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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."
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.
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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).