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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....)
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...
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.
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).
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? =>
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).
That of course is a demonstrable falsity, promulgated by our would-be "betters" since times immemorial. It wasn't the peons that made empires and kingdoms "work", it were the "nobility", right? Starting with examples such as an idiot named Cheops who made thousands of men align stones on top of each other so that his "glorious" and "totally above average" ass can ascend to Heaven as a bigger yet king. No one remembers those "averages" who actually built the thing, never you mind those who fed the empire and its oh-so-superior parasites.
And so human societies were always constructed on the basis of this fundamental idiocy, that "special" people, who are "naturally" (or who in some very rare cases ascend the social strata) born to rule the rest of us mucky-mucks whose destiny is to make sure golden crappers of our "betters" run properly and that the exotic lobster is delivered on time. Anything else would be "class warfare" and frowned upon ... by the said betters and their sycophants.
Total bullshit. The core of any economy are tradesmen (such as the majority of Slashdot readership), very small and small businesses, many millions of which operate in every country. Their owners are no more "special" then their employees and usually work hands-on in their chosen trade, as opposed to "managing" things or "investing" as is the case in larger operations. In most sane countries these owners also earn no more then double (after expenses and taxes) of what their employees make. In places such as Japan, even the CEOs of very large corporations make only about 10 times (on average) more then their workers. In neo-feudal nations, such as USA, that ratio is exceeding 500 and is on the way up.
The rarefied club of "exceptional betters", without whom we would surely not know how to tie our shoe-laces, is actually shrinking (as a percentage of total number of humans on Earth) and now less then 2% of humanity owns more then 50% of its private property (not income - assets!). Those numbers are worsening every year. If the trend continues, less then 0.5% will own 90% of Earth's assets in just few decades.
The would-be corporate royalty and the multi-mega-billionaires add nothing to the society as their activities are confined to "owning" land, machinery and people, people who in turn employ others who in turn do something actually useful. A process which would have gone on just as lively if the mega-billionaires were removed from the picture. Far more efficiently actually as a large number of small businesses competing in a marketplace is far more society-friendly then a few mega-bazillionaire corporate oligopolistic fiefdoms.
Whatever it is, neo-feudalism (this time with hereditary "business" royalty) isn't it.
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) 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
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.
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.