, he gets a little bit of "geopolitics 101". Somewhere else along the line he meets Sally, they fall in love, pump out a family, etc. They're both now getting into their late 20s, have fulltime jobs, juggle their lives around precariously, somehow managing to get by, and finding time for themselves too.
They stop caring as much about the political world; they have a family and goals, stress and worry. Instead of spending time researching the candidates like they used to, they're paying the bills, going camping, raising their children, perhaps finishing up a masters program, getting their daily fix of TV, whatever not. They still vote, but they don't have the time or train of thought to really be that concerned other than perhaps which candidates look more believable or which ones promise to do more things for their family, lower taxes, increase benefits, whatever it might be.
Repeat this 100 million times.
Now add in the media, spinning and twisting everything, feeding the public utter crap, partial truth, and not enough of it.
This is why our political systems are failing, and the answer doesn't lie in Middle America. People will still want to live out their lives and do their own thing, so you have to come up with a way of having them participate and/or making things better for everyone without letting those in power get out of control.
All your base are belong to Google.
What if the voter marks the wrong number? the ballot would be tossed just because someone can't count.
In earlier US elections you actually had to write down the name of your preferred candidate.
IMO someone who can't count is not qualified to vote. But in theory he could ask someone he trusts to count his votes.
That's not approval voting.
Approval voting doesn't give you a certain number of points to spread around, it simply lists the candidates and can be checked "yes or no' for each candidate.
Thus, if you *really* want Kerry, you can still only give him one vote, if you *really* don't want Bush, you can only withhold from him one vote.
More importantly, you can do that without "wasting the vote" on a third party: Let's say that I want Badnarik to win, but--more to the point--I want Bush to lose and can live with Kerry, who I consider more likely to defeat Bush. Under approval voting, I vote "yes" for both Badnarik and Kerry.
This doesn't represent my preference for Badnarik over Kerry, but it is a much more robust system than "point allocation," Borda voting, or "first past the post" that are too prone to tactical voting. It is also very simple, easy to implement, easy to explain, and people who try and cast a vote as if it were the current system will still cast a valid ballot.
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As you probably know, the result is accumulated, and cycles removed (even if a particular individual inserts them!)
But there is one additional problem: partial orderings. I can even give a plausible senario: I don't know whether to vote for the libertarians or the greens, valuing both liberty and the environment. I can easily rank both sets of candidates, both find them hard to compare with one another. With Condorcet, I can form two partial chains, but not with a single ranking.
Having said that, given that I couldn't choose between them anyway, I might as well intersperse them. Cycles can be simply not written down: pick a random order. If others think remotely similarly to you and also acts at random where they cannot compare logically, then statistics will resolve the apparent bug, here.
There probably remain a few anomolies, but they're not going to be very great. I'd be interested if someone can provide a counterexample that leaves a problem, even accounting for statistical "normalisation".
Wikileaks, no DNS
Either way, I do not think it was Cobb. Has he even replied to his Slashdot questions yet?
One more thing:
With all of this political stuff that is going on at Slashdot lately, maybe it would be a good idea to test one or more of these voting methods with a Slashdot election. Maybe there could be one required voting method for Slashdotters who choose to vote and a couple of optional ones. It would be interesting to see who would be elected on Slashdot as opposed to who is elected in the Diebold Virtual Election.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
What if I go through the ballots and *add* a candidate to a number of ballots. This is indetectable in approval voting. In plurality voting, adding votes shows up because there would be too many ballots. In approval voting, this would look fine, because you could add the votes to the existing ballots.
...at the same time we vote for candidates. This would be a reasonable and relatively straightforward reform that would cut down on the problem of gerrymandering and make it more likely that voters choose the candidate they want to represent them rather than incumbents choosing which voters they want to elect them.
You could make it a rule that for a race involving separate election districts (House of Representatives, for example) every political party or independent candidate eligible for election can offer a districting method (subject to certain objective criteria) on the ballot. Voters could vote for their preferred election map and their preferred candidate at the same time. The votes for the map would be tallied first, then the votes in each district of the winning map would be tallied to elect their preferred candidate.
There are a couple of issues with this -- it is possible that voters might elect a candidate who does not reside in their district (though if a majority preferred him to represent the district this would be minor), and it would be very difficult for candidates to figure out where they should campaign, given that their possible districts might extend over a much larger area than what they'd end up with.
On the other hand, this would take the decision of how voters should be grouped out of the hands of the incumbent political party and place it back in the hands of the voters, and it would definitely cut down on the number of bizarre inkblot-shaped districts.
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I STRONGLY recommend you read this article by Warren Smith of Temple University. (PDF 368K) He summarizes clearly what is wrong with our system of Government and how flaws in our voting system have led to the propagation of 50/50 elections, big-money spending and corrupt politicians. Excellent read. It lays things out so clearly that I was actually encouraged that changing our political system is possible!
Abstract: The USA has been and is evolving into an undemocratic state in which rich moneyed entities control politics to favor their own interests at the expense of the majority of the voting population. This evolution is a natural and inevitable consequence of certain logical- historical- economic- political laws that operate under the US's present system of government. The process is self-strengthening via "positive feedback." We back these statements up with evidence. We state and argue for the validity of several dynamical laws which underlie this. We then analyse the feedback process they cause. Six alterations in the political system are then proposed and analysed that could weaken the positive feedback and hopefully allow a renaissance of democracy. The most subtle, but perhaps quite effective, among our suggestions (and the only one to which we devote much analytic attention) is to replace the present "plurality voting system" with "range voting." It is argued that this will decrease both 2-party dominance and motivations for the major parties to try to appear identical ("Tweedledum and Tweedledee").
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
"Instant Runoff sounds so nice, so American, so instant!"
Mmm... okay. How about Smith/IRV, an ambiguity resolution technique for Condorcet that limits IRV to the Smith set?
I understand that in theory this Condorcet thing is nice. However, we had something like that in Italy - we could vote for up to four preferred candidates.
Can you imagine the results? with 30 candidates for each party, there are 30*29*28*27 = 657720 possible combinations. This means, if you want to get elected with mafia help, you simply need to get 10 idiots nobody knows in your party's bottom list, and give everybody in your local poll station clear instructions about whom to vote: me, and three jerks nobody would vote in a certain sequence: if they are 10, you have 10*9*8 = 720 combinations, more than the size of an average poll station.
Then, you place a picciotto at the poll station, who will have a check-list of combinations. If some combination is missing, somebody's car will be burning soon.
This law was abolished with a referendum in the early nineties, which paved the way to the loss of power of the cleptocratic government parties; however, the success was short-lived as the cleptocratic forces reorganized in a better propaganda-focused group (a phenomenon known as trasformismo in Italy), and hold now office (other than direct control of most of the media). But that's another story...
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
"Most voting methods are preoccupied with voting strategy and how it best reflects the will of the voters."
Really? I think most people have missed a very significant thing about most election systems.
In all the popular systems mentioned there is no way to say "No". To me that's a huge oversight. I propose modifying various voting systems so that they allow voters to vote "No" if they want to ("None of the above" isn't as specific as a "No" against a particular candidate - you can't say "anyone but this person").
The votes are totalled up according to whatever voting system is chosen - No = -1. Yes = +1. The candidate with the most positive or least negative total wins (or the equivalent for the voting system used).
Whilst people may not feel like going to a polling station to vote _FOR_ any of the candidates, they might actually get off their butts and vote _AGAINST_ a particularly unwanted candidate (or more than one - depends on what voting system you choose, adapted to allow negative votes).
Sure this is quite a "negative" thing. But if some people are feeling negative perhaps they should still be given a voice.
And it will at least stop some politicians from bragging that they have been given "Mandate", esp if they win with negative totals!
There isn't very much added complexity, and you have a better idea of what the voters think, you get to find out things like whether a candidate is controversial (near zero total, but lots of negative and positive votes), or just unknown (few votes), or really disliked.
Who knows, maybe there'll be a lot more voters participating if they were allowed to vote "No".
Look at the 2000 election and say that it worked.
a) people can't vote for third parties because their vote is wasted and they risk "spoiling". This means that people cannot vote for the person they want to be President. This is wrong.
b) majority did not rule. That is wrong. Anything other than popular vote is a mockery of the individual. One man, one vote, just like you said. Electoral college does not fit that description.
Suppose you had more choice and could vote every secretary separately into office.
Then still someone, probably the one handling the finances, would have the most power and the final say.
So I think that it is unavoidable to have at least one person with a little extra power, and the voting method has to name one.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
That's not true at all.. the Ministers in question hold largely political positoins; the actual hard work is done by people who are qualified in their fields.. advisors, staffers, etc. The minister is just the guy in charge.
.. what qualifies him to really do either? Does he have criminal law experience, or healthcare administration experience? No.. he's a politician, through and through.
To pick an example off the top of my head from a few years ago, Alan Rock, who was minister of Health for a while, and then Minister of Justice (or was it the other way around)
A politician's main skill is generally politics.. not business administration. If this country was run more like a proper business, we would be in much better fiscal shape.
Most approval voting systems allow you to only vote 0 or +1.
You can't leave out -1. Having -1 (No) as well as 0 (Don't care and +1 (Yes) gives you a FAR better idea of what the voters think.
This way voters can say "I don't care about the rest but I really don't want this person in".
If people are feeling negative about the candidates why should they go and vote _for_ anybody? In contrast they might actually go vote _against_ particularly disliked candidates.
Even if those candidates win, their votes still count! Coz if a candidate wins with a net negative total, he/she can't go brag about it - think of the field day the media will have. And the negative voter will certainly be satisfied that his/her vote made a difference!
Just think how many people are feeling negative about the candidates in the upcoming US elections? Shouldn't their voices be heard with less distortion?
If there are yes/no options on each ballot, the only way to add a new vote is to do a write-in. I think that a large number of write-ins, all in the same handwriting, would strike people examining the ballots as a bit suspicious ;-).
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
"It seems you had a childhood like mine. And we didn't get to vote on where our trip was going... We just ended up in Minneapolis, MN every year."
LOL!
If you examine this, I think you will see it was a voting problem. Over 90% of all the trouble in the world is caused by adults. They should not be allowed to vote.
--
George W. Bush's brother was on 20/20 last night talking about his prostitutes. Family values?
a) If they can't balance a checkbook, then they probably shouldn't be voting for someone to balance a nation's economy.
b) The Best Solution™ is for it to be automated. You push the buttons/screen, and it automatically inserts the count, preferably in a way that a computer can check to automatically verify the checksum.
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
The example is completely erroneous. If I ranked:
- Libertarian
- Republican
Then my libertarian vote would be transferred to the republican pile, and I most certainly wouldn't have helped the Democrat win. Simple.We use preferential voting in Australia, and it's not perfect, but this example doesn't come close to describing any particular problem with it.
The only problem I see is from the granularity of the electoral seats. A party (such as the Democrats) could poll about 3% on average across _every_ seat in the country and end up with 0% representation in the house. To get a seat, then (with the aid of preferences) must get to 51% in any particular seat, and they never have.
Those votes weren't wasted though, since each individual voter gets to decide where their second (and consecutive) preference goes. All the examples on the linked article for why IRV voting is bad, they all assume that _all_ the voters who vote for a particular candidate will also choose the same 2nd and consecutive preference. This is plain unreasonable.
In the IRV system, minor parties are _still_ under represented (in theory, the Democrats should have 3% of the House of Reps if 3% of Australian's voted for them), but their votes aren't wasted.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
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.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
There is another system which abolishes elections and career politicians altogether.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
The 'Technical Evaluation of Voting Methods' is flawed and misleading as it picks many critera that Condorcet happens to meet (in fact many of their criteria are variations of condorcet), so of course Condorcet come off best.
m l (remove the space before the l in html - Slashdot put it there)
... anyone that doesn't support your particular alternative to FPP is regarded as a heretic, and of course many people (usually those with some sort of vested interest) favour FPP. The www.electionmethods.org website would be much more useful without its bias, that seems to indicate (wrongly) that one method is perfect and the other methods aren't nearly as good.
There are other criteria that IRV happens to meet that Condorcet doesn't, for instance, in IRV, a candidate's later choices can never affect the earlier choice, so you never hurt your favorite candidate by your ranking of the others below them.
There is a theorem Called "Arrow's Theorem" that proves that the following criteria can't all be satisfied:
The Majority Criterion
The Condorcet Criterion
The Monotonicity Criterion
The Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion (Condorcet fails this one)
There is good (and much less biased) article at: http://ccrc.wustl.edu/~lorracks/dsv/diss/node4.ht
An interesting part of that is that it talks about 'Tendency to Encourage Manipulation' - the amount of information needed about the voter profile required to cast a strategic vote. Runoff methods fare very well here. First Past the Post (FPP) is of course the worst.
In my opinion, both IRV and Condorcet rank way above the FPP method usually used, and I'd support either one of them as giving a good result in most real circumstances (unlike FPP). The main improvement that both of these offer is that you don't need to 'vote for the lesser evil'. I will admit that I am much more familar with Single Transferrable Vote (of which IRV is a special case), and it is the only alternative to FPP on the table at the local level in New Zealand.
However, voting systems seems to be a little like religion
In germany you vote for a mayor by voting for your prefered candidate. Than there is a second ballot (between the two candidates which got the most votes) if nobody gets more than 50% of the votes. I think it's very easy to understand, votes are easy to count and easy to validate. The only draw back is that it's a little more time consuming than just doing a single ballot.
The problem being solved is that there is very little substantial difference between the two parties in an electoral process dominated by two parties. If you don't believe that the Democrats and Republicans agree on more issues than they disagree, then you've been watching too much Fox News. Your faith in the electoral college is rather naive. In this day and age, who are the "elite" and who are the "masses"? The system works for the corrupt two party, authoritarian state that we are fast becoming. It doesn't work for a representative democracy that we claim to be. What's the voter turnout? Less than 50%? There are probably more people who are too lazy to vote, believe their vote doesn't matter, and fruitlessly vote for a candidate they truly believe in than there are those who blindly vote for one of the two parties they disagree with less. So, if you're into arguing that Democrats are always right and Republicans are always wrong, or vice versa, then yes, the system works. But, if you agree with the Democracts 10% of the time, Republicans 10% of the time, and some other party 80% of the time, then the system does not work.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
I don't follow this... If you're saying the counters could fabricate votes by adding preferences that weren't specified by the actual voter, well, at that point couldn't they just start throwing away people's ballots and replacing them with ones that vote for a different candidate? If you can't trust the people (machines?) handling the vote-tally, you can't have a reliable election, period. Doesn't matter what system you use.
A recount would not be able to detect changes...
This is simply incorrrect and it misunderstands what a recount is. In a recount, one examines all ballots again and increments each candidate's total when a yes vote is found. This is true both for single-vote and approval.
You've based your conclusion that it is "impossible" to verify approval voting on the fact that single-vote has an easy checksum that approval voting doesn't have.
count(ballots) > sum(count(candidate_1)+ . . . count(candidate_n))
Although approval lacks this particular checksum, verification by recount is still quite possible. Further, the checksum you're worried about can be fooled by a tampering method that has the sense to remove ballots for opposing candidates at the same rate it adds false ballots. (The equation must use greater than rather than equal because some voters abstain from some issues.) That particular checksum was never reliable, so it's absence in approval voting is not a problem.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Everyone writes down the name of their preferred candidate, and drops it in a hat. At the end of the day, someone reaches into the hat and pulls out the winner.
Statistically, this will go to the person with the most votes. But it might not. In fact, this is the *only* method that truly makes every vote important.
This is a similar idea to what is used in the so-called "silent auction", or in a raffle.
The obvious solution to me would be computer assisted voting. For approval voting, the computer would display a list of canidates on a touch screen. You select the ones you want, and when you are done the computer prints out your ballot, properly filled out with YES and NO checked next to every canidate's name. Then the voter would take their ballot, verify it is correct, and deposit it in the ballot box. The paper ballots would then be counted (possibly by another, seperate computer, or by hand).
A ranking system would work simular. The big advantage to using the computer this way is that it won't allow you to screw up and select two canidates for first place, or forget to rank somebody in second place, or something simular. Just use the computer to rank them, and the computer fills out the ballot for you.
In this system, I would have the ballots already printed, and all the computers are doing is filling in the checkboxes, and counting the paper ballots. So if the computers failed, or someone objects to using them, they could still fill it out manually. And there would be a paper trail of paper ballots to count manually if needed.
According to this page, "according to common sense...B should win." I'd argue that this "sense" isn't so "common".
They point out that 12 votes preferred B to A, while only 8 prefered A to B. However, they ignore that only 5 votes had B as their first preference. If we were to interpret this the way it seemed to be meant by the voters, 8 people thought A was right and B was the closest thing to an acceptable second, 7 people thought C was right and B was the closest thing to an acceptable second, while only 5 people thought B was the right choice.
So, condorcet voting will push the choice to that individual which had the least people who wanted them to win.
If you look a little higher in that area, they say that B is the "Ideal Democratic Winner", which discounts a lot of democratic thought.
It still seems that condorcet is the closest thing we have to an acceptable voting system, but that page needs to clean up a few of its arguments.
(Note: I stopped reading shortly after that point, as I already have a fairly good notion of these voting systems. There may be other issues elsewhere, but I do not know of them.)
First off, anyone should automatically suspect a system brought about by a French mathemetician as being the incarnation of true evil that it is.
Outside of that, one has to realize that Condorcet suffers a fundamental flaw in that it makes value judgements that the voter isn't aware of. In Condorcet, you are asked to rank the four candidates in order of preference. The rules don't allow you to not vote for a candidate (and many States consider such a ballot to be invalid), but the rules could be changed to accomodate that. More on this later.
On a condorcet ballot, you rank the four candidates in order of preference. Such a ballot might look like this:
1. Bush
2. Kerry
3. Badnarik
4. Cobb
The problem is that the Condorcet method assumes that the voter sentiment is equally distributed among the four candidates. One person who casts this ballot might not feel strongly either way about Bush or Kerry, but might not want the minor candidates at all, and simply ranks them in the order of least displeasure. Another voter with the same ballot might be an ardent pro-Bush voter, not favor Kerry at all, not know who Badnarik is, and not want Cobb by any stretch of the imagination. The mathematical system of Condorcet erases these value judgements and replaces them with arbitrary ones. Why this is such a huge problem will become evident later.
It is worth mentioning that Condorcet as I've discussed it so far requires you to cast votes for everyone on the ballot. Should the rules of Condorcet and the individual States be altered to allow empty slots, then we run into a new problem. In plurality voting (majority wins, the system most places use), a vote for one candidate is also a vote against the other candidates. This seems counterintuitive until you consider that plurality votes are won by the person with the most votes from of a finite electorate. Even in three and four way ballots, the election only comes down to the number one and number two ranked candidates, and any votes for one cancels votes for the other while simultaneously reducing the available votes for the remaining candidates. However, in Condorcet the failure to rank a candidate actually increases the value of overall voter sentiment by decreasing the number of times it is eliminated in pairwise matching.
That last part - the pairwise scheme - is where Condorcet breaks down and fails to accurately portray voter sentiment. What condorcet effectively does is map voter sentiment to a bell curve, giving greater emphasis to candidates who fail to offend or excite enough voters.
In actual practice, Condorcet doesn't usually produce a different winner than plurality. In situations where the electorate is sufficiently polarized, the two methods will agree. However, in close races Condorcets pairwise matching scheme becomes a problem. Under chaotic conditions governed by cellular automata with three or more candidates, Condorcet nullifies the more popular candidates, and actually awards the election to one of the less popular candidates.
If you can't accept this on the theoretical construct, it is really easy to build a condorcet engine in software. With a basic understanding of the mathematics behind cellular automata, you can generate a series of elections between candidates where the votes cast follow ca rules. Each ballot is cast in condorcet style, but for plurality the number 1 ranked candidate gets the vote. I did this a few years back with a simple php script, and in 2 of every 311 races the least popular candidate by plurality rules actually won under condorcet.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with Condorcet or with IRV for that matter is the same problem presented by the electoral college; it obscures the process and disconnects the electorate from the result. In 2000, Gore did in fact have more votes nationwide than Bush. One has to keep in mind, however, that the lead (some 200,000 votes) was slightly more than 1/10th of 1% of the population, which is f
I agree completely that the federal government has way too much power and is meddling in affairs it should never meddle in, both within the US and in the rest of the world.
There is one problem with the Libertarian position, however. There are two major concentrations of power in our system, and both of them are exercising way too much power over the rights of the individual. One is, as you say, the federal government. The other is the corporate world. The former may be the only thing with enough power to protect us from the latter, and should be used for that purpose to the extent that we still have control over it. Unfortunately, these power systems are mostly working together at this point. Making either one more democratic would help us to use it against the other.
Eventually, of course, both will have to be dismantled, and the whole mess needs to be scaled way down to the point where it can actually respond to the needs of the people. Scale is the problem, not the solution. However, this will take time, and as it stands, we need to work with what we have. Making the government more democratic would certainly be a step in the right direction.
The massive limitation of the powers of the federal government, as you propose, without taking any measures to dismantle corporate power, would lead immediately to corporate dictatorship.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Maybe a good solution would be to use approval voting at the state level. Then each state generates a list of candidates ordered by number of votes they receive. At the national level, we can do instant runoff, or any of the other methods that require an ordered list. Each state is weighted by the number of electoral votes it has.
It might be better to abolish the EC all together, but it does serve several useful purposes:
One hurdle to getting anything to change is that the states and the nation have to change simultaneously. Change could begin at the state level, with each state transitioning to approval voting at its leisure, but as the parent said, the maximum benefit would come from changing the electoral college. I suspect that would require a constitutional ammendment.
-jim
"Condorcet Voting" or any method where voters need to rank all the candidates in order is WAY to complicated for anyone to even think about using. Anyone who suggests this for actual state or federal elections is wildly out-of-touch with the reality of his or her fellow citizens.
In fact, it reminds me of the Slashdot posters who say things like "ultimately, programming is very simple and anyone could do it". Do you really want to know how many of my incoming community college students don't understand the concept of "greater than" between whole numbers?
However, Approval Voting is a solid, realistic voting method that I dearly wish we could move to. Everyone can understand "who I like and who I don't", and it has huge mathematical advantages. I often think it's the #1 oversight of the U.S. founding fathers to have not done so in the first place.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
What is an Electoral College?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Here's something you'll never see again, a concession:
..." is quite elegant, but won't be easy to sell to a large portion of the electorate. Them's more of them fancy college school words.
Now that I've taken some time to review the details of the site, and some other external referrences, I believe that Condorcet processing of the ranked list isn't such a bad idea after all. In my head, I've been trying to make IRV easier to process computationally (immediately eliminate any candidates with no mathematical chance of winning), and simplifying the results (NxN-1xN-2x..., multi-dimensional results arrays), but it appears that Condorcet voting makes that problem reduce to a mere NxN problem. The ability to simply process results from multiple precincts is quite attractive, too.
As far as explaining it to the masses, the casting of the votes is just as simple as IRV (rank the candidates in preferred order). Explaining the processing should be as simple as possible: The winner is the candidate whose preference is ranked highest. "The winner of a sequence of 1 on 1
The only thing holding me back from a full-fleged endorsement is the issue of ambiguity resolution, which will take me more time to process. Congratulations to all that have offered their input on the matter. I've found it all very enlightening. Does that make me an evil flip-flopper now? =)
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
Alright I started reading this analysis of the various voting methods and on the first page they claim that one of the methods *never* requires insincerly ranking the canidates.
This is simply mathematically impossible. Arrow's theorem in political science guarantees that no matter what voting system we use (which has at least two voters) will sometimes encourage voters to insincerly represent their preferences. Maybe I am misunderstanding something and somehow the case in question doesn't fall victim but if so i would be very interested to hear why.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Magician going to audience showing a hand of cards saying:
Pick a card any card.
Sure it still does matter which card you pick. But the bulk of the picking has already been done.
What's wrong with "If one candidate beats all the others in a head-to-head, that candidate wins"? I'm pretty sure most people would understand that idea.
The difficult part, IMHO, would be convincing a politically-motivated media to run their fact files and commentary on why such-and-such a method would meet the goal(s) of a fair election, so enough people actually understood what was going on that the general population would accept it (the two not being the same thing at all).
The problem with Condorcet, for example, is going to be explaining how they break a tie -- not really an issue if you're used to a duopoly, but rather important here! What you need to make it successful is a system that is sound, which will stand up to critical examination from the few, but that can be summed up in a nutshell so the many understand how to vote. Fortunately, most systems meet the latter criterion: you say "list the candidates in order of preference", "vote for the guy you want", "tick all the guys you'd be happy with", etc.
BTW, if anyone hasn't looked, the linked site (electionmethods.org) is very well done. As a mathematician and someone who cares about elections, I found the page on technical evaluations of the various methods most interesting. The kind of criteria it presents for a good system -- the one-liner sound-bites -- are the sort of thing that should be fed to the general public, with the accompanying reasoning available for those critical enough to examine the details.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So I found a brief discussion of arrow's theorem on the website .
It's good to see that they considered this important theorem but given my understanding of arrow's theorem suggests they give it far too short shift. In particular they seem to be under the impression that it only causes problems because the introduction of another canidate might effect the election. This might be mathematically equivalent but it sweeps a very important point under the rug.
Another implication of arrow's theorem is that voters have an incentive to misrepresent their preferences. I believe this is equivalent to the irrelevant alternatives statement mathematically. Imagine an election where the introduction of an extra party would shift the election supposing everyone voted honestly, now this can only happen if that party is part of the smith set (i.e. beats at least one other party). This means that certain people would have incentive not to vote honestly so as to guarantee this party either does or doesn't make it into the smith set.
In short I don't think we can so blithely dismiss the consequences of arrow's theorem as, "well yah sometimes adding a new party affects the election" The result of this is that concordant voting, just like IRV also has situations which encourage insincer voting.
This means that the choice of voting system must be made by more practical pragmatic concerns. For instance what types of elections are common, simplicity for the average voter and the political system. Quite frankly the US is a two party system and this system has many advantages. For a two party system a IRV is a very good system.
The question of getting rid of the two party system is another matter entierly, but most of our governmental institutions are designed to work in a two party system and changing this requires much more than a change in voting system.
Frankly, I don't think a truly multi-party system is a good idea given our constitution. If we truly wanted three or more serious parties I think we would be compelled to move to a parlimentary system. Also the constitution was designed to make things difficult to do and it is only the oil of the party machinery which can get things done in congress. I think there is a real danger that any serious third party would simply bring congress to a grinding halt.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
As opposed to the current system, where you know that the election results have been changed.
-----------------------
You are what you think.
Here is a simpler example with even more dramatic results. Lets say the Democrats have instead a tiny majority. But lets also say that a huge majority of them actually prefer the Green candidate. However there is a small subset that completely distrusts the Greens:
49% R,D,G
48% G,D,R
3% D,R,G
Dems are eliminated, now it is:
52% R,G
48% D,R
And the Republicans win, despite the fact that the majority would prefer the democrats win.
Again this won't happen because Democrats would realize they have to insincerely vote D,G,R instead of G,D,R. But in this case almost half (23 of that 48%) of those votors must vote insincerely in order to get a desirable outcome of the election.
Now under the current system of single vote, with the above preferences, almost ALL the G votors (47 of the 48%) would have to vote insincerely in order to prevent a Republican win. This may very well be the situation we are in today. So certainly IRV is much better than the current system. However it does seem we can do better.
Cordocent (sp?) in this situation would elect the Democrat. Insincere voting will not make a difference.
Approval voting requires some guesses. Lets assume Republicans hate both Greens and Democrats, and Democrats hate Republicans. Then the votes would be:
49% R
48% G+D
3% D
And the Democrats would win here as well, with no insincere voting.
I'm inept.
How is that insightful? Currently, what if someone changes your vote from A to B candidate? The "one voter, one vote" would be equally screwed. If someone's going to tamper with the system, no election method is truly safe. However, I think you're confusing vote with ballot, which is understandable since they're essentially the same under the current system. Whereas with approval voting a person would indeed be voting for multiple candidates, they would still only have one ballot (Approval = one voter, one ballot). One, easily recountable ballot. That's no harder, yet far fairer, than the current system.
Personally, I prefer Range voting, which is similar to Approval but instead you assign a weight value to each choice according to preference (1st choice = 1, 2nd = 1/2, 3rd = 1/4, etc).
Would be nice to see more. I just don't think changing the vote is realistic at this time.
Do I want change in this area? Yes. Will it happen? Not in the near future.
Blogging because I can...
Maybe it's time to think about a multi person presidency, an elected council with different assigned priorities and duties. A foreign policy president (trade), a foreign policy president (security/defense), a domestic president (government civil services), a domestic president (federal law enforcement), and so on and so forth. Then one guy wouldn't be responsible for everything, and we could narrow down selections better. Candidate A is closer to your feelings on security/defense, but you think he sucks on donmestic civil services, etc. So you could still vote for him, and vote for another guy closer to your feelings on the other subjects.
Now all we have is the "lesser of evils, and winner take all" approach, even with third and fourth and fifth parties, because it's still the deal they get the entire presidency and by default the executive branch. I think the job's too important and too powerful and just too complicated to be entirely decided by ONE guy, I honestly don't think ANYONE is qualified to be the US president. It's too impossible of a job to do adequately, so all we get is has-beens.
In the olden days the guy who came in second was made vice president, and took his duties in the senate (with his tie breaking vote) more seriously,so at leasrt there everyones vote counted a scosh better, and the senators were elected by their state legislators instead of a popular vote directly, which made paying attention to your state races more important, so people did it.
With that said it's all a buncha crap! I'm for going back to even pre biblical ways, trial by combat! Texas cage whippin match! Several men enter, one man leaves! (and leads)! HAHAHAHAHAH!
Why not, makes as much sense as what we have now, which is *zero*!
Certainly more entertaining than the debates, which consisted of "My opponent said blah blah and sucks"
Other guy "did not, and you suck MORE!"
"Did so!"
"Not!"
I mean, that wasn't a debate last thursday, that was a really lame infomercial for advanced mediocrity. I expected them to say something like "have you checked with your doctor to see if you need the magenta pill?"
At least trial by combat would be fun!
Each election, it is a common complaint that there is no real choice, or that it is a choice between too evils. The only solution, I see, is to allow greater real access to unknowns.
As part of the solution, it seems to me that we should try and eliminate the benefit of wealth/backing in choosing candidates and the purpose should be to choose the best person for the job. I understand that some will argue that to be the best person for the job, they should have the backing of a major party so that they have pull in Congress. I disagree, it wasn't always that way, and the Consitution doesn't speak to the issue.
So my suggestion: everyone who wants to run in an election, such as for President, and who qualifies, gets equal exposure with all other candidates in the relevant media. For example, starting a set time before the election, all libraries and schools would be required to make available binders of all contestants. TV, newspapers, magazines, etc. would be required to run periodic presentations on all constestants, and they wouldn't be allowed to specially treat any one candidate. I know the 1st amendment is very implicated in this, but I ignore that for now. The idea is that every citizen can see basic info on all candidates with none getting special treatment. Then in the election, everyone votes for who they want. All that get more votes than a given threshold moves on. The point of this round is to weed out the chaff.
At this point, maybe allow each contestant an equal amount of money to run campaigns. Again, every contestant has an equal chance at exposure with equal money, but now the regulation of what information can be presented is loosened. And then we have a second voting. This could be the final one, as per the voting method du jour, or there could be a few more qualifying rounds to keep narrowing the pool.
Doing elections in stages, like this, would allow total black horses who are unknown to gain exposure. Even if they don't ultimately win, their competition is sure to make sure the entrenched party platforms get stirred up a bit.
[joke]Well, that would make all current members of Congress ineligible.[/joke]
Seriously, though, since 1/3 of all African-American men are in prison, on probation, or on parole, and African-Americans make up about 12% of the population, African-Americans would only have 5/6s of their population eligible to serve. [Assumption: most African-American women are not in this 1/3 group.] While this is somewhat better than the original Constitution, where they were only counted as 3/5s of a person, it is still disproportionate, and hence unfair. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "felons", but I would be willing to guess that most Americans believe that someone who has been imprisoned on a felony charge should *never again* be allowed to vote.
I don't agree, however, and I would argue that the 15th Amendment:
[Amendment XV
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. ]
makes it clear that the act of barring ex-felons from voting is, on its face, UNconstitutional.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Why can't we just get a list of possible candidates and vote either YES or NO for *each* candidate.
Example:
NO George Bush
YES John Kerry
NO Ralph Nader
YES Collen Powell
Then you just count up the Yes votes for each candidate, the one with the most votes wins. It's stupid to make voting in a duonopoly. I should lose my vote of confidence in the third party because I want to support a leading party candidate.
What's with the
3% D,R,G
Are you asserting that there are only 3 ways to vote, and that if you vote for the Democrats then you _must_ put the Republicans as a 2nd preference.
In your example, the Republican deserved to win, because _all_ of the Democrate voters opted to have their 2nd preference votes transfered to the Republican candidate.
Show me a real example of how it's unfair!!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's quite obvious that Condorcet Voting and Instant Runoff Voting are designed to help third parties. Since they eliminate the danger of helping your opposition by making a third party vote (the criticism of IRV in the linked article applies just as well to Condorcet voting, so it's really moot) we can expect LOTS of 3rd parties on the ballot. It's hard enough getting people to find out about 2 candidates. It's impossible and unreasonable to expect people to find out about 20. Both schemes can easily handle people casting single-shot votes, so they do not disenfranchise anyone as long as incomplete ballots are acceptable.
First, the inherent complexities of the ballot:
Since a voter could vote for 0 to n candidates in any order, an IRV ballot has SUM(i=0..n) Perm(n, i) = e * n! = THETA(n!) possible assignments.
Since a voter has n(n-1)/2 choices that can be 0,1, or don't care, there are 3^(n(n-1)/2) = THETA (sqrt(3^(n^2))) possible assignments. Since this is polyexponential, it dominates the THETA (n!) complexity of IRV.
Second, complexity of representing an individual ballot:
IRV has n identifiers that must be of size lg(n), so it can take THETA(n lg(n)) space to represent a full ballot.
Condorcet ballots can use implicit ordering, so the size of representing each decision is constant, making the cost of representing n(n-1)/2 decisions THETA(n^2).
Third, the decision complexity required to cast a single-shot ballot
IRV allows a voter to vote their preferred candidate first and then vote for no one else. While this decision itself is more complicated than a binary decision, a single-shot voter can go into the booth and make one simple action and not be disenfranchised.
Condorcet voting requires that a voter make (n-1) comparisons just to make their single-shot vote. Furthermore, they must make an additional (n-2) comparisons if there's a guy they REALLY want to lose. As of right now, there are a whole lot of "Anyone but Bush" people who will be voting for Kerry (possibly holding their noses) because it's a very simple way to do the best they can to make sure Bush is defeated. Condorcet voting requires these people to do two separate linear complexity actions.
Fourth, complexity of completely filling a ballot:
IRV is essentially a comparison sort. We know this to be of complexity O(n lg(n)). We can expect most people's process of completing the ballot to be more like selection sort though, which is complexity O(n^2).
Condorcet voting is trivially in THETA(n^2).
Fifth, average case complexity:
We can expect most voters to care about some subset of the candidates. My guess would be that it's upper-bounded by the "Seven, plus or minus two" rule for how many things people can keep in active memory at once.
IRV requires them to sort the 9 or fewer candidates they care about. While selection sort is quadratic in complexity, this is upper bounded by a constant, so the maximum amount of work a voter will have to do to make their voice heard is a constant.
Condorcet requires them to vote for all the people they like and against all the people they dislike for their opinion to be fully heard, so this complexity is linear in the number of candidates, regardless of how many they actually have opinions about.
Sixth, counting complexity:
At worst, IRV requires n-1 passes through v votes, with each vote costing O(n) to process on each pass. This can be optimized of course, but this is the algorithm that would be used for a hand recount, and we want to be able to do a hand recount. This complexity is O(n^2 * v).
Condorcet voting requires THETA(n^2 * v) operations to fill the matrix, with complexity of resolving ambiguities probably varying by method.
Seventh, certificate complexity:
In order for a vote to matter, its results must be certified. Election officials must be able to say to the people why one candidate won.
IRV requires showing vote tot
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
One of the benefits of being ostracised from political life is that they now had to find something to do with their time. If I remember right, Herodotus was exiled from the greek city of Halicarnassus, and as a result he wrote the history of the Greeks which we now know in large part because of him
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hmmmm, good point, but I wonder if this hasn't been dealt with already? For example, with my city council ballot, I already need to "choose as many candidates as you wish -- check here to vote for all". I wonder if there's any mechanism to deal with a recount in this situation already?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Sorry, I'm an IR concentrator with emphasis in nationbuilding, the best source for this is Sartori's CCE. Great book. More than you'd ever want to know about PR/Plurality systems.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
This is advocacy. The electionmethods.org website has been up and saying the same thing for YEARS. Why does it suddenly become a news blurb? And more importantly, why does the news blurb only link to one side of the issue and not any web sites arguing for IRV over Condorcet?
(It can be done, by the way. Condorcet arguably gives more of an incentive to vote strategically than IRV, for example.)
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
since a majority vote obviously isn't good enough?
A majority vote would be just fine.
But our current system is a *plurality vote* which is a much different beast.
PS: "Electoral College" isn't in the same category as IRV/Condorcet in terms of voting system choices. You can have any of those voting systems with or without an electoral college.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Second reply: How is that any different from right now, where someone could invalidate any ballot by adding an extra mark for another candidate?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The article discusses "approval" voting, which is pretty much what you describe.
Please explain how:
T->M
C->M
T->C
is significantly different than:
T->C->M
Condorcet can be played just as much as any other voting system, though it may take more thinking to do it.
Electionmethod are bunch of ideologues trying to solve the theoretical problem of how to resolve the most complex set of relative preferences possible. It is something that you can construct half-a-dozen vote examples for letters but it is not something that happens when millions of real people vote for real candidates in real elections. You don't get random spreads of preferences; people preference like candidates or they vote for their candidate and then an independant who they think might win if they hate the other side.
Condorcet has such a complex counting method that it abstracts the whole process so far away from the way people really think about voting that it would stop voters understanding what is going on and destroy trust in the electoral system. That is why it has never been used for anything serious despite being around for hundreds of years.
Optional preferential voting (IRV) solves the major problem of first-past-the-post, which is multiple candidates on one side of politics can split the vote handing the result to the other side. It does it in simple way that is the same as run off elections without all the extra delay and expense.
It can be explained simply: use numbers to rank as many candidates as you want in order of preference; if someone gets 50% they win, if not you eliminate the candidate the least people wanted to win and allocate any preferences and keep doing that until someone wins.
What's more you can get a fair idea of what is happening from partial counts and you can run opinion polls on preferences and get some idea of the outcome. Optional preferential voting is also not so complicated that it can't be run on paper if you don't want to use computerised voting. If you put symbols on the ballot beside the names then the illiterate can also vote (important in some parts of the world). The basic method can used for single representative and multiple reresentative elecctions.
One thing, however, you want to avoid at all costs is the Australian system of complusory preferences (where you have to preference every candidate) especially for multiple representative elections. That leads to massively complex counts. Then registered party preference tickets (which 95% use for the senate) were introduced to simply things, which means the parties horse trade perferences to try and get the best result for themselves, so and you end up with ballot papers 2 metres long as everyone tries to cash in on the game,.often running fake parties to exploit the process.
To express an individual vote people then have to number upto 200 boxes, and if they make mistakes their votes become informal. Though a clause was introduced that getting 90% filled in with only 3 simple errors was good enough.
dewatf.
Which voting method is best depends on how voter preferences are distributed.
Arrow's theorem says no voting method can satisfy all of five particular criteria. However, if you could accurately measure voters' rankings of all candidates on a real number scale, all five criteria would be satisified by summing those rankings and choosing the highest-ranked candidate (Cardinal Rankings). Arrow's theorem still holds because you can't apply measure ideal cardinal rankings in practice. You can't measure that one person has rankings all in 4.2 to 5.6, while another has them in -3 to 27.
But if you're doing computer simulations of voters, you CAN measure their cardinal rankings, and you can compare the ideal result to the results that any particular voting method and strategy will produce.
I did those simulations. It turns out that if voter preferences for all candidates are independent and uniformly distributed, the approval method beat Condorcet -- approval selected the ideal winner more often than Condorcet did. When voter preferences are based on distance from candidate preferences on a one-dimensional issue (voters and candidates both uniformly distributed), Condorcet ALWAYS picked the ideal winner. Approval didn't do so well there. Plurality did horribly compared to both, assuming two random candidates were considered the front runners. But plurality always came out on top when the two truly best candidates were considered top runners.
Swiss citizens do not elect the Counselors. They are appointed (or elected) by the national legislature called the Federal Assembly. The Counselors hold a four-year term.
The Prez and VP positions are rotated through the counselors for 1-year terms. I think the order of rotation is fixed and known in advance.
The political parties have worked out a formula and agreement on how divvy up which part gets how many positions. This agreement has been in effect for about 50 years. Recently there has been some grumbling on changing that, but I am not sure how that has played out.
Instead, you'd gradually remove subsidies over 10 or 20 years, and target subsidies at paying people to leave farming (because that would be the net result - fewer, bigger, more efficient farms) rather than encouraging them to continue.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Orzetto, was Condorcet really used in Italy, or was it IRV? That would be REALLY interesting if it was Condorcet, because I haven't heard of Condorcet being used in public elections before.
... or so they think.
If it is a matter of actual qualifications, why vote? Honestly, if a coroner needs to have certain skills, degrees, training, etc. who gets the job is not something you (the general population) should vote on. If you want the best skills for the job, make it a hired position. If you are voting for a position, than by definition the only qualifications are what it takes to get on the ballot.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
There are some proposed voting integrity schemes (e.g. http://www.votegrity.com/) that would publish all the ballots on a website. In order to insure voter anonymity as much as possible, voters would have to be restricted to voting for just their top two or three choices. That would displease some voters who might like to vote for several alternative candidates before voting for a major party candidate.
Approval voting insures voter anonymity a lot better and easier than ranked ballot methods, partly because each candidate can be approved or disapproved on a separate ballot paper. Condorcet insures anonymity better than IRV because with Condorcet, a vote such as
Abe > Bill > Charlie
can be broken up into three separate ballot papers as
Abe > Bill
Abe > Charlie
Bill > Charlie
Condorcet can choose a winner using those pairwise preference votes, whereas IRV neeeds to see the whole string "Abe > Bill > Charlie".
You should only be able to write in candidates who are not on the ballot. Yes/no options is a good idea. Only ballots which didn't have the relevant option checked would be vulnerable.
http://condorcet-dd.sourceforge.net/ Called Dual Dropping, it is a minimum dropping cost based combination of two Condorcet methods, Tideman's Ranked Pairs and Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping (can also execute RP or CSSD separately). It is actually two scripts, the optional first script converts a preference ballot list into a Condorcet square (a matrix of one on one competition vote totals) which is then utilized as the input for the script that determines the winner(s). It can be used as a ranking for system for anything that generates preference ballots. It is usefull for organization/club voting whenever there are three or more choices.
When you came up with your 66% to 34%, I think you forgot that 17% of the voters prefered the R candidate over the G candidate (after the D candidate). Thus 66% preferred either the G or D candidate... not the D candidate as you say
But the point your trying to make _is_ a valid point, but it's not a problem in real life situation. That's because of the party system... parties will inevitably become "aligned".
I'll give you a real life example.
In Australia there are 3 major parties that vy for the House of Reps. They are:
- Labour - center-left, unionist
- Liberal - conservative, pro-business
- National - right-wing, pro-farmer/country (as in not-city)
Because of the agenda of these 3 parties, the National and Liberal party have become aligned. Sometimes they go against each other, but rarely.Almost _all_ voters (except in one particularly famous election) who vote National first, put Liberal second and vice-versa. This is a natural consequence of partisan politics.
Thus, to make your example "more-real-world", you'll have adjust your figures so that about 90% of people who vote for a particular party put the _same_ 2nd preference. Now see if you can make the IRV system broken... it's much harder isn't it.
You're probably wondering about that famous election I was talking about. The National party had been in power in Queensland for 32 years, even though they polled about 10-15% of the votes, because of a strong gerrymander. Basically, country seats had hardly any the number of voters as city seats, and the national party represented the country (farmers mainly). The government was way beyond corrupt, and laws were passed to prevent dissent, such as banning public gatherings of more than 3 people. I'm not kidding, that's how it worked - and you probably thought Australia was such a nice place =)
Well it got sooo bad that even the country voters began to revolt. Even though the Liberal party couldn't officially align with their worst enemies, the Labour party (because of the other States, everyone would have laughed even harder at Queensland), many Liberal candidates were seen at the polling booths encouraging voters to put the National party _last_ (there's usually about 6 to 12 candidates vying for each seat).
Did IRV fail in this exceptional circumstance of party-alignment revolt? Absolutely not, because in no seat were Liberal and National party candidates polling approximately the same on primaries as the Labour party candidates - that's extremely rare, because of the class/industry/education relations to where people live are also tied to how they vote. It would be a _very_ unusual demographic that would produce such a result.
Even if it did, _and_ there was an "alignment" revolt on the go (also extremely rare), then the 2nd preferences of that 3rd popular candidate have to be pretty much split even.
Now staunch voters always tend to vote the same way (until a Brain Mulroney like event happens). Swinging voters are likely to follow the alignment switch... or possibly just vote for the other party (the Labour party).
So we have to have a 50-50 mix of staunch/swinging voters in an electoral seat with an unsual mix of immigrant/racist/rich/poor/farmer/city/unionist/b
But would it matter anyway? Only if that particular electorate made the difference of the election, and even in politically unstable Australia, most governments are formed with at least a few seats majority.
Once you get used to the IRV system, nobody thinks of the spoiler effect, and they put their favourite candidate first (or vote irrationally). Nobody considers that they should, for any reason, not vote for their favourite candidate.
It would certainly make interesting news if all the above _did_ happen!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Quite so, however, the status quo is already way too close to dictatorship for my taste. You're talking about moving in the wrong direction. We need something which is on the other side of the status quo from a dictatorship.
The problem we are facing is not that people don't know what's best for them, the problem is that we already do have professional leaders, guys like Karl Rove who are definitely born into it, who are staggeringly good at manipulating people and creating the political reality they want.
The problem with elitism in politics is that the elite always works in their own interest, which is usually counter to the interest of the population.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Yay!
In this case the D and R parties are aligned, and most of the voters want one of those two candidates to win.
The question for G voters is "are the D and R candidates that different if the parties support each other?". Well they are different, but the G candidate is _really_ different. This is exactly the situation with the Labour vs Liberal/National parties in Australia.
If the G party starts to poll around 30%, it will be easily enough to force the D and R parties into a coalition - otherwise there would by minority government (and I've never seen enemies make friends faster then when jumping at the chance to form a government; that's when parties get authority on policy).
Once this happens, then it isn't as important to G voters if the R candidate gets in, because the D candidate will still form a government with the R+D government. The only difference is the balance of power between the R and D parties in that government... the party with the most seats has the most bargaining power of cabinet portfolios and such.
Your example is not "exceptional circumstance" in that is wouldn't happen, but it does run contrary to the nature of partisan politics. I've seen this at work in anywhere where there are lots of parties... not just Australia (I was in Austria for an ellection, and saw the same forces at work in Italy and Israel).
There is no spoiler effect because the alignment of R and D parties, unless you start talking about wild and unlikely scenarios such as in my previous post. For there to be a true spoiler effect, the D and R parties would have to be genuine enemies who _both_ hate the G party even more. If this were the case, and the G party polled significantly, watch how fast the D and R parties compromise to form a new government and power-block against those damn communist hippies!
Oh, one more thing, since the National Party is considered very red-neck, almost all Labour party votes put Liberal 2nd, even though they're the main opposition party. This may result in National party candidates getting voted in, but as I said before, they're all part of the coalition anyway, so voting Liberal 1st is plain retarded!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Australia just had an election, and, whilst counting is still ongoing, here are the resultss:
election results
Notice how the National party polls 5% and is represented by 12 members of parliment, however, the Green party polls 7% and gets no members.
That's because the electorates are geographical, and the National party has a geographical constituency (the country).
But I think it's unfair that 7% of voters aren't represented at all! This is not something that Condorcet voting would fix, because it has to do with the granularity of the electorates.
Australian Senate (voting) uses a different system which ensures that each party is represented by approx. the % of votes they get. They can only do this by breaking every criterion on the page you linked... but it's fairer IMHO
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right