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Western-Style Voting 'A Loser'
sethawoolley writes "In light of the upcoming elections in the US, author William Poundstone was interviewed about voting systems by Mother Jones. In it he advocates the benefits of Range Voting as a solution to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Approval, Borda, Instant Runoff, and Condorcet Voting, which are often solutions advocated by the Greens and Libertarians (in the US), are discussed, as well, in light of Warren Smith's recent empirical research using Bayesian Regret. My local party (of which I'm the Parliamentarian) uses Single Transferable voting, but we're considering using Range Voting in the future. One thing is for certain: any system is better than the West's out-dated plurality voting system."
Excuse me, but a great number of what I'd call 'Western' countries use other systems than pluralist votes. For example, the German Federal Diet is elected by a hybrid of the first-past-the-post election system and party-list proportional representation. Proportional systems are also used in countries like Finland, Austria, Spain and many others. Remember: Just because the USA and the UK use it, it doesn't make it "Western" by default. (Just because -their- minds boggle when we here get along well with a four-party coalition government....)
... 'Western style voting', while 'proportional voting' seems to have a stronghold in Europe.
Yet, though I agree that plurality as well as proportional systems from party lists need improvement or a change, I do not see how this is to fix major problems.
My position is that until there is no improvement regarding political ethics you will end up with the same quality of political discussion/decision making that you have today. In short, you have to create a proper set of choices first.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I knew I'd seen something similar to this before. The link in that article doesn't seem to work anymore, but I'm sure there's plenty of insightful comments for everyone to repost to get the ball rolling...
This guy's the limit!
Here in Ireland we use Proportional Representation with Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) which is pretty nifty (and apart from anything else, makes election counts a whole lot of fun and a spectator sport that can last for a week).
The problem however is that no matter what system, we are voting for politicians. Our past election saw the Greens (a small minority party) get into government coalition with the main party here. They've already shown themselves to be well able to play the political game; and I don't mean that as praise.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Either way. Both India and the UK has winner-takes-all variants which are more or less working. In India several different parties can vote for the same candidate. For the most part, you still end up with two large blocks, but atleast you'll get *some* group-dynamics and bartering. In the UK they only use winner-takes-all on constituity-level, meaning you still can take local-phenomena into account. The Lib-Dems do get seats.
My point is, there's probably a million really small fixes that could majorly change the whole incredibly silly voting/campaigning-dynamics you have over there. There's no need to scrap everything.. and frankly, I really believe trying to introduce a whole new, reasonably complex voting system is silly to the extreme, given how really ******* easy it would be patch up the one you have.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
You do realise that the USA is not the only country in "the West", surely?
Australia has had compulsory instant runoff voting (aka IRV, though we call it "preferential voting") for decades. It works pretty well. Systems like the Condorcet Method, Meek's Algorithm and Range Voting have some theoretical advantages, but they fail in one crucial respect: they are hard to count. Range Voting creates possibly hundreds of rounds of counting. The Condorcet Method creates exponential numbers of counts. The Meek algorithm is essentially only doable with a computer. In contrast, the maximum number of counts required in IRV is the number of candidates - 1. In most cases the election is settled in two rounds.
What I've learnt over the years as an interested student of voting methods and as a politcal hack and Parliamentary candidate is that voting systems in theory and voting systems in practice are not the same. You need more than the best system in terms of Arrow's Theorem, you need something that can counted quickly and which can be trusted. This implies more about the rest of the electoral system.
And so it is that I, like most Australians, read about the woes and tribulations that the USA goes through come election time, and I though I know it is rude to say this in public, I pity you.
IRV is simple to count and simple to understand. Number the boxes in order of preference. That it is compulsory in Australia helps to moderate our politics by ensuring that the almost the whole population turns out to vote, not just ultra-motivated special interest groups (churchies, to pick a purely random example).
We also go further to ensure the integrity of our vote. The Australian Electoral Commission is a statutory body, independent of government. It is appointed, not elected. Its employees are forbidden by law to be or have been members of any political party.
Every ballot box is numbered. It is signed out by an AEC employee and at least two party- or candidate-appointed scrutineers. Every ballot box is sealed with numbered tags. These too are signed off. Every ballot is initialled by an AEC employee to ensure it is official. Every voter is signed off the Electoral Roll when they present at a booth to vote. The ballot is overseen by the independent AEC and is also watched by party or candidate scrutineers, whose mutual hostility and watchfulness ensures that rules are observed.
The unsealing of ballot boxes is witnessed and signed off. Every box is counted going out and counted coming in. Every tag is counted going out and coming in.
The count is watched by scrutineers, who may challenge how a vote is being counted. They may also challenge the formality or informality of a vote -- whether the vote is allowed to be counted.
The count is conducted three times: once on election night to give a "two party indicative" count, which will usually show which party will form government. It is counted two more times, with scrutineers at every stage, before the formal declaration is made.
Mistakes are made, but as a system it is largely immune to the shennanigans I am constantly reading about here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Incidentally, the Australian Electoral Commission also makes itself available for contract work. They mostly run ballots for unions and the like. They'd probably be available to run the Presidential election in November for a very reasonable rate.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
There would have to be a major improvement in math education for concordant to be accepted here. At least with pluralities, people think they understand it. Most just skip the part about the popular vote being ignored and the whole mess decided by the electoral college.
Put the candidates in a huge Steel Cage with various hand to hand weapons scattered about. When the bell rings everyone goes crazy. Last man or woman standing wins the election.
In practice a democratic decision will strengthen the interest of the average at the expense of the above average. The problem with this is that it isn't your average Joe that makes society work. On the contrary, the people that produce and that create jobs are a small exceptional group that often get the short end of the stick in a democratic system. True majority rule is in essence self-destructive as the average it pulls towards isn't capable of maintaining the society.
Our solutions up to date has been double standards. On one hand we praise majority rule democracy as the greatest of ideals while we try to make it as inconsequential as possible. There are different ways to go about it but all end up in saying one thing and doing another. These tend to be practical solutions that have worked so far (meaning that they haven't destroyed civilization) and seem to be fairly revolution-proof. Given the inherent contradiction in them, they cannot by any standard be seen as optimal. When you have a system that defines 'right' in such a way that it is not possible to do right then you have a fundamentally flawed system.
I'm not sure what would constitute a better system, but what we have right now certainly isn't it.
Simple majorities are outdated. All it does is give you 49% of people pissed off at the other 51%. Achieving consensus is often impractical, but you can get a pretty good compromise by allowing for weighted votes, where each voter can specify the degree of his liking or not liking each candidate. That way, you end up with someone that perhaps the majority doesn't love, but everybody can accept. Ultimately that seems to be a much more sensible way of determining the leader of an entire nation. The fact that Wikipedia works as well as it does, despite being perceived as an anarchy, is due to the policy that people should agree mutually on what goes into an article, rather than simply reverting each other until one side "wins". For all of WP's faults, it so far has made a better example of a society than any globalized nation I can think of.
Huh, I have no idea that the "West" counts as "The US". What about Australia with STV? European countries with d'Hont or other similar systems? Even if you take "West" as geographically "western hemisphere", it still...
Oh. I just RTFA. No mention of "The West" in the article. So I guess it was just the summary. Meh.
Range voting is quite common in questionnaires, where the form is often:
Q) You boss is an idiot.
[ ] Totally agree [ ] Partially agree [ ] Indifferent [ ] Partially disagree [ ] Totally diagree
I always answer those using the extremes for those cases where I'm not indifferent, in order to maximize the influence of my vote.
The range voting advocacy center acknowledge this as the optimal strategy in the generic case, but are able to find some corner cases where an honest voting strategy is better.
It is worth noting that Kuro5hin experienced the same effect, and switched from range voting to approval voting on comments.
For general elections, I'd recommend either approval voting (because the mechanics is so much simpler) or preferential voting because several of the vote counting techniques for preferential voting makes strategic voting very difficult.
"I'm not sure what would constitute a better system, but what we have right now certainly isn't it."
The reason it doesn't work is because too many people are spectators doing commentary on it not working, and too few being participants in making it work. You'll never have a working system that depends on people doing nothing.
Thank god someone knows what they're talking about.
I'm not an expert, but I've done enough reading on the subject to know that there is no "best" system; they don't necessarily have the same goals. FPTP (or plurality system) works if you believe in mandates for parties; PR works better if you believe that having more parties in the government is the best way for accurate representation. Is a large centralized party that has to appeal to many voters going to be closest to the median voter? Or is a bunch of legislators bargaining going to work out best? Should the voters get a direct say in policy making, or do they need mediators? What about regionalism?
All this also depends on whether the voter is rational or not, whether they vote ideologically or strategically, and whether the voter has accurate information or not.
I'll wait until a political scientist writes about this one -- most texts I've read by non-experts are extremely flawed. Like having politicians talk about the internet, really.
In other words he used lots of words you did not understand so you try and dismiss it any way you can.
I have a better idea, try and look up all the bits you did not understand and then you might learn something.
I dont read
There is no 'right' system.
People favour the system they see as being most likely to give them the results they would like.
Might as well just go with the simpler Approval voting, mentioned in the wikipedia article you linked: However, approval voting is range voting with only 2 levels (approved (1) and disapproved (0)) and forms of approval voting have been used for example, in Venice in the 13th century. It's simpler, and more effective in my experience.
Make a huge wiki of all the countries laws, policies and decision making.
The government that anyone can edit.
Correct, there cannot be any perfect system, except in the very limited case of exactly 0, 1, or 2 candidates/parties running. That's sort of the point of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem -- you can game any multi-candidate voting system.
Preferential voting, range voting, whatever. There will be artifacts that will allow "dishonest" voters to game the system. Even the wikipedia page on Range Voting shows how it could be done with the Kentucky Capitol election example -- Memphis Voters artificially score Nashville low so they they are guaranteed to win the election.
Our current system is a two-party system, with the system set up with a massive inertia to essentially discourage any 3rd party from running unless they can get a massive momentum from the start, like let's say by being a former president in the case of TR. This is bad. However, two-candidate elections also can't be gamed like preference voting can.
Note that the primaries, which are not two-candidate elections can be gamed. For example, if I was a Libertarian living in California (a state with no chance of a Republican carrying the state, let alone a Libertarian), I might very well vote for a Democrat in a close primary election, if I think one Democrat (let's say Hillary) would be a disaster, whereas another candidate (Obama) would be less of a disaster (from the point of view of my hypothetical Libertarian sensibilities (which I'm not)).
But once we're down to two candidates, you can no longer game the system by voting in a specific way.
Therefore, I think that ranking or preference systems would be fine for *primaries*, but that maintaining a final election between two people is probably a good thing (for this and for the more important reason that we get to focus on the candidates more during the final cycle).
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Range voting has many nice properties that are very appealing. However, there are 3 major properties of voting systems that it fails to meet:
1) Majority Property: If over 50% of voters prefer a single candidate over all others than that candidate should win the election.
2) Condorcet Winners Criterion: If a candidate would win any head-to-head election then that candidate should win the election.
3) Condorcet Losers Criterion: If a candidate would lose every head-to-head election then that candidate should not win the election.
Arrow's theorem implies that EVERY voting system has MAJOR flaws. This includes range voting, instant runoff, etc.
However, I have to say that I do like range voting (in particular its reduction of regret). But it should not be considered a panacea for alls the problems with voting methods.
I'm not trying to flamebait here, but I have big doubts with the two party systems in the USA and in England (or the UK?). It seems like those two parties are certain to have the almost absolute power from time to time, and smaller parties are never able to get enough votes to rule the country. (I also have big questions with corporate sponsoring of the parties in the USA, this makes the country being run by the corporations and not it's inhabitants, the way it should be.)
;) ), the greens, and so on...
:-)
:P
I'm from Belgium, and here there are a lot of parties. The orange (catholics), the blue (they seem to be for the people not working for the state, people who like to keep as much money they earn), the red (the socialists, but do not think this is some kind of communism, the world is not black & white you know
When the elections are over, the winning party needs to form a government, and they do this by making a coalition with one or two other parties so they represent more than 50% of the voting people in the country. This way all major opinions should be represented in a government. A new party might not be a part of a new government, but they are able to use there representation power in the parlement, for example when new laws are discussed and voted for.
I fear that the hunger for power will keep the system in England and the USA just the way it is, and also the corporate sponsoring. I guess those countries are screwed for eternity. Perhaps I'm missing some extreme good thing about their systems? I only see abuse of power, greed and the same thing happening over and over again. (Slightly offtopic: it's nice to know that Microsoft is loved a lot in exactly those countries.)
PS1. I know it's a lot more complicated than this in our country, you've got flanders, brussels and wallony with their own governments and parties, but I'm just making a point here.
PS2. Those who are up to date with belgian politics know this time is kind of worrysome, but this has nothing to do with the point I'm making.
And I can't resist saying this: Now the American patriots can mod me down into oblivion for my rant against their best country in the world!
Dependency hell? =>
All voting system are bad because they give the voter the idea that by voting he can influence the outcome of the voting process. That is only the case if there is a draw. Even if there are only 2 voters, that chance is only 1/3rd. Voting inaccuracies (have you never been surprised that if they do a recount after an election, that they don't end up with the same outcome, but may be hundreds off?). People who believe in voting suffer as much from delusion as a creationist. An election is just a very expensive poll with a large sample (yet still very often biased). It could be less biased by asking only 1% of the population to vote (computers select the voters randomly).
Also, voting takes away any nuance you may have. For example, I'm a democrat in the sense that I'd want that civilians can influence the outcome of decisions by the government by supplying facts, arguments and ideas, and that the process is transparent. The party that defends democracy in the Netherlands, but they are old hat proponents of chosen mayor etc. More elections doesn't give an individual voter any more effect!! I want someone capable, not someone popular!!
My idea of democracy is a kind of public wiki per topic that the government decides on, but it must be a moderated wiki to keep things organized, and civil. Politicians will be smoked out when they say stupid things that have been proven wrong in the wiki. Media will have a field day. So, politicians will pay attention. And yes, it is possible to do that without the moderators giving too much power.
Bert
Any voting system that expects all voters to rank all candidates is a loser. It's still a big improvement. But someone should take into account the incomplete information inherent in voting.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
For starters, why should anyone dependent on the government for income or benefits have a say in how the system is run? It is in their financial interest to see the status quo maintained or expanded. The right to vote should be tied to at least two things:
1) Gainfully employed on your own, even if it's at McDonalds
2) Not drawing any income from the government. I'm dead serious on this one. Not even the military, of which I am a big fan and supporter (like most people that straddle the fence between conservatism and libertarianism), should be allowed to vote. If someone wants to sign up for the reserves, and really volunteer their time, they should have to choose to receive no pay at all while they maintain their right to vote.
#2 is critical. How many welfare babies have you heard of that are down with the idea of limited government?
I live in Fairfax County, VA, a place where a significant number of the wealthy voters are contractors and federal employees. It shows in their voting, as we are by far one of the most statist counties in Virginia.
The fact that third party candidate are called spoilers is a indicator that the system is not fair. The article states that any system where voters have even the slightest influence on the process should be called democratic. I disagree.
Well, in that case, Iran is a democratic country (a list pre-approved by the clergy of candidates) Or former east germany. (garanteed 50% of the parliament for the communist party, other 50% up for vote)
If a system favors 1 party, we usually call it a dictatorship. If it favors 2 parties, it is suddenly fair and thus the "western style democracy"? People living in Texas don't have much reason to go vote. The outcome is pretty much set to be republican. Why bother going to the polls then? Turnout is tradionally low in Texas. This makes the argument: "Gore won the popular vote" also less valid. If in all the guaranteed R states everybody would have gone to the polls, i wouldn't know if Gore would still have won the popular vote.
Dividing up the country in seats to vote on favors the 2 party system. In California they are working on a law to split the electoral college like the Californian vote is split up, but if that is not done throughout the country that's not fair either. The electoral college is from a time where small states feared to be ignored. Now it's almost the reverse. Iowa and NH get way more attention than the bigger states. It is outdated. I hope C will have the guts and give their ec to the winner of the national popular vote. That would propel everybody in the US to get their butts to the booth. (And make presidential elections more fair).
Correct, there cannot be any perfect system, except in the very limited case of exactly 0, 1, or 2 candidates/parties running. That's sort of the point of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem
No it isn't, unless you're being tautological and defining "perfect system" as "one that meets the Arrow Impossibility Theorem criteria". Just reading through the definition of Arrow, IIA didn't seem obviously necessary or correct for a fair/perfect system to me. I then looked at the Wikipedia article and it seems that in fact, altering IIA makes designing a fair voting system possible and that that is what many proposed systems do.
Essentially, it looks like the point of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem is that "this set of criteria is too simple to accurately model what real-world voting systems are trying to do". It does _not_ say that any sufficiently non-trivial system cannot be fair; it says they cannot meet an arbitrary set of criteria.
(The whole thing is busted, and strikes me as akin to Econ 101 arguments about people being non-rational; classes often start off talking about utility functions, then switch to dollars for simplification of math, then go on to point out that people aren't rational because they won't bet their $1,000,000 life savings on a 100-to-1 shot at $100,000,001--without recognizing all the lectures they've just gone through about how the marginal value of someone's first dollar is greater than the next and that utility is not actually equal to dollars. No, people don't always behave economically rationally. But them not agreeing with your bogus definitions isn't an example of that)
rage, rage against the dying of the light
I never understood why the US keeps mucking about with these increasingly bizarre voting systems. Pretty much every other democracy - Western democracy - I know off either has a 1) parliamentary system, or 2) uses multiple votes.
Parliamentary systems: Here, the populace elects parliaments, usually with proportional representations. The parliaments then elect the 'single seat', such as the head of government.
Multiple votes: Here, the populace elects the 'single seat' directly. If in the first n [n>0] votes no candidate achieves an absolute majority, then a final plurality vote is conducted.
As said, pretty much every "Western" democracy other than the US seems to use some variant of those two. I personally like the first better as it keeps the center of power in the parliament, which is sort of a good thing for a democracy. But either solves the problem in a clean, easily understood and verifiable manner. So... what's the deal with the US and their funky voting systems craze?
Also, I'm rather thankful for the various people pointing out the blatant mis-use of the term "West".
... except for all the other systems that have been tried.
In my view range based voting will be too time-consuming.
I think we need something new; something that has only become recently practical. Sitting here in front of this box of plastic, steel and various pieces of silica I think that it's the key to a powerful resource. We have statistics, we have a bi-directional communication system, we have the ability to make finer-grained decisions we just need to do it. What I would like to see is a geography based opinion gathering system. Referendums are the most accurate measure of an aggregate citizens pulse but are expensive so to work around this limitation we can use this shiny tech sitting in front of us and encourage people to express themselves on policy. This raw data can be statistically turned into useful Information for representatives to consider when they cast their vote in our name. I hesitate to endorse the extreme where a resource such as this would dictate policy as it should be filtered through some kind of rule-system that would prevent tyranny of the majority situations. Everyone's waiting for their government to do something like this but that is not necessary, for now any citizen has the freedom to tabulate what their fellow citizens think. And that would be very useful when it comes to measuring exactly who is divergent when it comes to the principal of representation. A history of divergence without corresponding "good of the many" justifications would also provide valuable feedback when it comes time to choose the next representative. The most difficult aspect initially would be just making citizens aware that such a resource existed.
Shh.
The number of links in the summary should give you a tip. Plenty of theories, most of them without real proof.
No voting system will be perfect while we keep voting for people instead of issues. Instead of inventing ever more complicated systems for choosing representatives, why not develop a system where every person is allowed to give an opinion on the law articles themselves?
If you don't understand the terminology, perfect in this sense means that people get who they vote for, and the system can't be gamed. In other words, the election results will always perfectly reflect the will of the people.
I think it's relatively trivial to show that the 0,1, and 2 candidate elections are perfect... why do you have trouble accepting that? 0 and 1 go without saying, and in a 2 party election people simply vote for A or B or not at all, and the election perfectly shows what people wanted.
When you start doing things like Result Voting, then you get the Russians voting low scores for the Americans in Ice Skating, so that they drag their numbers below the scores for their own team... and the Americans reciprocate by doing the same thing. Or if you have a rival video on Youtube or something, you score them with 1 star (especially if the vote count is low) so that your own video appears higher on the sort-by-ratings list.
The wikipedia article isn't the whole story on the Arrow Impossibility Theorem -- the reality is worse. You can always game a system that has >= 3 candidates. That's the end of the theory. The practical suggestion I made is that we thus use one of these alternative voting systems for primaries, and do a simple 2-party final election. That would eliminate the spoiler effect, while not penalizing people to freely vote for 3rd party candidates. Plus, it has the practical side effect that one simply cannot track the positions of large numbers of candidates.
Voting should be as simple as what it was designed to be, there's just been a whole lot of extra cruft added on by various world governments for political purposes (some areas claim they should have more influence and thus, more votes, others claim their voting system should be different, it's a mess).
Voting -itself- is not a mess, and if it were implemented properly, it would work:
- you place a vote for a candidate. Check it off on a box, on a piece of paper. Or for that matter, one of those "fill in the circle" forms that they use for some statistical surveys that can be read by computers -- this leaves a paper-trail while speeding up the counting process. No "chads," no rigged voting machines, no bullshit.
- when the votes are counted, a simple majority = win for that candidate. One recount should be mandatory in cases in which the vote is close -- but if the candidate who wins is ahead by two votes after that recount, then they still win. The whole point of having votes is to establish with certainty who the majority of the voting population believes should win.
I don't know, I'm sure people with more knowledge of political science will chime in and tell me how wrong this is...but why should voting really be any more difficult than checking a box, counting the boxes that are checked, and giving the win to the man/woman with the most checked boxes? Isn't this the most neutral way possible of conducting a vote?
i seriously think the voting system in the USA is a farce and the democratic process is dieing if not dead already, it just seems fishy with the obvious flaws and vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines yet the people in charge of implementing electronic voting machines seem to ignore this issue...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is in use in Scottish and Ulster electoral systems (to the respective devolved assemblies. (The geographical British Isles is now moving towards a much looser confederation of mini-states with varying degrees of independence from London; thanks to the Peace Process, Northern Ireland now has full devolved control of it's own governance, as do Scotland and Wales (there are differences between each of these, don't get me started); the Republic of Ireland has had full independence since 1922 of course.) Some form of PR, a party-list based system IIRC, is also used in the UK for elections to the European Parliament.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Kentucky Capitol election example -- Memphis Voters
:) And while I'm being a nit-picker...
:)
:)
That would be Tennessee's capitol you're talking about. Sorry, as an ex-KY resident, I had to say that
there cannot be any perfect system,
True, but that doesn't mean that different systems aren't better than the other. I worry that because none are perfect some people might assume the argument is pointless. It's not: the voting system matters. I mean, there's no perfect presidential candidate either, but that doesn't mean we should leave Bush in office
two-candidate elections also can't be gamed like preference voting can.
Or, I might say they're pre-gamed. That is, you've somehow already limited the field to two candidates somehow. That process, whatever it is, can be gamed and is part of any two candidate system.
in California, a state with no chance of a Republican carrying the state
And as a current California resident, I must point out that our current govinator is Republican
Sorry -- not trying to be a picky pain in the ass. I found your post interesting, but it's 5AM, I can't sleep, and those little things stood out to me.
Cheers.
A truly western-style election would include guns and back-to-back aligned candidates.
Only in America can you come up with these crazy ideas!
If for no other reason than to have a sensible counter-point to the GP.
Of any system declared dead by fringe groups like the Greens (in the US) and Libertarians. The problem with proportional voting and accommodating small parties with narrow agendas is that you're going to be politicizing legitimizing the message and empowering people on the fringe with extremist views. Don't disrupt a 200+ year old system because you don't like George Bush.
In the US, this means that anti-abortion parties, libertarians, socialists will begin to wield real political power. And although they won't win alot of seats, their power will be magnified because they will become swing votes. In New York from the 1840's until the mid-20th century, Tammany Hall was a corrupt political machine based out of New York City that dominated state politics. They did so because the Republicans had about 40-48% of the legislative seats, the mainstream democrats had 40-48% of the legislative seats, and the Tammany Hall democrats kept around 10%. When people vote, the swing people matter.
Personally, I feel that over time, the good ideas advocated by fringe parties get absorbed into the mainstream party platform. I think that's healthier for democracy than having Senators waving pictures of dead fetuses on the Senate floor.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
i always thought that. i'm not so sure now though, as i have a feeling it would come down to just the same 'popularity contest' but driven by media towards the law they would prefer you to vote rather than towards a particular person. i'm not sure of any better alternative though, just some idle thoughts of mine :)
porl
In Ontario, we use a first-past-the-post system. We had a referendum a while back to switch to a mixed-member/proportional system and it was soundly defeated.
The proponents of alternate systems are all for democratic reform... but naturally when they lost, they had all kinds of excuses... anything but admit that most people are happy with first-past-the-post.
You can prove mathematically that any representational voting system is "unfair" where "unfair" means that decisions can pass that are supported by fewer than 50% of voters. I believe first-past-the-post is a reasonable compromise that keeps the power of splinter groups in check and prevents them from hijacking the agenda.
There's your problem right there - if you look at party systems, you either have 2 parties and you pick the lesser of two evils (especially nowadays there doesn't seem to be that much difference left between the major parties apart from the candidates - sure, each will point out the fallacy of the other parties policies as a whole - but more often than not, their own are only 'inches' away from the other).
On the other hand, you had the massive multi-party setups like the Weimar republic, where no party got enough to rule so had to form coalitions with multiple parties - eventually bringing everything to a dead-lock and giving rise to some demagogue pointing out the flaws and changing it 'all for the better' (I think, the world is still pissed at how much 'better' it got -- how many people died in WW2 again?).
There is a three-fold problem with party systems:
a) different parties set up different programs on what they think is best. Unfortunately, you only get the choice between the lesser of the N evils - UNLESS, one party matches EXACTLY what you think is right (which will not be often if you only look at issues; rather than party politics). As an example, I would support Bush's decision on stem-cell research (though, not on religious grounds; but rather ethical ones; on the other hand, I had been completely set against various aspects of his foreign 'policy' and the treatment of basic rights as in Guantanamo). IF I was an American and allowed to vote in your elections, I would therefore most likely vote Democrats - even though they are FOR stem-cell research.
b) gaps in election programs - if there is an issue that you might find important, but the parties find not important enough (or not palatable enough) to deal with in the election campaign (i.e. how to actually DEAL with national debt, instead of just continuing to amass more), you will not find any authorative statement of what 'your' party choice is going to do until they get to power. The same goes for any issue that only really arises during a term in office - nobody in the US really seemed to have spent that much time thinking about terrorism and its consequences until it finally hit you in 9/11 - and at that time, you were stuck with whoever you had voted into office at the time - no matter, whether that candidate was any good for the situation, or not.
c) 'campaign promises' - Bush Sr. 'no more taxes' anyone? You vote for a candidate - and once the candidate is in office, you have virtually no chance of getting rid of the incumbent until the next election - no matter what the incumbent is going to do about whatever he/she promised during the voting campaign.
(This should not be seen generally as a rant against the US or any other nation - I *do* see that anything but a relatively simple few party system was virtually impossible even a hundred years ago - the modes of communication and the general level of information available to everyone would prevent that. Which is why you had your electoral college - which seems fairly quaint if you look at it in the lights of what should be possible today).
Each of the above in itself should make a case against those democracies we 'value' in the West.
Having lived in Switzerland for a few years, I did notice that their processes are SLOWER than 'ours' in the rest of the Western world, but I also saw that they actually deal more with issues than other nations do. Of course, they currently DO have a problem with a 'demagogue' (Christoph Blocher, in my opinion is nothing less), but even Blocher can't make people vote for or against something they see as intrinsically wrong - and even in power, there was little Blocher could actually DO without the final say-so from the people during their *quarterly* (yes, 4 times a year, not once every 4 years) polls - which are on the individual ISSUES, not on party politics - just to name a few things that they did vote on in the last few years: legalisation of drugs (failed), funding for massive railway expansions "NEAT" (appro
It sure would, but I'd prefer to handpick laws rather than vote for a person with whom I agree on some subjects and disagree on others. When people vote for Hillary Clinton because of her stand on health care they are also voting for regulating computer games. If they vote for Ron Paul because of his deregulation proposals they are also voting for getting the US out of the UN.
A) Law is a technical subject. People who specialise in it are professionals - in terms of the education that they require and the amount of time that they devote to their careers. So either we would require a society entirely composed of lawyers (who wouldn't be very good at growing food or other non-essential activities), or we would have a society full of half-assed un-educated law amateurs wielding power.
Note: I'm not suggesting that our current system doesn't involve a room full of half-assed legal amateurs being in charge, but at least they haven't contaminated the whole country.
B) Voting for issues is hard because there isn't a good way to model exclusion. The classic example is: Who wants to vote for better education? Everyone. Better hospitals? Everyone. Lower taxes? Ahh, we have a problem.
One problem is that the law is intrinsically complex - it's a model of allowable human behaviour. People qualified to work with it are specialists, and society needs a mix of specialties in order to survive and be productive. One interesting idea is machine-readable law - it doesn't make it any less complex but it does make it easier to interpret. If my (dodgy) memory holds then the idea is mentioned in Accelerando as the basis for a post-Singularity society. I think some (very basic) initial work was published by Simon Peyton Jones on the subject (although manybe that was trade, rather than law).
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
The paper referred in the article is next to worthless, too. It goes to great lengths to say that "range voting is the best, because it represents the voters' wishes the best".
Except, they assume that people will agree to throw away their vote just because they're don't agree with one side entirely. Range voting is nothing but approval voting with a possibility of casting only a fraction of a vote. This is what the paper refers to as "strategic range voting".
The whole reasoning is busted, because it assumes people will agree to waste most of their vote just to make someone else more happy. WTF? Rational people vote the way which gives the best chance of getting results _they_ want.
The paper also compares range voting to systems which are pretty bad but have been used historically, disregarding serious contenders like Condorcet.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
> You do realise that the USA is not the only country in "the West", surely?
Every country can be found in the West, if you walk long enough.
That use of the term "UK" really means "England"
Scotland and Wales cope with a multi party system (Labour, Lib Dems, SNP/Plaid, Tories and, until it imploded the SSP in Scotland) ulster is also more complex.
We also have a bastardised Proportional system in the Scottish Parliament)
where the losing party always claims foul play and then turns into a guerrilla fighting force, and the winning party (having control over the military - in general) always uses military force to suppress the voice of the losing party.
There is an African saying that goes: "You know a country changed government when there's a power outage". I think that comes from the fact that the countries power grid is a large target around election times.
In any event, I don't think the majority of Africa understand the various systems - I mean, really: most of the inhabitants cant read or write yet, and there is still a very strong factor of intimidation. Even here in South Africa (where I am), most people still don't understand democracy or what they are "really" voting for. The recent election of Jacob Zuma for the presidency of the ANC is a very good example. He is more in court for various criminal charges then he is in office. Just on pure morality I can not think how you would want this man to be a president of a nation, yet there is a very high probability that he will be South Africa's next president.
O well - that's it. I need to get back to something positive now :-)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
About 90% of the criticisms you see towards IRV are directed at variants where you can opt not to fill out every box, i.e. give preferences to as few or as many candidates as you like. This isn't possible in the Australian thing, meaning problems with (for example) no-majority winners and issues with wasted votes due to only being given x numbers to use when there are x+n candidates don't apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion
How do you game Approval Voting?
You don't. Instead we argue about whether the unrestricted domain criteria is actually important enough that the extent to which Approval voting doesn't meet it is a problem.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Not so. Single Transferrable Voting fails the monotonocity criterion. Basically, ranking someone higher can cause them to lose, and ranking someone lower can cause them to win. There's debate on how often this might come up in practice. It might be missing the larger point, though, which is that in STV, it's very hard to predict what impact your vote will actually have.
STV is the only mainstream electoral method which fails the monotonocity criterion. Even the much maligned plurality method, which everyone is familiar with, passes. Voting for someone will never cause them to lose, and not voting for someone will never cause them to win.
Arrow's Theorem says we can't have everything, but I consider the monotonocity criterion as something which is an absolute must. At the very least, if you are contemplating switching away from the plurality system to something else, be sure that it is strictly better than plurality, which STV is not.
The real problem with American Presidential votes is not just first past the post voting, but the fact that it is first past the post PER STATE. Instead of the Electoral College votes being proportional to the state vote or being by congressional district + proportional for the 2 electors for senators, it generally gives (Maine is an exception) all Electoral College to votes to whoever wins the plurality of the states votes. It is as if Congress were elected by states so only one party ever represented a state, getting rid of districts.
Although the Republicans have benefited most from this (witness 2000 election), it is also Republicans from large states that get hurt most. Instead of Republicans in California having an influence on who gets elected President, California Republicans lose their vote because the Democrats consistently win the California Presidential vote. No wonder there is such a low turnout, since your vote only really matters in swing states.
Yes, first past the post voting is not as good as proportional. But what is recommended in this article is just the frosting on the cake. Before you can put on the frosting, you have to have the cake. America does not have the cake. THe approach espoused in this article is like a mechanic who, when presented with a car that does not start, decides that a paint job will fix the problem. The problem is that america is NOT a democracy. And where democracy is crippled, money rules. The lack of democracy in america creates a vacuum, filled by Big MOney. We have a choice--democracy or plutocracy. If you do not have democracy, you have plutocracy. the solution must return power to the voters by changing the constitution so as to empower the voters. How do you do that? The same way they do in Europe, canada, oz,etc they use governmental infrastructure to empower voters. They empower by parliamentarian democracy. Look to western europe. There is a reason why they have universal healthcare, progressive taxation, less police brutality, a small war machine, etc etc. You see, THEY have democracy in the form of parliamentarianism. We do not. The founding fathers were ANTI-DEMOCRACY. THe reason they illegally installed the present constitution is because the several states under the articles of confederation were becoming parliamentarian democracies, and then passing laws that were helpful to working people and harmful to the rich people like the founding fathers, e.g. debt relief laws and progressive taxation. The founding fathers hated democracy. James Madison, the father of the American constitution, said that democracy is not right for America. Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the COnstitution, said that there was an "excess of democracy." Read all about how america is not a democracy: How did the FOunding Fathers stop democracy in America? Primarily with strong checks and balances and the Presidential System. Read these articles and this online book to learn more about what I am talking about. These articles are written by Phds in history and political science (or are articles reviewing books by those PHDs). http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/10/31/taxation_revolution_and_some_other_rebellions/ and here: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1023/p13s01-bogn.html and here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4026/is_200607/ai_n17187913/pg_1 and here: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:u1pjfiO0X_8J:www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/62.2/holton.html+woody+impera&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=opera and here: http://cyberjournal.org/authors/fresia/
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
Every year, Margaret Thatcher retakes power, and people vote on whether she wears whipped cream or a wet t-shirt.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
and how the idiosyncrasies of our election system left Louisiana voters to choose between a notoriously corrupt liberal and a former Ku Klux Klan leader for governor (the crook won) It is still not clear to me who won those elections...
Good job making assumptions about someone you don't know. In that vein I could say get out of the basement and wash your face, but I'm not going to. I was just trying to bring a little brevity to a discussion that is bound to be a flamefest, however I see that my humor is lost today. Anyway, how about you don't assume that someone is uneducated based on a couple of sentences. I never said that I disagree with what he's saying did I? I also never said that I agree because for the most part I don't really care all that much. Now go be a jackass somewhere else please.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
The article seems to imply that the best voting system is the one that is most democratic. Is that really proven? Will Western-style voting systems really bring about worse governments than other systems? There are almost certainly places where a benevolent dictator would be (or is) better than a popular government.
There isn't really much difference between the life of the average person in Britain, Canada, and the U.S., despite each nation's hugely different history. It seems likely that culture and genes have as much if not more to do with how good your government is than the particular system you use.
I agree with you quite a bit, they really don't take advantage of the power of the internet yet. I'm sure that a system could be devised where constituents of a district could vote on an issue which would be interesting. I say interesting because then in order for the politician to push the issue the way he/she wants they have to actively campaign for the issue instead of just go whichever way they want. That system also rewards the people that are active in politics since they'll have the most say about the issues at hand. Another benefit that I see is that it makes it easier for people to vote on an issue, they don't have to go out of their way. I'm going to leave this half finished and let the discussion do what it does best and run with it.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
I am glad I do not live in Australia, based on this law alone.
What an egregious violation of human freedom.
... The West as in being the US does not use the voting system the author thinks it uses. As we found out in the last election.
Its voting system is based not upon any of the describe methods but rather on of how well voting results can be manipulated.
With 3 candidates A, B, C, if you'd vote A=100, B=50, C=0, but are forced to vote B=100 or B=0, depending on what others vote, voting B=100 could elect B instead of A (which you would have preferred), and voting B=0 could elect C instead of B (which you would have preferred). If you don't know how others are going to vote, it is safer to vote as you think.
What you propose would be a "direct" or "true" democracy . The very worst of all possible systems, IMO. It's pretty obvious that under a direct democracy anyone whose opinion is at variance with the majority loses rights, status, opportunity, etc. The tyranny of Joe Average and all his church learrnin' would be no improvement for our troubled nation.
Caveat Utilitor
Even if range voting does devolve into approval voting, you can't really say that range voting is worse than approval voting. Well, except that it might take more resources to count the ballots.
Come on people...the national "vote" in the US that gets reported around the world as a democratic vote is not entirely that. The States elect the President. If you want to parse the US national voting system then you have to understand that the plurality vote only occurs when the electorate casts the vote and not when the citizens of the US cast their vote. The citizen vote is only used to influence the citizen's state electorate. The electorate can then choose to vote with the will of the people in their state or not. Each state is assigned a number of electorates based on the population of that state. The states choose how and who are allowed to vote in the national and local elections. If the electorate (State representative) system is to be changed in the US then 2/3 of the US states would have to agree to an amendment to the US Constitution (not likely in my lifetime). Remember, the US is made up of 50 individual States...think Europe if all of Europe were to decide to have an over arching federal government with its own president.
The best way for people to change government in the US is to pay more attention to local elections. All politics are local. Stop allowing terrible candidates at the local level and you will slowly remove the knuckleheads at the national level.
Our voting system isn't at the heart of the problem. The fundamental problem is a vast imbalance. An American citizen's power of his government is miniscule, while the government's power over him or her extends to every little aspect of his or her life.
Changing the voting system will give you only an insignificant increase in power. The best thing we can do is work on the other side of the equation: insisting our rights be respected, on government power being constrained.
As I was reading the article and I read the comment about the 1912 election and I thought to myself, "why not use the more recent spoiler election of 1992?." Well I got my answer later in the article with the whole crux being the still crying idiots who think Bush stole the 2000 election from Gore. Well maybe the memory has slipped a little for the libs here in the US but there wouldn't be a Bill Clinton/ Al Gore without the spoiler election of 1992. Let me refresh a little. Bill Clinton only pulled about 42 percent of the US popular vote. The rest went to George Bush 1 and a third party candidate named Ross Perot (yes, that's right, there are more than two parties here in the US). Ross Perot clearly pulled more votes from Bush 1 than Clinton and way more votes than Ralph Nader will ever get. Without Ross Perot, Bush clearly would have had a second term.
Plurality voting serves an important purpose, it moderates candidates -- and voters for that matter -- and keeps them close to the political center. Political extremists don't like it since they are locked out but that's a feature not a bug. If you want political change then sell your ideas to the public and get them to buy it and get candidates to support those positions. It's long hard work but it can and has been done. Repeatedly.
We have non-partisan city council elections here in Minneapolis and while they are non-partisan in an official sense, everyone knows which party the candidates belong to and the councilors tend to follow all the usual political platforms and biases of the parties they represent. So I don't think that officially making elections non-partisan would help, nor do I think the parties themselves would ever allow this to happen.
There's probably also arguments to be made in favor of party labels, as they allow both the electorate and the political system to more efficiently identify friends/foes.
Range voting reduces the ability of minority parties to influence the political system.
Right now, major candidates have a strong incentive to prevent serious spoilers by subsuming those spoilers' key ideas into their own campaigns. The Republican candidate will preach small government because if he doesn't the libertarian candidate will pull away enough voters for the democrat to beat him.
In a range system, why bother? Folks who oppose his rival will rank him high anyway to assure that his rival loses. If the third party candidate can't spoil your race, why bother paying any attention to his supporters' desires at all?
Truth is, our government stays pretty centrist (even in times of crisis like 9/11) and the reason it does is that whenever a candidate strays too far, a spoiler comes in and wipes him out. With range voting, nothing prevents large unstable swings in governance.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I came here to post exactly what the parent poster said. This is yet another "boo-hoo Gore should've won" commentary.
Lets see, who are have income or cost break from the government:
1) amtrak employees
2) research grant recipients
3) small business grant recipients
4) students receiving interest rate break.
5) parents taking dependency deduction
6) retirees on Social Security
7) auto inspection contractors
8) medicare recipients
9) medicare physicians and hospitals
10) judges
11) prosecutors and public defendants
12) subsidized emergency relief organizations.
13) charitable organizations claiming tax relief (churches, non-profits)
14) riders of publicly subsided mass transit.
15) Chrysler corporation
16) families of 9/11 victims
17) veterans
18) pensioners of defaulted plans.
19) banks (interest rates charged by Fed)
20) regulated industries: example: communications, pharma, mining
21) subsidized farmers
22) firefighters and policemen
23) airport employees
24) park rangers
25) garbage collectors
26) office incumbents: mayors, county clerks, congressman
27) homeowners (interest rate deduction)
28) catastrophic health patients (medical payments deduction)
29) the blind (tax deduction)
30) those collecting unemployment or disability from state
31) recipients of aid from poverty
32) residents of rent-controlled apartments
33) recipients of energy rebates
Who is excluded from the above and CAN vote?
1) fugitives (bail jumpers, jail escapees, 'enemies' of the government)
2) illegal aliens
3) coma patients
4) people in their bomb shelter in Montana waiting for the Russians to drop the bomb.
Regards
John
It only doesn't penalize people for voting for third party candidates by completely removing them. So the primaries are held to determine the two spots for the final election, right? So we have some free for all election system, where we pick two candidates out of a pool of N, and then have another election, where we elect one of the two? I think I have this wrong, but is that what you're describing?
What about the UK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons
No, I haven't RTFA, but I have read most of the comments here. A lot of them point out that what is meant by the "West" is really referring to the USA. The other main topic of discussion seems to be talking about what is wrong with the system in the USA, and why their methods are better, "their" because most of these comments seem to come from non-US citizens. There seems to be something intrinsically wrong with this.
Yes, which will (again) magnify the vocal minority's power -- the sort who treat politics as a team sport & always root for their team and their player.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Although the regional voting in northern ireland is quite different from the national elections. It uses proportional representation, for one thing, and has been talked about as a model for the rest of the UK.
And as a current California resident, I must point out that our current govinator is Republican :)
In addition, in the last 24 years, California has had 3 Republican Governors and 1 democrat. The Republicans served for a total of 20 years, while the Democrat served just over 4 years before being recalled during his second term. President Nixon & President Reagan both came from California. President Reagan and President Bush (Sr.) did win in California in 1980, 1984 & 1988.
There are many reasons why a Republican Presidential Candidate hasn't carried California since 1988, but the flawed Electoral system is only one part of that issue.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I'm saying that if you are receiving public money, you shouldn't be allowed to vote until you stop receiving it. The natural human tendency is to use politics to protect one's own position. That is how it's done in much of the world. We're simply better at mitigating that habit and controlling it sometimes.
Someone who is currently receiving tax-supported medical care is, on average, going to vote for a politician who will increase their benefits. Very few people say "no thanks, I know I'm partially a ward of the state, so in the interest of respecting my fellow citizens, I'll be the least burden I can be." Dude, the average person is more likely to say "gimme, gimme, gimme" when it's not their money, they have a real need for it, and there is a way that they can legally turn the money printing press back on for their wallet.
This may come as a surprise to you, but I used to do some work for the government, and yet I would have gladly given up my right to vote during that time out of principle. Instead, I compensated by voting for limited government candidates who would be a lot more skeptical about the need for spending.
I would say the solution would be quite simple in a range system: if there are, say, 7 choices -- instead of letting people vote on each one, give them a set number of points, say 300. They may distribute the points as they wish but at a maximum of 100 points per choice. They would not have to use up their points if they so choose.
The 2-candidate one is arguable.
What if candidate A is -sligthly- prefered by 51% of the voters, but they really are very close to "don't care", while candidate B is -VERY- strongly prefered by 49% of the voters ?
Yeah, it's a matter of definition what is "fair" in such a case.
That being said, arguments about "perfect" elections is a distraction. Yes, nothing is perfect. This should however not take focus away from the main point: lots of systems (all of them basically) are MUCH better than the current US one.
Just because we can't get a -perfect- result is no reason not to go for a BETTER result than the one we have today.
This guy is dead wrong. He thinks his voting system escapes Arrow's result because it allows "scoring" rather than "ranking." This is utter nonsense. Ranking can be viewed as a particular kind of scoring, i.e., it's possible for everyone to "score" the candidates in such a way that the information on each ballot is equivalent to a "ranked" vote. Since, as this bonehead acknowledges, Arrow's theorem applies to ranking methods, it applies to scoring methods as well, since ranking is a particular kind of scoring. In other words, if your voting system allows "scoring" then it's possible for everyone to simply score the candidates in a way that is equivalent to ranking them. So unless the voting method bars people from scoring the candidates in a "ranked" way (which would be completely absurd), moving to a scoring system cannot avoid Arrow's theorem. This point is common knowledge in social choice theory.
Let me say it again, in a different way: if there is no solution to a particular set of cases, then there is no solution to a broader set of cases that includes that smaller set. This should be obvious.
Here's what the fool wrote/said, in case anyone is curious: "For decades, there was almost a kind of despair among voting theorists of getting any better system than we had. What's interesting, though, is that the impossibility theorem doesn't apply to systems where you score the candidates rather than rank them. With scoring, you're essentially filling out a report card--if you think there are two candidates who deserve four stars you can give them both four stars--whereas with ranking you have to artificially give one a number one and one a number two. That turns out to be crucial."
Also, some here have criticized some of the conditions of Arrow's theorem, in particular, IIA. Unfortunately, criticisms of IIA are largely misunderstood. Even the philosopher Michael Dummett, who wrote a rather large book on voting theory, gets it wrong. IIA is best understood as the condition that the only information we are going to take into account is that which is present on the ballot; we will not, e.g., ask people whether they hate their "last choice," whether they love their "first choice," where they'd place Stalin or Hitler in the ranking, and so on.
Oops, you're right.
I originally just saw 'English speaking', but they're all the way English in the example.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I have some open-source software that implements STV, IRV, Condorcet, approval, and other voting systems (but not range voting) called OpenSTV. You can download it from http://stv.sourceforge.net/ and you can also download some ranked ballots from US elections to see how the various voting systems work.
duhwha?
So much so that it is located in two differen countries. I suspect the use of the term "ulster" really means the 6 counties of the 9 county province of Ulster that comprise "Northern Ireland"? ;)
Offtopic nitpicking.
brevity I do not think it means what you think it means... "concise and exact use of words in writing or speech"
I suspect you meant to say levity, "humor or frivolity"
Either way it's the wrong word... Your post was neither a concise restatement nor was it humorous. Though I agree the original summary does sound a bit smug and a tad disconnected from reality.
I love my sig.
The human element, if you will.
There is no party discipline in the states - no party organization - no ideology, no ethnic, religious or class alignments - as anyone born under a parliamentary system would understand it.
The Republican who wins in New York isn't the Republican who wins in Iowa.
Labels like "Socialist," "Green" and "Libertarian" live and die with the charismatic politicians who try to give them meaning. The "Right to Life" candidate for city council discovers that his real job is to decide whether to replace the traffic light on Third and Main.
The american political party is always a coalition.
There is the illusion of continuity in the major parties because the american voter has always been centrist or center-right, by any reasonable definition.
The american political system is centrist by design.
The strong bicameral legislature is the norm in the states. Representation by population in the House. Representation by regions in the Senate.
The Executive is important. Constitutional restraints are important. The courts are important. Nothing much gets accomplished unless you can build a broad consensus for action.
The american voter, like the american sports fan, does not like split decisions, a complex ballot or instant replay. "Close only counts in horseshoes."
He may vote a stalemate between a Republican President and a Democratic Congress.
But he will turn on a politician or a party that contests the results.
Can't you "game" approval voting by voting that you don't approve of a candidate you would in fact accept but who might beat someone you prefer?
The USA is not the world, or even "the west" (unless you compare it exclusively to the people east of you). I don't know a single country in the world that uses the USA's retarded single-round winner-takes-all system. In pretty much every european country, presidential elections have a second round, where people whose favourite candidate didn't make it to the top 2 get a chance to vote for their least hated candidate. Imagine this situation:
1st round (candidate / percentage of votes)
1. Adolf Hitler / 25
2. Mahatma Gandhi / 24
3. Abraham Lincoln / 18
4. Anonymous Coward / 18
5. CowboyNeal / 15
What happens in the USA? Hitler wins. Okay, it's better than what they have now, but still pretty bad. This means you'll never get a strong "third candidate", because his presence could make the "wrong" guy win.
In nearly any other country, what happens is you have a _second_ round, between the two most voted candidates. This means extremist candidates are very unlikely to be elected. If this could be done in the USA, the second round would probably go something like this:
1. Mahatma Gandhi / 52
2. Adolf Hitler / 48 (this is the USA, after all, and Hitler was white and talked tough)
Oh, and most of the world uses this thing called paper ballots, and pens, where people draw an "X" inside a square. It's really cheap, takes a lot of work to fake, and can be recounted manually at any time. And the votes are counted with a representative from each campaign present, so any complaints are dealt with right there, they don't get dragged for 6 months. It usually takes less than 24 hours to get national results.
Maybe you USAians should consider "upgrading" to this 2nd century technology.
And, most of all, stop pretending that the rest of the world (or the "western world" or whatever) is as clueless as you are.
It's not a dupe. The article is new, the article talks about voting methods not considered in the article you think it's a dupe of.
Since I submitted the article, I'd like to clarify some things as well.
1) I didn't make the headline, but I did lead it on with my last sentence. Plurality voting is fundamentally a western concept. That some parts of the west have moved on doesn't mean that it's not western.
2) The article doesn't discuss multi-seat/plurality elections. Range voting doesn't work well for proportional representation compared to single-transferable-voting, for example, or even the method-of-equal-proportions. The context of its discussion is in single-seat elections. I actually think Condorcet voting works better than IRV for single seat elections, but for multi-seat elections, I prefer STV (the general, multi-seat method for IRV) because STV distributes minority opinions better. I'm not a big fan of party-list elections, because it's less direct than STV, but I think even that's better than plurality voting. In the US, the Congressional House of Representatives is primarily a regional-based Proportional Representation, so it IS a form of PR, but regional PR is not very effective at representing broadly held minority opinions.
3) Since Range Voting hasn't been supported by as many as IRV or Condorcet, I thought it was good to promote it in a submission to slashdot for discussion. We should consider whatever method works best for the situation at-hand. In terms of Bayesian Regret, Range Voting looks interesting, so I thought it had something going for it beyond the typical Arrow's Theorem cluster of discussions that dominated discussion of the other methods.
Even within the US, there are many different types of voting. Let's have a little glimpse at how complex the voting procedure can be for electing a president. For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the Independent "Party."
Beginning with the Caucuses, a voter has the opportunity to vote in either:
A) The Democratic Caucus
B) The GOP Caucus
In the Democratic Caucus, each candidate must have at least 15(?)% of the precinct's vote in order to get representation. If (s)he does not, then those votes are redistributed.
In the GOP Caucus, there is no redistribution/re-voting, if a candidate initially gets 3% of the precinct's vote, then that is how much of the vote (s)he receives.
Voters choose which candidates they wish to represent each party, but can only participate in 1 caucus. Once the candidates are elected for the parties, then voters choose between which party (because there is only one candidate for each party.) At this point, voting becomes very simple. However, starting from the beginning, there are many ways one can vote.
Overview:
A - Winner amongst x-z
x
y
z
B - Winner amongst u-w
u
v
w
Let's say someone has xPyPz, and uPvPw, where x is strictly preferred to y
Because of transitivity, xPz and uPw
Then let's include a comparison between the A's and B's.
xPyPzPuPvPw
So voter i strictly prefers A to B.
Initially, one might conclude that because x is i's favorite candidate, that the voter would participate in A's caucus and give their vote to x. However, there may be an instance where i participates in B's caucus.
Let's say that the polls are showing that the overall population's preferences are uIvPyIzPxPw, where the population is indifferent between u&v,y&z, prefers u&v to y&z, x is the second least-liked outcome, and the population absolutely does not want w to win.
In this instance, it would be beneficial for voter i to participate in B's caucus and vote for w. If enough i's do this, then the the preference order for B will become:
(1) w
(2) u,v - u and v tie for second and lose the nomination.
This process, while hurting i in the sense that (s)he can not experience total satisfaction, is better off than voting for any candidate within pool A in round 1 (the Caucus round.)
This concept is called "Sophisticated Voting," and this is one demonstration of how the whole presidential election could be skewed. Add in people who strictly prefer B to A, and then this gets incredibly more complex.
The whole voting process (in general, not just the one used by the US), are actually very interesting. We only covered a few in one of my Economics courses, but it was interesting to read Economic journal articles and books about things like Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Condorcet Procedures, and the like. I strongly recommend you all to take an Economics course that covers this type of material if given the opportunity, because I think it's far more interesting than the typical stuff covered in typical Micro and Macro courses.
That's a good point, and a great reason why a two-party system is preferable to a multi-party system. In fact, I'd go so far as to say we should take the final step and simply abolish one of the parties altogether and stop voting entirely - there's no chance any election could ever go wrong anymore if we simply don't have any!
The main reason to oppose voting on laws rather than lawmakers is because the sheer number of votes required would quickly turn 99% of the voters into non-voters. That might be an argument in its favor because requiring a minimum turnout would quickly reduce the number of laws enacted, but you also have the problem of generating the laws to vote on -- since we are doing away with lawmakers, we'd have to have a scaled up version of California's initiative process, where you gather signatures on a petition. That would result in probably hundreds of petitions circulating at any given moment, most poorly worded and some at odds with each other.
It's a recipe for disaster.
Infuriate left and right
The author is either using a very peculiar form of Condorcet with reversals, or is just confused.
Suppose 50 people prefer C to B, 51 people prefer B to A, and 776 people prefer A to C. If you prefer C to B to A, there's *nothing you can do* to make C win (the author claims you can make C win)--the 776 margin is too large to be reversed, regardless of how the margin is counted. All you can do is influence whether A or B wins, since either the CB contest will get reversed (making B the winner over both C and A), or the AB contest will get reversed (making A the winner over both C and B).
It is true that if you count the number of places between the two and use that to score the preference--i.e. C vs. A would give two points in favor of C if B is in between--you create a pressure to place the candidates farther apart from each other than you really believe.
But the solution is trivial. Don't do that! If C beats A, it counts as one person preferring C to A.
This yields a system where it is extremely unlikely that dishonest voting will help the voter, and thus everyone should vote honestly, and thus by the author's measures, Condorcet yields the best outcome when the voters vote maximally in their own interest.
In NC both houses of the legislature and the governor's mansion are held by Democrats, but Bush still won the state 56/43 in 2004. State politics != federal politics.
The number of links in the summary should give you a tip. Plenty of theories, most of them without real proof.
I provided all those links for a reason. Not the point you are trying to make...No voting system will be perfect while we keep voting for people instead of issues. Instead of inventing ever more complicated systems for choosing representatives, why not develop a system where every person is allowed to give an opinion on the law articles themselves?
But, you do bring up a valid point, however such a system does exist: The Green Party's system of "modified consensus process". It's quite complicated and can make issues drag on for a while, but the modifications allow the consensus process to fall back once all dissenting comments have been heard. It also requires facilitation to integrate compromise proposals so that real consensus can often be reached without polarizing a majority vs a minority. In modified consensus, the majority still is able to win (depending on the election threshold the particular group uses as its modified fallback percentage), but the minority will get heard and allow the process to drag on until all their issues are out in the open. I'm the appointed Parliamentarian for the Oregon Pacific Green Party, and this is the process we use.
Also, ballot measure initiatives are very popular in the Pacific Northwest (where I live, if you didn't know where Oregon was, exactly). Anybody can bypass the legislature completely for either statutory or constitutional measures (but the courts can still declare them unconstitutional, as has happened frequently). Assisted suicide and medical marijuana legalizatoin in Oregon, for example, came about through the initiative process. However, there are still the majority of cases that can be resolved by professional representatives. The major problem with direct democracy is that it can take a lot of time. Sometimes it's effective to not use direct democracy for everything. It's still important to have direct democracy as a fallback in case the legislature abrogates its responsibilities.
Depending on the circumstances, either of those two methods would work well. The first in small groups, and the second in much larger groups.
Yes you can. Because by offering the option to "downweight" your vote, and implying that that is the "right" way, it gives more power to those who discourteously exagerrate their vote. "Nice" people are effectively disenfranchised.
Please try to separate "decision-making procedures" from "participating politically into our society". The former has to do with voting schemes, the later is about true (direct?) democracy and does not preclude any specific procedure.
Indeed, the flexibility to choose among procedures would be an integral part of a direct democracy.
Also Joe Average is the guy next to you. If you consider him stupid, then allow me to consider you stupid as well, and stop listening to your suggestions. But it is my stance to want to improve society along with its citizens. Therefore i prefer participatory systems that educate Joe Average.
Besides, how can you stand for juries? According to your attitude, we should delegate juridical decisions to the "specialists", the judges?
As for the Tennessee example: what's artificial about it? Nothing would stop someone for voting 100/100 for one person and 0 for everybody else, giving that vote the same impact as it would have in a plurality system; there's just more nuance available for those who want to use it.
There is still probably some reliance on how viable voters think that most of the candidates are. If I like A the most, B second, down to E the least, E is definitely getting a 0 from me. If E has no chance of winning, I can safely give D a 0 as well. But if E has some chance of winning, I need to weigh whether giving D a slightly positive score, in case D and E are the frontrunners, is worth risking the cases where D is a frontrunner with some other candidate. That depends on an estimate of relative viability.
Perhaps you are correct, but it seems to me that it is a part of human nature to do everything they can to enforce their view on the world. By that I mean that I foresee a system where people will do max/min voting just to give their preferred candidate more of an edge, even though it may cost their secondary candidates any chance of winning.
In a sense, you can game approval voting just as you say. But it turns out to be very benign gaming. It simply means the voter adjusts his or her threshold of approval, based on circumstances. Suppose we held the Democratic primaries with approval voting. Then the ABC crowd could approve all the candidates except Clinton, and the Clinton crowd could approve Clinton only. Without Clinton in the race, or if Clinton simply didn't appear to be a viable candidate, the ABC crowd would probably just vote for their favorite two or three candidates, and the Clinton crowd would vote their favorite two or three. This sort of strategizing can indeed change the outcome, but voters are unlikely to regret their strategies. Also, in this scenario, in fact in ANY approval voting scenario, nobody ever has an incentive to disapprove their second choice while approving their third choice. Thus, voters are always honest about the preferences they do express in such a system.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Arrgh. You can't really measure strengths of preferences among individuals in a 2-candidate election (and with more than 2 candidates, you can't measure those strengths either, but with the additional information contained in the ballots -- if they aren't lone-mark plurality ballots -- you can begin to hypothesize). People with very weak preferences will just sit it out. You have to assume that those who do care to vote have strong preferences. There's no fair and accurate way to determine that voter A's preference is stronger than voter B's. The fact that they bothered to vote entitles them to have their vote counted on an equal basis with the other voters.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
I live in Switzerland and it has a direct democracy system, and I do not think it is the worst system. The reality is that you actually get a middle of the road system.
You fear that there would be a tyranny of Joe Average with his church learning, when I really doubt that would happen. The problem right now in the American system is that it is not proportional representation. Look at the senators, 2 from each state. Compare California, and Iowa... A bit of a difference. Yes there is the house of representatives, but with gerry-menadering things have become quite warped.
Look at the New England states. They have quite a bit of direct democracy. Has it hurt them? Or what about California? Annnorld... for a republican looks pretty democratic... I think the real reason why America would not want that is because the entire midwest would loose huge amounts of influence. It would be concentrated in California, New York, and Florida. And what are those states? You guessed it mostly democractic, or at least democratic tendencies.
What I have experienced in a direct democracy like Switzerland is that people don't vote always with the same party. They vote for the issues. So you will have people who vote on the right for many things, but on other things vote for the left. You compromise.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
One of those characteristics, incidentally, is that a candidate should never lose an election to another candidate whom a larger number of voters support. If the US had a voting system which respected that characteristic, maybe we wouldn't be in the hole we're in right now.
I am confused by use of the term "The West". The overwhelming majority of countries in what is usually termed the "West" abandoned plurality voting either last century or the century before that. Like slavery and the ancien regime, it came to be regarded as a system that had become untenable and that could be replaced by something that worked better in terms of expressing democratic interests. Only in the most of the US, and portions of Canada and the UK, is such an antiquated, simplistic system still used. That is why the current hoopla in the US over its impending voting orgy amuses me -- so much money is being spent devising better ways and techniques and propaganda to wage a political war that, compared to most other political theatre in "The West", is about as complex as a child's Punch and Judy show. Without pluralism, these people would be hopelessly adrift. All they understand is the exclusive-or and the politics of negation and attack. There is little room for negotiation, finding common ground, creating consensus, and involving as many points of view as practicable. Pluralism creates simplistic politics, and the tyranny of the largest minority. It also enables small, unaccountable ideological groups to seize control of the larger minority parties and dominate national politics to a degree undeserved by their actual, demographic political support.
Da Blog
Isn't it more like 32.7% telling 67.3%? Involvement is the biggest failing of many democracies. Unsurprisingly, low turnout suits the established parties and their petty criminals. Increase the turnout, and you may get flighty parties and higher grade criminals :)
Well, if you are from Oregon, I admire and respect you. I'm a Brazilian citizen, and this Portuguese language link lists the 81 different federal taxes in Brazil, without mentioning all the different state and city taxes we have here...
I don't really see that as a problem. Laws shouldn't be seen as an immediate solution to a pressing problem. Laws are, by definition, general rules of conduct applicable to an indefinite number of future cases. Decisions that must be made immediately are executive decrees, and those are a different matter. That's why democracies have separation of powers.
The Legislative branch creates laws, the Executive branch does what laws say, and the Judicial branch tells if laws are being correctly applied. I think that's a pretty efficient system, but IMHO the Legislative branch is the one most needing a reform today.
In the US you have a district system, where representatives are elected by district and senators are elected by a state majority system. In Brazil we have a proportional system, where both senators and representatives are elected in a (somewhat involved) system where votes from the whole state are considered. I believe the US system is slightly better, because in Brazil we tend to elect too many representatives for special interests, like churches, farmers, trade unions, etc.
I believe an ideal system should allow discussion and participation from ALL citizens in creating ALL laws. It's not as if a law had a deadline to be created. Let's hear the opinions of as many people as possible before formally casting something into a formal law.
I don't think "boo hoo Gore should have won" is the point of voting reform. For me, if Perot gave the election to Clinton, then that is a problem too (even though I like Clinton).
The point for me is that due to the spoiler effect, our country is forced into two opposing parties (which normally eliminate spoilers before the general election via primaries), rather than finding candidates that are more toward the consensus. (see Duverger's_law) We have polarized government that spends more time fighting the other side than actually getting things done.
This is the bad thing. Not that Gore lost.
Maybe, but maybe not. When min/max'ers see that candidates that are completely opposed to themselves keep getting elected, they may start to give a few points to acceptable secondary candidates.
This is an idea for a balanced voting system.
As you note, there's a problem with systems where you can give candidates a certain rating, there would be the tendency to rank one candidate 10 and the others 1. This system would attempt to balance the rating system with the ranked ones, limiting the extremes of rating, while giving the voter more choice than using rank only.
You would have a number of votes, based on the number of candidates and triangular numbers, and you can give a certain number of votes to each candidate. So 4 candidates, leads to 10 votes, 5 candidates, to 15, and so on.
Say there are 3 candidates, leading to 6 votes. The maximum you can give to a candidate is the same as the number of candidates, in this case 3.
For example, Lucy votes as follows: Andy 3, Barbara 2, Clive 1. She could also vote for Andy to have 3, without giving any votes to the others.
Another example, Max only cares about Clive, and would vote 6 if possible. Because he is unable to do so, this means he has to give the others consideration. As a result, he gives Clive 3, and Barbara 1 vote.
The results are tallied, and the winning order's based on the number of votes.
This system may be subject to manipulation, and could be improved upon. Comments and critiques are appreciated.
>In it he advocates the benefits of Range Voting as a solution to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Uh, there is no 'solution' to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. That's the whole point of the theorem.
The primary system in the USA is a kind of run off system. The primaries are the 1st phase vote and the main election is between the two parties. The 3rd parties don't get a fair shot and they may have primaries as well; although, I suspect many 3rd parties have little relative trouble in picking their candidates.
If had the primary elections merged into a single one you'd have a run off system. In which case we'd be better off because none of the republicans would make it to the #2 spot. (they are all nuts except ron paul who might have a better shot in a merged primary.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Sorry. The Govinator is a RINO (Republican In Name Only). He's much more of a "Democrat" than most of the Democrats I know.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Holy crap! Most Americans posting on slashdot probably vote. Heaven help us.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
But just because a candidate makes centrist mouth-noises in the general election, doesn't mean they will actually execute centrist policy. That's the problem. The primary system forces candidates to out-extreme each other, and then they have to run to the center for the general election. They can't actually participate in a conversation about what the policies ought to be.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
When facing a choice between a turd and a douche, I want the option to vote AGAINST.
Why not? When bastards get to their Parliaments, Congresses, Diets or however they call their little club where they are paid handsomely to do nothing - they get to vote "NO".
Well, damn... I want to vote "NO" to that.
And where is the option to ban the fuckers from practicing politics after they fuck up multiple times?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You misunderstand. The whole point is to get nothing done. If they got things done, we would have a 90% tax rate and the government would be in charge of everything. There is no natual limit on the power of the US government other than their inability to do anything.
Plurality voting serves an important purpose, it moderates candidates -- and voters for that matter -- and keeps them close to the political center. Political extremists don't like it since they are locked out but that's a feature not a bug.
Laughable.
Reagan and Bush were both extremist right wing nutjobs and they were both elected to two terms.
That's not gaming the system that is voluntarily limiting your influence in exchange for a priority (The highest influence in approval voting goes to a voter that votes for 50% of the candidates).
I would consider it a fundamental part of the system, not a flaw that is gamed.
No, there are other Econ arguments about people being irrational, such as the studies that show people are vindictive (are willing to impose a cost on themselves to impose a greater cost as punishment on someone else, taking into account the value to them of deterence.) But your critique is horribly wrong. The marginal value of a dollar is used to justify why people are rational about not risking their life savings. But maybe you had a shitty Econ 101 professor.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
You're absolutely right. The problem is that people don't (usually) know what their utilities actually are, at least not in absolute terms. For example, just think of the last time you answered one of those surveys that use a Likert scale (from "completely disagree" to "completely agree"). I don't know about you, but trying to decide whether I "somewhat" agree or "completely" agree isn't always easy. The same would go for range voting. (Hmm, do I give Candidate X a 3 or a 4?)
We're somewhat better at knowing our relative utilities, but even then it's difficult to put a total order on candidates in an election. For example, I might really hate two candidates, but figuring out who I hate more might be very difficult or impossible.
The best system that takes this into account is likely Condorcet voting, but Approval voting is indeed simpler (and simplicity is important - remember Florida 2000).
If my enemy's enemy is my friend, what happens if my enemy is his own worst enemy?
Actually, I think you will find that the biggest factor driving people towards or away from the middle is not the voting system so much as whether voting is compulsory or voluntary.
Voluntary voting means you need to rile your supporters up enough to get them out to vote. A result is that candidates are driven to pander to extremist interest groups who are well organised and can deliver thousands of motivated voters.
Compulsory voting, on the other hand, drives candidates to the middle because they need to capture the middle ground in the election as everyone will be voting anyway. You can already count on the extremists voting for you (because they have to vote and would certainly not vote for the other guys).
Just look at the pandering to minority (and often extreme) interest groups that goes on in the US as a result of the 'get out the vote' imperative. Could you ever imagine an NRA gun nut voting Democrat anyway? So why do the Republicans have to pander to them? If voting were compulsory, both parties could move to more temperate positions on this (and other) issues.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You only get a set amount of points to work with. This may actually be a different already formulated voting system but I'll attempt to illustrate it anyways.
So you get 2 points for each candidate, to keep the numbers low but allow for unlimited candidates (as opposed to getting 10 points regardless of the number of candidates).
Say for instance there are 3 candidates (a b c), so each person gets 6 points to assign to their candidate choices.
Rob assigns all 6 to candidate (a)
Jill assigns 4 to candidate (a) and 2 to (b)
Steve assigns 3 to (a) 2 to (c) and 1 to (b) - for no apparent reason
Susan assigns 5 to (c) and 1 to (b)
Joe assigns 4 to (c) and 2 to (b)
a) 6 + 4 + 3 = 13
b) 2 + 1 + 1 + 2 = 6
c) 2 + 5 + 4 = 11
Candidate (a) wins, (b) comes in 2nd and (c) is third
Everyone gets to assign a majority of their points to their first choice and can optionally pick a second choice or even a third, fourth or fifth though the more choices you give support to the less your vote will count compared to someone who gives all their support to 1 option. OTOH if you give all your support to 1 candidate and he/she loses as well as the candidate you liked second best, well you had the option of using some of your points to get your second favorite elected but chose not to.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
It's great to say we should have a consensus, but where should the middle line be drawn unless there are two sides to the discussion? A spoiler candidate can only have an effect if one segment of the electorate is too far from center (Perot to the right, Nader to the left). When that happens, the affected side gets beat and has to regroup closer to the center. Say what you will about polarized government, I have to believe it's better than a single party having full control.
The VP is just a figurehead position. Giving that to the loser (with no chance of actually becoming president) would just be four years of humiliation.
Actually, nothing in your original post indicates you were trying to bring brevity to the argument. Instead you criticize without foundation. For your part, try to appreciate that people with other backgrounds, such as my own in political science occasionally try visit this site. Maybe instead of writing what you didn't say, try looking at what you did. Now go be a jackass somewhere else please.
The real loser is the idea that we should even be voting. While I have great sympathy for the idea that I should be able to cast a vote in the process to determine which tyant will rule over me, nevertheless it always ends up with tyrants ruling over me. The only solution I can see, short of the anarchy, is extreme decentralization of government. If your local city council turns out to be a bunch of petty dictators out to milk the taxes, you can always move a few miles away. But if it's your national government it's a hell of a lot harder to move away. The larger the government, the harder it is to escape.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Maggie was the PM with the biggest balls, but did she also manage to redraw boundaries in USA too?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The point of the system in use in the US is to ensure that as little as possible is actually accomplished.
So, the Interstates, the Internet, Social Security, and the Manhattan Project were little accomplishments?
People in the US have forgot, or been convinced to forget, what government of the people, by the people, and for the people can actually accomplish. This has happened before - a massive immigration of anti-tax, individualistic, anti-urban Germans so utterly changed the conception of the "res publica" that the Western Roman Empire simply faded away despite the best intentions and self-interest of everyone concerned. People stopped believing that they should pay taxes to build roads, public works, and to maintain the security of transnational trade. The new arrivals believed that their taxes should be light, and spent locally, with nothing going to remote urban centres. They simply stopped believing in the idea of Rome, and within a couple of centuries the infrastructure collapsed or was destroyed and unrepaired to such a degree that a massive economic depression swept Europe. The idea of the res publica, or Republic, would not take hold again until the 14th century.
Da Blog
From memory, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem applies to voting systems satisfying the following criteria:
(1) an individual vote is a consistent (i.e., acyclic) set of preferences between candidates (i.e., a possibly constrained set of "I prefer A to B" statements);
(2) the result of the election is a consistent set of preferences between candidates;
(3) [majority rule] if all voters prefer A to B then the result must prefer A to B;
(4) [independence] whether or not C is a candidate should not be able to prejudice the relative preference between A and B.
Arrow's theorem shows that the only voting scheme satisfying these criteria is a dictatorship (i.e., only one distinguished voter's preferences count).
These criteria seem entirely reasonable to me. While range voting is not subject to Arrow's theorem (voters assign scores to candidates rather than preferences between candidates), it does not respect criterion (3), which I find rather unpalatable.
It never ceases to amuse me when occupants of yet another historically and socially insignificant country look down their noses and sniff at the USA. Statements such as "any system is better than the West's out-dated plurality voting system" really should produce stomach-cramping guffaws from those with even the most rudimentary understanding of global history. The framers of the constitution of the United States were arguably the most brilliant men of their time, and for a great deal of time afterwards. The system they created produced the most economically, socially, and militarily powerful country in history. All attempts at the vaunted theories of Marx have crumbled when put to the test against the USA. Even the mighty Soviet Union is just a memory, and without a single shot fired. Anyone who argues otherwise is simply incapable of being objective.
On the surface, their system seems to reduce voter choice and eliminate any chance for new ideas. But in truth it builds in something other systems do not - decisiveness. Nothing is more important in leadership or any other form of conflict resolution. (For those ignorant of the theory - see here and learn about the "decision loop" - http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000172.html). Everything else is just leadership by committee, a complete oxymoron.
Of course, one can argue that it's not perfect, but in a way it is - because the system has built in mechanisms for self-correction. No form of government can survive unless it can adapt, and the USA has proven the most adaptable. Frankly, there is no end in sight for the success of the USA, because they are capable of both change and decisiveness. The rest of the world has only a few choices - join, mimic, oppose, die or be relegated to the trash heap of history.
And before you start up the flame throwers you should know that I'm not an American, just someone can put his petty pride aside and recognize a superior system.
Polity and Custom of the Camiroi, by R. A. Lafferty. Laws were wikis, bad ones got reverted quickly, and one visitor who entered a law restricting the system to qualified people got reverted immediately. The visitor was informed that yes, the law could be re-entered, but that the guy who reverted it was "very good with the ritual sword".
Ah, standard naive mantra.
What does happen if "nothing gets done"? The default scenario of humanity isn't peace and prosperity. Power doesn't cease to exist. In the absence of government, power goes to whoever can take it by force.
The reason range voting evades Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is discussed here: http://RangeVoting.org/ArrowThm.html
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is based on the premise that the purpose of a social welfare system (voting system) is to combine everyone's set of preferences into a set of preferences for society. It's true that this can't be done perfectly. (It's like trying to represent information from 300 million dimensions losslessly in one dimension.)
...but who cares? That's not a rational goal anyway, as Arrow proved. A better goal is to give everyone an equal opportunity to influence the final outcome. And hey, our current system does exactly that. Everyone knows how the votes will be counted. Everyone has a symmetric/equal (or nearly equal, due to the electoral college) opportunity to game the system.
...and the best thing about a goal based on giving everyone a fair chance to game the system is: smart people have more influence. The only thing Arrow's Impossibility Theorem did was make people think a perfectly functional system was somehow broken because it didn't satisfy some impossible goal that was subtly irrational anyway. And now people are trying to fix a system that ain't broke.
Around the beginning of the last election cycle the Mensa Bulletin had an interesting article on psephology. Each of the voting methods were voted on using each method, with the weirdly negative result that no voting method won using its own methodology.
The ancient Athenians (those were the first to devise the term "democracy") insisted that "voting procedures" tend to select those candidates that the public considers them best suited for the job - that is, the "aristoi", the best, hence "aristocratic" measure.
In contrast, democratic measures such as "sortition", educate the members of the "public" and transform them into "citizens" by assigning to them various public tasks.
Whatever the results of this conversation might be, it will not guide us by itself to democracy - nevertheless. participating into conversations about such matters, and acting upon their outcomes, is a genuine democratic behavior.
In general, democracy is not about procedures (Russia has elections also).
Parent is dead on. You should be allowed to not wear a seatbelt if and only if you pay a highly financially sound insurance company to cover all plausible costs for your medical care if you get in an accident - and all disability payments you might get for the same reason.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Kinda like range voting (I guess...)
The range being -1 to 1 with 0 as "Don't care"
so voting -1 for a candidate causes their overall score to go down, while voting 1 makes it go up, and 0 has no effect.
this allows a "disagree" vote as well as "agree"
you vote on each candidate in the list, if you don't care about one, your vote for that candidate is 0 and doesn't do anything.
tally it up and the candidate with the highest score wins...
Whaddya think?
"I've done cried me a thousand tears over how you've taken mah vote away"
"Losing yer vote is like havin' a bucking bronco break yer back"
"I'd vote for you but I'm too redneck to hold a pen"
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
New York City had Republican Mayors and the state had a Republican Govenor in 2000 and 2004, but it still went blue in both federal elections. NY, MA and CA Republicans != IA, AZ, and FL Republicans.
While it might be a good idea to have a run-off election when no candidate receives a majority of votes, that's not the system we have. Furthermore, our system combines representative democracy with federalism.. it's not "America", it's "the United States of America". The states count. you can't discount them, you can't make them go away, and you can't change the rules of the Electoral College. So from time to time we will elect presidents who win a majority of electoral votes, but less than a majority of individual votes. It does not intrinsically favor either party, but it does give power to voters in smaller states who would otherwise be overwhelmed by the big states. History is replete with examples of minor parties that disappeared when their ideas were adopted by the major parties. The Whigs became the Republicans by incorporating the ideas of the Free Soil Party. The Peoples Party (the original Populists) were coopted by the Democrats, so lost all their strength between 1892 and 1896. The present-day Democrats have adopted most of the Green Party platform.
There's no need for a separate runoff election -- IRV, Condorcet, and most of the other systems described in TFA moot the need.
And yes, the states count -- but there are serious negatives caused by that system. It's the reason folks can't vote for the 3rd party they prefer without losing the ability to have their preference between the Big Two counted -- and effectively locking the country into a two-party system (with, yes, good ideas occasionally adopted from elsewhere -- but no serious chance of power moving outside the major-party circles).
(Incidentally, I think Range Voting is a pretty good idea -- but as a minor implementation tweak, I'd move the range to be -100 to 100 [defaulting to 0] rather than 0 to 100, to encourage individuals to leave space in the range to distinguish between candidates they have no particular reason to support and candidates they strongly oppose).
...and yes, I realize that we can't get to anything significantly better without amending the Constitution. That's not impossible; it's been done a great many times, and may well be done again. Politically impossible in the current climate mayhaps, but implementation difficulty is no reason for folks to stop discussing good ideas -- if people never so much as proposed or supported difficult things, much good would be left undone.
You're not taking Arrow seriously enough. The combination of a primary and a 2-party final election is itself a multi-party election and can be gamed like any other multi-party election. Consider that it's identical to a single election where each ballot consists of: some votes for the primary (however you planned to run that) and a set of final votes (one for every possible outcome of the primary). Now, you may like such a runoff voting system (it is after all one of the alternatives), but your proposal is no different than using one of these alternative voting systems for the whole election.
(4) is the one I named IIA (so-called "independence of irrelevant alternatives"), that seems potentially unrealistic in the real world. Simply listing additional candidates on the ballot can easily have a significant psychological effect on the voter. For instance, if David Duke makes the ballot there could easily be a psychological effect about what the rest of the country is thinking, which could affect how someone chooses to rank 2 other candidates relative to each other--even if the only difference is that he's listed on one ballot and not the other (and in both cases has the same national support) a real perception effect is likely.
Likewise, even if the Republican candidate has very small support (say in a very liberal state), listing him on the ballot could easily tilt how voters choose between, say, the Green and Democratic candidates; while the Republican might not have a real shot in the race either way, that doesn't mean that the simple listing of that candidate on the ballot doesn't affect people's preferences between the other 2 candidates.
The fact that it seems unrealistic and that real-life voting systems exists that don't violate any of the other axioms (but do violate IIA) leads me to believe that perhaps IIA is not part of what people in real life would expect from a fair voting system.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Oh, well if you say it's certain, I guess there is no need for a debate on the benefits of the Western system!
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I'm sorry, WHAT?
It was my understanding, that the entire purpose of democracy was that the majority would rule; All the way back to Athens this has been the rule: The person who gets the most stone (votes) wins. I personally think we should carry this idea further, and have it cover legislation too: Any bill must get at least 50% of voters to vote for it (maybe more?). That way, laws would better represent what the people want.
Are you suggesting that we should abandon this, and give the least popluar candidate the win, even when more people support his opponent?
IMDB uses range voting for its movies and it's been taken over by special interests. New movies get hyped cheaply by the studios and producers paying blocs of professional voters and commenters so that every new film winds up with sky-high ratings. Newly opened Sweeney Todd is 146th all-time. Christian voters hype up non-controversial feel-good family values (how do you think Shawshank Redemption is number 1 or 2 film). Film school fanboys vote up the latest director they learned about in class and since they are the only ones that actually watch obscure Orson Welles movies - these are also top 250 material.
And these abuses are there despite some mechanisms designed to reduce the effect of extreme votes. Think of what this bloc/special interest voting would be like in a political system that mattered...
The totally free argument is ancient as is the counterpoint. All places have restrictions, it just varies depending on the place's history. The only place that's completely free is a warzone or so deep in the desert/ocean that no government can be stuffed exerting influence. The ultimate problem with living in such a place is that people being to exercise their freedoms, which inevitably impact the people around them.
For example, you might have no problems burning dead leaves in your backyard. But your neighbours may, now if you lived in a government area, there would be laws limiting or banning such activities to strike a balance; if you're completely free otoh, how do you resolve this with your neighbours? Same for noise. Same for insurance, if you get sick, if your family can't pay the expenses; is it ok for you to suffer?
For me, I love this country. The measure of a government is how it cares for it's people. I have enough freedom to really enjoy my life and enough protections to insure the freedoms of others don't cause problems for me. I admit I'd like to have free-er gun laws but I like the current administration and I suspect our electoral system has something to do with that.
How do you kill that which has no life?
Reread the line you quoted; you've obviously misparsed it.
The problem I refer to is that it's possible in the US for a candidate who loses the popular vote to nonetheless win the bulk of the electoral college and thus the election; indeed, we've seen this happen in recent history. This is even more true when you take into account that voters who select 3rd party candidates are unable to express their preferences between the 1st party candidates, and that these preferences are thus unheeded.
That said, I don't agree that a direct democracy is appropriate in a nation with as many minority groups (not in the racial/ethnic sense) as the United States -- see "tyranny of the majority".
Your stem-cell argument is just wrong.
Bush was the first US president to push for and get approved federal money specificly for stem-cell research. You have other Republican canidates pushing for increased stem-cell research and other Republican leaders have setup tax free areas for stem-cell research.
Or if you agree that you can be euthanised and have your various organs harvested and distributed to those who can pay their medical bills or have the appropriate insurance policy.
I don't think you can solve this problem by choosing another voting method. Stupid people tend to elect stupid politicians in an indirect democracy or vote for stupid laws in a direct democracy. Garbage in, garbage out.
And the seatbelt-less driver who is ejected from their vehicle in a head-on collision, and goes through the windshield of the other car to break that driver's neck? What of them?
And the driver who is thrown out of their seat from a minor accident, and unable to control their vehicle as it careens into oncoming traffic? What of them?
Seatbelt laws do not only protect the wearer of the seatbelt.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Some states have laws against that, and they work quite well. Compare the district boundaries in Iowa to those in Georgia.
Constitutionally Correct
I disagree, at least with respects to the United States. The Executive has taken powers that it was never supposed to have. The only reform that the Legislative Branch needs is to grow a pair of balls and start restraining the power of the Executive.
Unfortunately party seems to matter more then principle and I'm guessing that if you see a Democrat win you won't see the Democrats in Congress whining about the Executive overstepping it's authority. Ditto if a Republican wins.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
And therein lies one of the problems with Democracy -- the tyranny of the majority.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
With careful selection of examples one can "prove" anything. The stability issues in both France and Germany has nothing to do with lack of two party system. Bringing in Germany is also stretching it a bit far. They had one republic, the Weimar republic, which failed due to lack of checks and balances and a very special economic situation. Had the economic situation not been what it was it might very well have survived.
Quite to the contrary the American political system is proven quite unstable. America is stable not because of its system but despite of it. In surveys it has been shown that parliamentary systems are always far more stable governments than presidential ones. Long democratic traditions and absences of considerable economic and military threat has protected the government.
I think you can pick almost any other European country and it will have an equally good record of stability with a multi party system: Switzerland, Holland, Nordic countries etc.
Folks you are all forgetting your short term history here. Do none of you remember the Florida vote in the last two elections? Things like "hanging chads" etc? The majority of us American's can barely make a distinct selection when there are only two choices, how does anyone expect us to be able to assign a weight to each of the candidates and make it possible to verify that it was counted right?
Variable weighting also makes it much easier for the corrupt few to distort the results and steal an election.
>Might as well just go with the simpler Approval voting... It's simpler, and >more effective in my experience. I partially agree. The most effective strategy under Range voting is to always vote max or min score for each candidate that you think is a real contender to win. Any other vote could be considered a partial abstention. If the voting instructions are poor or minimal many voters will accidentally partially abstain which will understandably make them angry. But if the instructions are well written then I do not think that this will happen to a significant degree. I like Approval voting but I see allowing partial abstentions as being a small improvement. I don't like the idea of encouraging frequent accidental partial abstentions so my support for Range Voting is very sensitive to the context and voting instructions. Some more of my thoughts on this: http://allaboutvoting.com/2008/01/07/our-voting-system-is-a-loser/ See also the Range Voting advocacy site's comparison of Range vs. Approval and make up your own mind: http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html
Follow my election reform blog at AllAboutVoting.com
(reposted comment with correct formatting)
>Might as well just go with the simpler Approval voting... It's simpler, and
>more effective in my experience.
I partially agree. The most effective strategy under Range voting is to
always vote max or min score for each candidate that you think is a real
contender to win. Any other vote could be considered a partial abstention.
If the voting instructions are poor or minimal many voters will accidentally
partially abstain which will understandably make them angry. But if the instructions
are well written then I do not think that this will happen to a significant degree.
I like Approval voting but I see allowing partial abstentions as being a small improvement. I don't like the idea of encouraging frequent accidental partial abstentions so my support for Range Voting is very sensitive to the context and voting instructions.
Some more of my thoughts on this:
http://allaboutvoting.com/2008/01/07/our-voting-system-is-a-loser/
See also the Range Voting advocacy site's comparison of Range vs. Approval and make up your own mind:
http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html
Follow my election reform blog at AllAboutVoting.com
For those outside of these united States, (and many within), let me explain what we have here: We have a federal republic of 50 States, each of which is technically more independent than Britain or France in the EU (though the central government has been working against this since the 1913 amendments) In order for us to have one country, instead of several, there was a compromise between the large (populous) States and the small States. The large States insisted on one head-of-family, one vote, the small States insisted on one State, one vote; each thus favoring themselves over the other. The compromise was that the House of Representatives would be populated based upon population, by majority vote in each district in each State, and the Senate would be populated based upon State, with the Senators chosen (and replaceable) by the several State legislatures. The 17th amendment in 1913 violated the Large State-Small State compromise in part, by changing the Senate to plurality vote. The Democrats, led by She Who Must Not Be Named and the Nobel Fleece Prize laureate Al Gore, wish to totally destroy the compromise, giving all electoral power to California and New York. Were they to succeed, the compromise that made this country possible would be over, and the rest of the several States would be justified in leaving. Could our system be better? Probably. The Founding Fathers insisted on no parties what so ever, but we have in effect a two-party system, each being an insane sort of parliament of factions. If the lower house of representatives were turned into a national parliament, and the Senate returned to the control of the several States, and the federal government once more limited in power by the Constitution, we might have something a lot fairer and more workable - and a lot less likely to be able to attempt empire.
I support seat belt laws because I don't want to pay the huge costs of caring for a parapalegic. In spite of that I await your posting of real examples of "death by flying driver".
I have NEVER read of an example of what you claim. And if it has ever happened it would be an extremely rare event.
That use of the term "UK" really means "England"
We have a somewhat weired system of partial devoloution in the UK where there is a british parliment and then the scotish parliment (not sure what ireland has if anything) and welsh assembly which make some descisions independently.
The result is that for example english people have no say in say university fees in scotland but scottish people do have a say in such issues for england.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Ya know, it's one level of thinko when I type something incorrectly.
It's another level when I reread it several times, knowing that a reasonable person has parsed it a specific way, and still think that it's correct.
Mea culpa.
Do you think names mean anything more than names anyways? As far as I can tell the Democrats are Republicans and visa-versa for most intents and purposes. Sure, they fight each other, but it's primarily for the sake of empire building. Not because they stand for anything particular. They all pretty much agreed on the war, for example. You can find people on each side of the fence with the same views, and people on the same side of the fence with different views. It's just about names. Republicans are supposed to vote Republican and hate Democrats, and visa-versa. Big Endian, Little Endian.
Anyways, I try to pick individual candidates based on their individual views. My two favorites at the moment are Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.
Cheers.
I assume that by this:You are referring to the 2000 election, with special regard to Florida. I feel I must point out to you, that George W. Bush won the election, even in EVERY SINGLE ILLEGAL and convoluted recounting method dreamed up by Gore's supporters in weeks and months following the election. Again, and again durring that election the news-media (television news, especially) did everything in their power to support Gore, including calling the election for Gore, before the polls had closed, and in doing so, cost Bush tens of thousands of votes. On average, it took the television news stations less time to give Gore states he had lost than it took for them to give Bush states he had won.
Personally, I'm glad Bush won; I know Gore would not have been able to handle certian events nearly as well as Bush has done. Going off topic a bit, but on the subject of the wars that we, The United States of America, are fighting in the middle east: We have a choice, do we want to live in an Islamic theocracy or not? I choose not, and therefore, I wholeheartedly support the continuation of these aforementioned wars, until the governments of the affected countries can stand on their own against the threat of terroristic Islamic opposition. The question of whether or not we should have gone war is, at this point, moot. We made that decision with full support from both major political parties. And, as a consequence of that decision, we must remain until the affected countries can stand on their own. As for bringing in the UN, this is a stupid idea: for proof of this, look no further than the rebuilding from WWII: Japan was sucessfully rebuilt (solely under U.S. supervision) in far less time, and at far lower cost than Europe, which was overseen by the U.S. and her 'allies.'
Back on-topic: As to this "tyranny of the majority" that you mention, I ask this: Which is better, to have a country governed by the will of the majority, or the will of the minority? I would argue, that it is better for the majority to be in charge; to see evidence of this, look no farther than the M.P.A.A./R.I.A.A.: They are a minority doing their best (and succeding for the most part) to effect their will upon the majority (us) to the detriment of the majority (us). If the laws were not in favor of the minority (recording industry), and rather in the favor of the majority (us), we would be much better served.
Why don't you go look up the Deacons for Defense? Here are a couple of links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335034/
http://www.amazon.com/Deacons-Defense-Resistance-Rights-Movement/dp/0807857025/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199740596&sr=8-3
Blacks in the south who used guns to defend themselves from a corrupt government -- state, county, city elected officials, police, judges -- who were in league with the KKK. They shot back and stopped the outrages, and that was the ONLY reason the federal government stepped in -- niggers with guns freaked them out.
You read up on them, and then tell me guns have no use except evil. You explain how blacks defending themselves against a corrupt oppressive government is anything but good, and then explain to me how all the patronizing whites looked the other way and pretended Martin Luther King completed his march to Selma without armed patrols around the nightly camps.
You nanny staters with your smug patronizing attitude that individuals must defer to the almighty government, whose Supreme Court has ruled several times that police are not obligated to defend individuals -- yes, you, who think everyone should follow your moral guidelines, that you are a superior thinker for the ages and conditions can never change -- go ahead, I dare you -- read up on the Deacons for Defense and Justice of just 40 years ago, and then tell me how your patronizing smugness can prevent a repeat today.
You can't, because it will happen again, and I hope there are heroes like the Deacons to come save your sorry ass.
Infuriate left and right
No, there are other Econ arguments about people being irrational, such as the studies that show people are vindictive
The thing is, those also don't necessarily show that people are irrational because they make the some utility/money conflation that was my other point. It's entirely possible that the personal happiness people get out of not feeling ripped off or not letting someone "get one over on them" is worth more (utility-wise) to them than the monetary difference there. To its credit, the page you link discusses that possibility.
And most Econ 101 classes I've had start off on day one talking about utility, then say that to simplify they'll use dollars as the utility representation. That's fine, but then later on they present some example as why people are irrational without considering that it may actually be an example of why their own simplification sucks.
I'm certainly not saying that people behave rationally (indeed there are plenty of well-constructed economic experiments that show that they aren't), but it frustrates me to see illogical arguments lumped in with good ones. And it frustrates me to see simplified models applied poorly.
The marginal value of a dollar is used to justify why people are rational about not risking their life savings. But maybe you had a shitty Econ 101 professor.
That's entirely possible.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
But doesn't IIA just mean that the voting scheme should produce the same overall relative preference between A and B regardless of whether we consider voter preferences for C or not? That is, the voters can make their decisions however they like, but the overall preference between A and B is decided purely on the basis of the voters' preferences for A w.r.t. B (after taking transitivity into account). This seems entirely reasonable in my opinion.
My point is that the simple presence of C on the ballot can affect the preference for A vs. B. However, upon further reading I think I was misinterpreting IIA as:
(a) In a vote for A vs. B vs. C you should have the same relative outcome for A and B as in a vote for A vs. B, assuming the only change is whether C is on the ballot or not.
But it seems to actually mean:
(b) In a vote for A vs. B vs. C, the system should give the same relative results for A and B whether you discard all votes for C or count them (ie if the results without counting C are A>B, then with C it should be C>A>B, A>C>B, or A>B>C, but not, e.g., C>B>A or similar).
Which on its face seems more reasonable but I'm not sure it's obvious enough that I'd consider it a clear part of "perfect voting"; I'd guess that most people would really only care about a weaker IIA that ensured A>B>C>D + eliminating C guarantees A wins; they'd find it odd but not broken if A>D>B could result, but broken if B>A>D resulted.
But I'd also suspect that the weaker IIA implies full IIA since the result apparently holds in any 3 candidate system.
I guess I'm sold on IIA but I hardly find it as intuitive as the others.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Let's say that I'm an Obama supporter, and Obama and Hillary are in a close race. I don't mind Hillary, but I hate Edwards.
To game it, I rank Hillary artificially low so that my preferred candidate will edge out the one that I almost prefer just as much. I also honestly rank Edwards low, but probably even lower than Hillary, since I'm hoping for my man to win.
Correct. In a two-party election, if 51% of people want A over B, then the election is fair if A wins.
Unless we have some sort of fuzzy win system, wherein A gets to be president 51% of the time, and B the remainder (which would be a disaster, IMO), this is a perfectly fair election.
I'm taking it more seriously than Arrow. I think that you have to pitch the underlying assumption that people will actually vote their preferences. Because they won't -- most people are, actually, one-candidate supporters. It's basic human psycology. If I have a "Bush/Cheney 2008" flag on my front yard, due to Cognitive Dissonance and other effects I will want him to win at the expense of everyone else. If I'm an Obama supporter, I will do my best to make sure he beats Hillary in a close race, even to the extent of voting Hillary last so that he could edge her out in a Range Vote. And I'll do that even if Hillary was my 2nd choice.
I'm not sure why Range Voting is even a live option -- we've SEEN this effect happen at the Olympics all throughout the Cold War in the Ice Skating Competitions. They had to end up throwing out the top and bottom scores because the US and the USSR always cheated on their own skaters.
My statement about doing a 2 person final election, would probably eliminate a 3rd party candidate like Nader, but, well, he has never come very close to winning anyway. In the case of TR, it probably would have ended up with our first 3rd party president -- all he had to do is beat Taft.
Mainly though, I think the final election should be 2 parties more for psychological reasons than anything else. I've *read* the platform statements made by all the candidates right now, and I still can't keep track of who supports the Estate Tax, or reforming the tax code, or eliminating the cap on Social Security, or whatever. With 2 candidates, we can separate their stances much more easily.
# Could you ever imagine an NRA gun nut voting Democrat anyway? Sure. A lot of the NRA gun nuts, of which I am, voted for the current Ohio Democratic governor, he is actually pro-gun. The Republicans ran an anti-gun fool and threw away the gun nut vote. If the Democrats want to win the Ohio seats in the US Senate they need to run pro-gun candidates. The Democrats know the one and only reason they control the US Senate now is they ran MODERATE candidates, many of which were progun, or at least not obnoxiously antigun.
Spoken like a true believer. Just because the political center isn't where you want it doesn't mean it's not the center.
True, there may be a psychological reason why people do make that decision. After all, people don't make random decisions. However, whatever psychological need it fills people to be vindictive, it still is irrational. The point is that given the choice between having a dollar and not having a dollar, it is irrational not to want the dollar when you get no concrete benefit the other way. While people may behave rationally given irrational utility functions, the crux of the argument doesn't change.
Now, I have huge issues with other parts of Econ 101 where professors fail to recognize that their definitions are self-contradictory and/or the problems are entirely in their models. A perfect example of this is extolling the free-market while preaching privatization of natural resources to reduce externalities, ignoring other possibilities such as government intervention.
P.S. As a side note, I went beyond Econ 101, and I may be confusing that class with others.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
True, there may be a psychological reason why people do make that decision. After all, people don't make random decisions. However, whatever psychological need it fills people to be vindictive, it still is irrational. The point is that given the choice between having a dollar and not having a dollar, it is irrational not to want the dollar when you get no concrete benefit the other way. While people may behave rationally given irrational utility functions, the crux of the argument doesn't change.
But it's not irrational unless you define rationality as maximizing money.
If you think that going to the movies is irrational--you're giving up money for nothing--you're welcome to that opinion, but you can't expect others to necessarily agree and it's not really worth continuing a conversation since we clearly have a difference of opinion. Likewise paying a lot of money for a really tasty dinner with beautiful ambiance and presentation, a beer that will be gone in the morning, a pair of shoes that makes you feel hot, or any of a lot of other things that have no lasting value outside the psychological.
If someone goes to Vegas and knows that blackjack is 51% against them, they may still rationally bet on it if the entertainment value they get outweighs the small cost.
If someone gets entertainment value or a feeling of self worth or whatever out of punishing someone else for offering them a small amount in exchange for getting a large amount themselves (when they had the option of offering an even or less disparate split), that doesn't necessarily mean they're irrational. Utility and money aren't the same thing, and if you feel like you're going to wander around for the rest of your life thinking "man, that guy was a dick and I let him get away with it" it might be worth giving up some money for peace of mind. Even if it wasn't the other person's choice, a lot of people might feel better turning down $10 if it meant giving a total bastard a few thousand dollars; the sense of equity is likely a very valuable human trait in terms of species survival that shouldn't just be dismissed as "irrational" because it doesn't always maximize personal wealth.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
In Approval voting, you either vote for a candidate or not. So you have to chose to either vote for Hillary and Obama or to just vote for Hillary. Neither of these choices is gaming the system - they're just different expressions of how much you prefer Obama to Hillary and Hillary to Edwards. It's only gaming the system if you decided to vote for Edwards and *not* for Hillary or Obama - but there's no incentive to do that.
Now, your comment seems to be talking about Range voting - as discussed in the article. In range voting you're still expressing the same preferences - just with more detail. Again, there's no incentive to rank a candidate that you dislike higher than a candidate that you like - and how high you rank Hillary between Obama and Edwards isn't gaming the system - it's expressing your preference specifically (which is the whole point of the system).
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
As shown on rangevoting.org, this statement is false in some scenarios. The linked page presents an example (see "Theorem 4") where there are four candidates (in rapidly decreasing popularity: A, B, C, D) and a voter has preferences C>>D>B>A, but the optimum strategy is to approve of C and B while dishonestly disapproving of D, because approving of D hurts your chances of breaking a tie in favor of C.
While you're never hurt by voting for your #1 favorite in Approval, there are weaker forms of strategic dishonesty lurking in the corners.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Approval Voting and Range Voting are the same system, just quantized differently.
For example, consider the following election. A poll shows that Obama has 34% votes, Hillary has 34%, and Bush v3.0 has 32%.
An Obama supporter would probably rank his preferences this way:
Obama
Hillary
Bush v3.0
However, since (psychologically) people tend to get worked up over a single candidate, the hypothetical voter would probably vote like this in an Approval Voting scenario:
Obama (Yes)
Hillary (No)
Bush v3.0 (No)
He's an Obama supporter, so he really wants Obama to win, and figures the race is really between Hillary and Obama, so he games the system by voting no for Hillary, even though he really wants Bush to lose, and actually wouldn't mind Hillary winning quite so much.
Of course, when enough Obama and Hillary people game the system this way (which *will* happen in close elections), the votes turn out that both Obama and Hillary lose to Bush v3.0 -- just like with a classic 3rd party spoiler effect.
That's more or less my central thesis -- all these nifty alternative voting systems are all gameable, and only work when people only actually vote their preferences. All multi-party elections are gameable (think Republicans paying for Nader voting drives). The only system that can't be gamed is a 2-party plurality vote, where people simply indicate preference for one over the other.
First, you're misusing a technical term. In the context of voting systems, "gaming" occurs when a voter votes in a way that contradicts their true preferences for (correct) strategic reasons. Setting your threshold wrong in Approval voting doesn't produce a vote that contradicts your true preferences (your examples are all valid expressions of voter preferences) and isn't a correct strategic decision. People failing to understand how to operate an Approval ballot after coming from a plurality system is likely, but it's a separate issue from gaming.
Second, you're right that a 2-candidate plurality election avoids a whole pile of problems - but that doesn't matter because such a system doesn't solve the problem at hand. In practice there *are* more than two candidates (as there must be, because there are more than two political positions), and the solution that you seem to be suggesting, of institutionalizing two specific parties and then having them each select a candidate through primaries, just makes the problem more complex and introduces more systemic artifacts into the result.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
If you read my example, it is an example of gaming. The person's actual preferences are this:
Obama: Yes
Hillary: Yes
Bush v3.0: No
But she strategically votes no for Hillary because she believes it it is a close race between Obama and Hillary, and she prefers Obama over Hillary. Gaming.
I wasn't suggesting enshrining two parties at all, but rather using alternative voting systems to come up with the final two candidates. Ideally, what I would like to see is an election where the Bull Moose Party would have won (like I think they should have), but the Green/Libertarian/Etc. party will not win (as they shouldn't -- even with an alternative voting system, they won't pick up a significant number of votes). In fact, I think the very worst situation is one in which a very small party can achieve a supermajority-like power through voting artifacts.
Ever been to a site that allows people to vote on articles on a scale of 1-10? It rapidly degenerates into everyone either voting 10 or 0 1. Even if everyone does that, then you have "Approval Voting", which is still exceptionally good. 2. We've done a lot of research that indicates A LOT of people will choose to be expressive and use their full range of values instead of min/max, especially since it has about 91% as much effectiveness as perfectly strategizing (which is hard to do since it requires probability analysis). (e.g. You might consider that around 1/3 of voters don't register with a major party, even in areas where that prevents them from voting in the primaries, and thus diminishes their vote power.) http://rangevoting.org/HonStrat.html 3. That extra honesty means much better election outcomes, so Range Voting is much more "effective" than Approval Voting. http://rangevoting.org/ShExpRes.html 4. Range Voting can help with problems like the Burr dilemma, and is experimentally shown to be "easier" in the sense that voters will sometimes have a hard time making a yes/no binary decision for a candidate who is right on the line, but will have an easier time scoring (which is why HotOrNot's creators preferred scores to hot?/not? approval voting -- faster scoring is good for their "business model"). 5. Range Voting has a powerful "nursery effect" that gives fair representation of minor candidates/parties/viewpoints until they become competitive, so a candidate who may get very few approvals with approval voting can maybe get a 35% average, and that can help society gauge itself -- it can work like a windsock to let us get a better sense of the political winds. That's abstract but plausibly very beneficial to society. Approval is definitely simpler, and is a great voting method that we can implement RIGHT NOW with virtually no changes. From there we could upgrade to Range Voting if possible. Hence: http://rangevoting.org/Approval.html Here's a head-to-head comparison/apologetics piece: http://rangevoting.org/AppExec.html
As opposed to the current situation where politicians are bought by private interests, they follow the party line and ignore pretty much the wishes of the populace (stem cell research comes to mind).
In a world that is mostly urban in nature such state of affairs is fair. People in non urban areas could then band together to obtain political representation as a minority party.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If those were actually her preferences, she'd vote them. But in your example, those aren't her preferences. Instead, her preferences are these:
Obama: Maybe
Hillary: Yes
Bush: No
In a case like that, either voting Hillary-only or Hillary-and-Obama would be an honest vote. It would only be a dishonest vote if she voted for Obama and not Hillary or Bush and not Obama. Only dishonest votes count as gaming.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I think you got Obama and Hillary backwards. He wants either Obama or Hillary to win (definitely not Bush) but wants Obama to win over Hillary.
In a Range Vote, an honest vote would be something like this:
Obama: 100
Hillary: 80
Bush: 0
However, since he really wants Obama to win over Hillary (and it's a close race between the two), he'd game the Range Vote like this:
Obama: 100
Hillary: 0
Bush: 0
However you want to quantize that to approval voting, the problem is exactly the same -- it just has a rougher granularity.
The upshot is that approval and range voting actively encourages dishonest voting. Like I said, take a look at how the range voting went on Ice Skating in the Olympics during the Cold War.