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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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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).
>>The fact that Wikipedia works as well as it does
LOL
If we implemented the wikipedia system, our president would be chosen by who could yell the loudest for the longest period of time, and then Jimbo would come in and put his brother in the Oval Office.
Wikipedia is a very dysfunctional community. I'm rather amused you'd consider that an effective system of governance.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion
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 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.
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
As an example, if you're a socialist in the US, you'll almost certainly vote Democrat. You might not support the Democrats, or want them to win. In fact you might hate them bitterly. However, if a socialist candidate stand for election anywhere where they'd have a chance of winning a serious number of votes, those votes would serve the Republican Party, not our socialist voter who would presumably prefer the Democratic Party over a Republican any day.
The same is the case for right wing voters, or even centrist voters. In fact, such a system disenfranchises everyone that doesn't support one of the two largest parties but that considers one of them the lesser of two evils.
One property of such a system is that it slows down change, even when that change is wanted by the voters. In the UK, a poll in the early 90's shocked a lot of the establishment when the majority polled said they'd like the Liberal Democrats to win, while at the same time, only abou 20% said they'd vote for them. The reason was that at the time a vote for the Liberal Democrats was seen as a wasted vote in many circuits, because they were seen as a centre alternative and voting for them would mean whichever party of Labour or the Conservatives you didn't like would have a higher chance of winning. People were voting for the lesser of two evils because they thought their preferred choice had no chance.
The lesson from systems with proportional voting is that it causes a far wider spectrum of opinions to be represented in parliaments as well as in governments (frequent coalitions for example), and while such governments may seem less decisive, that is because they more closely represent the opinions of the people instead of at best a narrow majority, but also because the number of votes considered by voters to be wasted is far lower.
It's not unusual for parliamentary systems to have 10-15, or more, parties in parliament. Many European parliaments have parties ranging from communists to right wing nationalists in parliament, with most shades in between. They're composed that way because the parliaments actually reflect the range of opinions present in the population rather than a bland set of lesser evils.
Even with that level of flexibility, I can honestly say that nobody has been representing _my_ opinions in parliament in my native Norway for as long as I've lived, and even in a system like that I'd have to resort to voting for a party I don't directly support for my vote to matter. But at least my choice would be far closer to what I'd want than what it could ever be in a system like the US one, or any system based on simple majorities or single person circuits. I'd not have to vote for someone I actually considered to be useless bastards in order to prevent some even more useless bastards from winning.
There is no such thing as a neutral voting system - they all are designed to bias the result in the way that the designer happens to think is most fair. Sometimes they might seriously be looking for a fair solution, and other times they have an agenda. But all voting systems meets different criteria for how to satisfy some group of people. That group may or may not coincide with the population as a whole, and that group may or may not agree with the criteria.
That said, a simple majority is one of the worst alternatives I can think of unless there truly only are two alternatives.
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.
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.
In Australia we have compulsary sufferage because we feel that having representation for those who don't feel like voting is more important than letting them spend another half hour on the lounge watching football every three years. If you want your entire electorate to be over 60 because they have nothing better to do, then enjoy what you have.
Australia lacks some of the freedoms of the US mainly because they allow one to hurt oneself, we have compulsary wearing of seatbelts etc. because people don't always do what's best for them. We have strict gun control because having a large bore semi-auto isn't as useful as knowing that muggers and bank theives don't have them. We pay other people's healthcare bills for the security of knowing that others will pay ours. We can't have certain pets but in exchange we have a country free of certain pests. We have censored computer games (no sexual violence) which I don't personally agree with, but that's mainly because of an unchangeable government act (introducing an R rating requires the unanamous agreement of 7 attorney generals). Australia is far from perfect in many ways of course, but the desire to maximise an individual's freedom in the longterm by keeping one safe and healthy for long enough for one to use this freedom isn't a bad idea, if not perfectly executed all the time.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Sounds like a pretty terrible place to live, IMO. Laws which protect only one person from themselves (singular them, clearly) are a gross misuse of government powers. The government should only be enacting laws which protect others from the stupidity of that one person. As a grown adult, I don't want to go back to the nursery and have some higher power watch over my every move to make sure I don't trip and fall or choke on my own thumb. In other words, what you have there in Australia is derisively referred to as a "nanny government".
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
That's why then, in USA you're -allowed- to grow your own marijuana and smoke it all you like -- aslong as you don't, for example, drive while intoxicated. (which would endanger others)
You're also allowed to drink beer at 18 (again, provided you do it in a way that won't endanger others), walk nude trough town, sell your left kidney, marry your sister provided you get sterilised or are infertile, live in polygamy (or polyandri), or, for that matter, paint your house bright pink.
Which USA is this again ? Certainly not the one over in North-America, there people regularily get punished for all of these, and a million other crimes which hurt nobody other than possibly themselves. (unless you adopt an extremely silly definition of "hurt")
All governments aer "nannies" to larger or smaller degree. Overall I'm not convinced the US one is all that much less nannyistic than say the Australian or many European ones.
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.
And in what magical fairyland, may I ask, do you live, in which the government doesn't watch over your every move and treat you like a child? Personally, I would prefer a government that compels its citizens to do things that are in their own interests over one that compels its citizens to do things that are in its own best interest.
As far as your complaint about laws that protect only one person from themselves, most of the laws mentioned by the grandparent - compulsory voting, gun control, pet laws, socialized medicine - don't even come close to falling under this category. Censorship of videogame sexuality is a complex issue, but one that I would guess is not primarily aimed at protecting adults from their own baser urges. So I guess it's the seatbelt laws that have you all riled up?
Anyway, all governments are what you dismiss as "nanny" governments. Some of them are just more pleasant about it than others.
Laws that protect one person from themselves are useful if the rest of society invests resources in education or takes care of hurt people. In that case, hurting oneself does, in practice, impose a cost on society; you can't hurt yourself "for free".
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
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.
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.
You are laboring under a delusion, one that is shared by many in the US.
The point of the system in use in the US is to ensure that as little as possible is actually accomplished. The problem identified by the "founding fathers" is that if you allow a government to accomplish things then things get done. Most of what a government can do is of no real utility to the people living there. It therefore makes sense to limit what the government can actually accomplish.
In the US this limitation is enforced by having two differently composed bodies (the House of Representatives and the Senate) being required to agree in order to implement anything. Everything has to be compromised on, limited and restricted to be acceptable to a supermajority in both houses. Having different election cycles for the two houses also ensures that someone is always running for office. This also limits the amount of "real work" that can be accomplished, but it is difficult to credit the foresight of the founding fathers with this.
Imagine if things changed in the US and there was a greal deal more cooperation between the two houses. The natural tendency for these elected people is to "do" things that they can show their constituents how much they have accomplished. Everything they "do" is going to cost tax dollars or otherwise make living and doing business in the US more expensive. The only real limit on this, barring other limitations, is how much you can take from the people before they revolt. As shown in Europe, you can take a lot more from people than is currently done in the US. Lots and lots more.
It is in everyone's interest in the US to have a limited form of government which is constantly battling with itself unable to do much than the basic requirements of keeping the government operating. Think what things would be like if the government could pass a new Patriot act every session. Or a new group of Congresscritters decide to revise the government-run health care system because they thought they could do a better job than the people that reworked in two years before.
Be very thankful that the system in the US is far, far from true democracy and is extremely unresponsive and accomplishes little.
If we implemented the wikipedia system, our president would be chosen by who could yell the loudest for the longest period of time, and then Jimbo would come in and put his brother in the Oval Office.
And just how's that different from today?
$> cd
$> more beer
Hrm. A 50% reduction in gun deaths. That seems pretty awesome to me. In 2004, 29,569 people were killed in the US by guns. Don't you think it would be nice to save 15,000 lives? I sure do.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams