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An Analysis of Various Election Methods
An anonymous reader writes "David Cobb talked about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as the best choice in electoral methods in his interview here, but is it really? The folks over at electionmethods.org seem to think it isn't. They favor Condorcet voting, which is another ranking style method using simulated one on one elections. Here is an evaluation of various methods, including IRV and Condorcet."
Much as we need a better system, it won't catch on if it can't be explained in one simple sentence.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
One mechanism I've not seen discussed is one I'll call a "voter economy". It probably has a real name, but it's not on that site and it seems like a reasonable system to me.
In this system, you get a certain number of votes (say 5x the number of candidates) and you can "spend" those votes however you like. So if you really like candidate A, you spend all your votes on A. If you like A a little, hate B, and would prefer C, you can spend 75% of your votes on C, 25% on A, and none on be.
This, to me, seems much better than ranking systems, since you can specifiy how much you prefer one candidate over another. It should be easy to explain, since people are used to the idea of spending.
Mathematicians, tell me whether or not this is a workable system.
The biggest problem that I can see with systems such as approval voting is that it is not non-repudiable. In other words, it would be impossible to verify that election results were not changed. A recount would not be able to detect changes made after a voter made his/her marks.
With a one voter, one vote system, it is easy to count the number of voters and the number of votes and ensure that the results were not modified.
I believe that this is a pretty important characteristic and I am a bit skeptical about who is pushing approval voting.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
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.
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:
To be honest, i dont think our voting msystem is going to change. Between public apathy and the unwillingness of the establishment to change what benefits them -- not saying they're necessarily evil, but come on, for them it's not broke, so why fix it?-- there's never going to be enough inertia in the movement to move it onto either the systemic or institutional agendas. And frankly, if the 2000 election fiasco wasnt enough to get people to go after their elected representatives, nothing will.
Or maybe i'm just Apathetic.
I'm not sure this is a problem (or I'm missing something here). The nice thing about Condorcet, is that you can vote for as many or as few candidates as you like. If you are only interested in 2 candidates, choose those (the system even works if you rank them the same). If you know precisely the order you'd like 100 candidates, rank them 1 to 100.
He has made a simulation that is open source.
So hack away. Look here and here.
Condorcet and IRV both use the same style of ranked ballot, so the 'number of choices' would be identical. The difference is in how the votes are tabulated, and in how the winner is determined.
Or am I missing something?
Scary, isn't it? As much as Mr. Condorcet deserves the recognition, it is not a very comfortable name for a voting system. Instant Runoff sounds so nice, so American, so instant!
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
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.
Yep - every time a minor party has a popular idea, one of the major parties adopts it as a long-standing tradition of their party.
Actually, it is the US with the obsolete voting system. Check out most of Europe, Australia, just about anywhere that has a newer democracy than the US. That's where you find such inovations as party list for legislatures and ranking systems or approval for presidents.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Actually there have pretty much always been 2 major parties and other minor parties. Whenever a minor party has gained strength it didn't create a multiple party system in America but simply replaced one of the two major parties at the time.
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.
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
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
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
Y + N + A = T*C
Y = total number of "approve", N = total number of "disapprove", A = "abstain", T = total voters, C = number of candidates.
Although, I would go for IRV personally. Yes there are contrived conditions where you can show that some mathematically disproportionate fraction of the populace would be "happier" with a different candidate, but look at the reality of voting in the US. 90-99% of the voters split their votes relatively evenly between the two major parties. The rest split them fairly unevenly between the remaining minor contenders.
As shown in 2000, this can be a factor in pushing a "dark horse" candidate to the top, even if that candidate represents the views of fewer voters. The classic example is: A gets 30 votes, B (similar platform as A) gets 30 votes, C (diametrically opposed to A) gets 40 votes and wins. Clearly, either A or B would more closely represent the views of more voters than C.
IRV fixes this problem. Realistically, in IRV, you would have people generally voting for the "left" candidates, and people generally voting for "right" candidates. You would not have preference lists of "Cobb", "Bush", "Kerry". These are the types of contrived preference lists that are purported to show that IRV is poorly designed.
In more realistic situations, IRV allows voters to unequivocably state a true "first choice" candidate/platform, and also state a "safe" vote for someone more likely to win, whom they could live with. With plurality voting, many times the smart choice is to vote for the "safe" candidate, thus giving the candidate the potentially mistaken opinion that all who voted for them did so as their first choice.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
So, would you then prefer to live in a dictatorship? Seriously, democracy has its flaws and this is one of them, but the alternatives are much worse because they take away our freedom.
Furthermore, this attitude is seriously elitist. Joe Voter may know more than you give him credit for. Of course most people don't understand the technical details of how to run the country, indeed, no one person really understands that. But the population as a whole should determine things like general direction and basic values, which is what you're supposed to be voting for when you vote for a candidate.
Joe Voter doesn't know what's best for the whole country, but he often has a pretty good idea what's good for him, and since the country is just Joe Voter in aggregate, its interest is just his interest in aggregate.
The problem we have in our system is not so much that the voters are stupid, but that their opinions have been deliberately manipulated so as to be contrary to their own interest. But this doesn't always work: "you can't fool all the people all the time," and democracy is still the best chance we have to get a government that represents the interest of the general population. As it is, we have an oligarchy representing the interests of the priviledged few. Moving in a more democratic direction would help to correct that.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
In my experience, the only thing that electoral bias in favour of rural voters does is to artificially inflate farmers property values by turning them into into welfare recipients (in all but name), while indulging their worst tendancies to blame people who aren't WASPs for the world's problems and tell everybody else what they can and can't do in their own bedrooms.
The subsidy for American farmers works out to about $20,000 per rural job - yep, those salt of the earth folks you love so much have a huge proportion of their income paid by those city pagans. That's what the electoral college, and 2 senators per state regardless of population, does.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The number of ballots has not changed - it's still one person/one ballot. But Nader's vote total has been increased by one, and there is no way to determine that that extra vote of approval is fraudulent.
live(free) || die;
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd make the President of the U.S. elected via Condorcet, Senators also elected per state via Condorcet, and the House of Representatives elected proportionally. For the House, I'd use Single Transferable Vote (STV) and it wouldn't be one big nationwide proportional pool, but rather, multimember districts of 5-9 seats.
Rob
(who's lying...if he could wave a magic wand, there's a lot of other things that would be too much more fun to do than change the electoral system)
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).
Most voting methods are preoccupied with voting strategy and how it best reflects the will of the voters.
Well, there is one method that is overlooked: continuous voting.
Ok ok, it is overlooked for a very sound reason, continuous voting requires the election to be constantly held, this is difficult in our physical world. And yet, what other method would better reflect the will of the voters???
VeniVidiVoti LibraryArrow's theorem and its relevance to these voting systems is a much more complicated matter than it seems at first. For instance, one of Arrow's "reasonable requirements" is the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterian (IIAC), and it's been shown in many scenarios that failing the IIAC is actually what you want.
Condorcet fails Arrow's Theorem as do all other methods, but only when there isn't a Condorcet Winner. When there is, Condorcet is perfect. When there isn't a Condorcet Winner (like when there's a defeat loop, A over B, B over C, and C over A), then there are plenty of tiebreaker methods people can use that are "almost perfect". But in large elections, it's actually pretty rare that there isn't a Condorcet Winner.
So the Arrow argument isn't the smackdown that people take it to be.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Er, if there are five candidates, and X voters, and each voter says "Yes" or "No" to each candidate, you have 5X votes cast.
Sure, that's a big number. Good thing we have calculators.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
However, when all the numbers are added up, you still have an arbitrary number that has nothing to do with the number of voters and therefore lacks a general credibility.
As one of the previous posters pointed out: for each candidate on the ballot, you either mark them as "approve" or "disapprove". Make it clear to the voter that they must not skip any candidates. So, as long as every candidate is represented on every ballot, then the numbers will add up. If there are 10 candidates and 100 million people vote, you should be left with 100 million ballots with 10 yes/no choices each, adding up to 1 billion total votes. So of course: votes = (number of voters) x (number of candidates)
Additionally, by forcing voters to mark the "disapproves" as well as the "approves", you reduce the chance of someone changing a ballot by trying to approve another candidate on that ballot later (I say reduce, and not eliminate, because there are bound to be a few foolish people who don't fill out the entire ballot as they are supposed to).
I can't believe the amount of defeatist rhetoric in this thread. I guess Americans just don't realise [don't bother correcting the english spelling] that there are many countries around the world that use alternative voting methods. I know because I live in one.
In New Zealand we used to have a two party system , not completely fucked like yours but it was pretty bad all the same. People pushed for electoral reform. Getting to the point of holding a binding referendum was a struggle but we got there in the end. Now we use a system called MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) whereby everyone has two votes. One for a party and one for a local representative, like a senator.
Each party wins a percentage of parliament based upon the percentage of the party vote that they manage to get.
This has lead to a much more balanced goverment. People vote strategically knowing that their vote is not wasted. If I like the specific policies of a small party then I can vote for them. Viva democracy. MMP wouldn't work in a presidential election though. IRV would be perfect. We use something similar (called STV - Single Transferable Vote) for some of the local body elections. It isn't a complicated thing to do. Monkeys can rank things in order of preference.
It's time you lot got together and created a more democratic voting process for your country. Before you idiots let some demagogue convince you into raping any other defenceless countries.
Like some I saw around here said, if you keep on voting for the lesser of two evils you are going to keep on getting evil.
Cheers
Hansel
I don't agree with you. If you believe people are so stupid that they can't comprehend to rank candidates in order of preference (Condorcet) or simply put a mark on the ballot for all the candidates they approve (approval voting), how the h*ll do you think they are going to make an informed decision as to which politician best represents their interests?
Yes, there's always going to be some dofus who doesn't get it (Florida anyone?), but for the most part the electorate understands perfectly well how to vote.
Now, the real reason why any of these better voting methods aren't implemented is simply that the current incumbent parties are in power partly because of the current system. As they are the ones with power to enact new laws, why should they enact laws which reduce their own power? Ain't gonna happen, sorry.
In 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.
One thing that many city dewllers seem to forget is just where all the food comes from.
And most supporters of the "farming lifestyle" seem to forget that farming wouldn't exist unless the city dwellers were paying for that quaint old farming to be kept around. You're acting like the farmers are the one providing a service to the cities, but it's in reality the other way around. The cities could buy their food overseas and save money. Farming in america isn't kept around because it's useful, it's kept around because it's politically sensitive. Europe is much the same.
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.
Belgium called, since they're a sovereign nation they think they deserve equal power to the US inside the UN, and they want a permanent seat on the security council. You do agree we should give it to them, right? Or are you trying to destroy the rights of sovereign nations?
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.
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.
We've been dealing with this for years in the computer world using checksums. I don't see why that wouldn't work here.
For instance, let's say we have a punch card ballot with a machine operating it. It marks each person you wanted to vote for, then it marks *the number of people voted for*.
Suddenly, it is easy to detect tampering. People can still invalidate the vote, but they can do that when there is only one hole in the card as well by punching another one for another candidate.
That is, of course, assuming that a punch card is actually used. Printed bar codes, etc, are also options.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
No reason why that rule couldn't be passed by all states.
I would also like to see a limit on contributions from outside the politician's district. Say a limit of $3000 for residents and $1000 for non-residents. And if corporate contributions are allowed, then each corporation has to choose one and only one district to be its "home".
sPh
So why doesn't the slashdot poll use this method...
/. has a decent sized community.
:)
/. implements something other than plurality, I don't want to hear any complaining that the US Government should.
If we want to argue that alternative voting isn't complicated, the best step in that direction is to implement it ourselves in a very simple manner.
I propose the first poll on the new system ask what poll is best.
Until
Karma Clown
There have been less than 50 US presidents, and I believe that a President has been elected while not having a plurality of the popular vote before 2000. So I do think it's a big deal. There have been a few more than 50 Presidential elections, but many of them weren't close enough for the system of voting to matter. Even if it's never happened before 2000, 1 out of 50 Presidential elections going against the popular vote seems like too many to me.
However each individual election goes, the fact is that we no longer view ourselves as a collection of states, but as one nation. The number of electoral votes per state is based on number of congressional seats per state which is based on state population. Determination of state population can be politically influenced in the same way that redistricting is (in the most recent census there were disputes about which regions and types of ares were undercounted and overcounted, and ways to make the data accurate; these disputes were at the Congressional level and in one case consisted of Republicans arguing that urban areas were overcounted and Democrats arguing that they were undercounted). A party or group of parties in power can and will try to perpetuate their position in power.
Only by counting the vote of each person who chooses to vote equally can the politics of perpetuation of power be removed from the selection of the President. Whether we continue to vote using some kind of plurality-based system or move to a ranking or approval system of determining a winner, the electoral college must go.
The arguments against the Electoral College simply dismiss the College out of hand, without staring the best reason for having them in the first place. Our government is a federation of sovereign states (e.g., "Federal" government and "United" States). We are not a monolithic governmental body. The purpose of the Electoral College is to intentionally skew the numerical advantage of smaller states to make them more equal in power to the larger states when the states are acting as equals, such as in the Senate and Presidential elections. This is a negotiated settlement of state vs. state power that is fair and balanced and has stood the test of time.
Properly speaking, our President is elected by the states, not by individual voters. (In fact, in the beginning, the President was directly elected by the state legislatures, and there was no direct, popular vote.) There's nothing "un-democratic" about the Electoral College. It's just the states' way of voting.
In my opinion, any proposed change in a voting mechanism must address the need for state vs. state balance of power, or it simply won't fly. The reason the Electoral College is in the Consitution has to do with the way our Union is is organized, not with some supposed desire to "keep women and minorities down" as electionmethods.org would argue (*sigh*).
It may be that changing the voting mechanism could help states select Electors better, especially in a tight race with more than two close contenders. But in the end, it will always be very much to each State's advantage to award the Electors as winner-take-all, because this maximizes their leverage against the other states in the Union.
In fact, without the Electoral College, the effect of winner-take-all would be even more pronounced, only, it would be the winners of just a handful of states.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.
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.