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Western-Style Voting 'A Loser'
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jan 06, 2008 06:32 AM
from the math-and-politics-two-great-tastes dept.
from the math-and-politics-two-great-tastes dept.
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."
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"Western"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Western"? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:"Western"? (Score:4, Informative)
Under the current system many people think that voting for e.g. the Green Party or an independent candidate is a waste of their vote.
Parent
Re:"Western"? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is also noteworthy that the system is rigged to benefit those two parties via the boundries of the electoral zones. In the last general election the Liberals won more votes than the Conservatives but won less seats. This was due to Maggie Thatcher redrawing various electoral boundaries via the Boundary Commission when she was in power. The British system is not designed to be democratic, it is designed to give the illusion of democracy while still allowing the same people to rule: The companies and rich people who donate money to political parties.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Excuse me? There are massive problems with first-past-the-post electing, but this statement is bollocks, as my page [game-point.net] shows.
A better criticism is something like, "the Conservatives got more votes in England than Labour, but won 92 fewer seats".
Re:"Western"? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:"Western"? (Score:4, Insightful)
A common criticism of the American two party system is that both parties are essentially identical. This is true because each party MUST have the approval or at least acceptance of nearly half the public. That is why the parties can easily swap positions, for example on free trade versus protectionism, foreign intervention versus isolationism, local versus national school control, etc.
Parent
Re:"Western"? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What a horrible law (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What a horrible law (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What a horrible law (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
There's more to it than voting and legislatures! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:There's more to it than voting and legislatures (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Re:There's more to it than voting and legislatures (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Wh
Insanely biased paper (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Insanely biased paper (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Let's say there are three people running, A, B, and C.
You don't mind B(6) and C(10), but you hate A(0).
They don't mind A(10) and B(6), but they hate C(0).
B wins with A(10),B(12),C(10) as the final tally.
That election couldn't have been done with binary voting, and everybody wins.
If it were binary, B would have won as well, but in a more complicated case, let's say B got rated 4 by both parties. In range voting, the contest would be between A and C. B wasn't good enough for either of them to even be considered. Yes, in this extremely small case, one loses out more, but at least, neither would be forced to vote for the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils has to at least be good enough to get past a certain point in the range, which is a pretty effective improvement over regular approval voting not least horrible plurality voting.
The point of the paper is that the assertion that everybody wins is accurately modeled by this calculation, and they use Bayesian regret in support. If you disagree with it, then point out why, but your reasoning here doesn't make any sense.
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Re:There's more to it than voting and legislatures (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Wrong term ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wrong term ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I really doubt you'd ever get the political parties fixed before you would the voting system. I'd argue that the key benefits of a proportional parliamentary system is that it limits the damage caused by one party over another.
The problem with Western (I'm assuming American) Winner takes all is that you have 51% of the people literally telling the other 49% what to do without recourse. This gets exorbitantly bad when the same party controls both the Presidency and Congress. In fact, I'll argue that the quality of what the government does (or the fact it isn't doing as much) is when either the congress and presidency is in opposition.
The only real good solution is to set up the system so that there is always an opposition or some sort of road block and consolation of the people who did not win the election.
If you have ever studied US history, you will know that during the beginning the Vice President was not appointed or chosen by the winning President but rather was the person who lost but had the most votes. He didn't have veto power, but over all I think it provided some obstacles for a President who wanted to railroad the opposition.
If we were to really reform in the United States, I would argue that the Vice Presidency go to the looser in the election and he would get veto power. Not an overriding veto though. If the President's party owns the congress and he wants to sign the legislation but the Vice President does not like it, the VP can of course veto it just like the president and congress has to get 2/3rds just like the regular President. However, if the President Vetoes a bill the VP can't unveto it and congress has to do the old 2/3rds method.
Also, the President and VP can choose their Deputy President and and Deputy VP in case one of them dies or is hospitalized so that the Presidency or Vice Presidency stays within the same party until the next election.
I suppose the biggest argument against this is that government won't get anything done, and I say that is a good thing because when you setup a situation in which every party must compromise with the other then usually the 49% of the losers aren't going to get railroaded with things they are vehemently against.
As far as addressing proportional representations, I would argue that we would have to do away with the house of representatives as we know it and do a popular election. If there are a total of 500 seats then you would divide that into 300,000,000 you would get around 600,000 votes per seat. So you could run for a seat in the House and as long as you got 600,000 votes you would be guaranteed a seat. If you got more than that, it wouldn't count. Now of course since all 300 million people don't usually vote, you are going to get plenty of people who didn't get the 600,000 votes to get a seat so you just allow those runner up in the order of highest nation wide votes until you run out of 500 seats.
That way candidates can run across states so have a more populist view.
BUT in order to retain the power of the states, I would argue the Senate revert back to its old method of having the senators being elected directly by the state governments or a sort of electoral college for each of the states districts. Now this might seem a step backwards, but in order to balance things out and retain some sort of local constituency of the Senators, they need to be elected by the state or appointed by the State legislators.
However, there might be better ways to reform the US government, but currently I think its quite broke that we let winners take all do whatever they want while the 49% who voted against the party have little or not say.
Parent
4-year dupe cycle (Score:4, Funny)
PR-STV in Ireland (Score:5, Interesting)
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 is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
"The West", you say? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's completely wrong. Range Voting consists of adding up the numbers and then taking the average. As anyone knows, that's linear in the number of candidates and votes. Even if you do it by counting "pseudovotes" (this can
I Prefer Cage Voting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Prefer Cage Voting (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Right choice vs Majority choice (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
So take away the right to vote for some (Score:3, Interesting)
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 conserva
Re:Right choice vs Majority choice (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Right choice vs Majority choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, it takes some skill to misread a post like that. Did you miss the part where I identified the exceptional ones as the producers and the ones that create jobs? No, royalty do not qualify in the exceptional category. Neither do those that have inherited money and have not done at least as much as their forbearers that actually made that money. That is not the elite I'm talking about. No, they are parasites exploiting and in many cases destroying the achievement that isn't theirs.
Now you are getting there. Yes the tradesmen are the core of any working economy - trading value for value. Then there is also the question of ability. Being a trader makes you honest, but it doesn't mean that you fall in the exceptional category. All the progress of civilization is tied to technological progress so there is our clue. The people I call exceptional are able to invent and to produce.
They are the people of mind that through centuries have endured and silently counteracted the destructiveness of the tyrants, the mystics and the mindless mob. Not only that, but they have fed them and ensured their survival. Man's mind is the root of all our progress. If you don't believe me, try to obtain your food by means of just physical force or try to grow wheat without the effort of the mind of the people that learned process for the first time. So when I'm saying "the exceptional" or "the strong" it is not the strength of weapons or of muscles - it is the strength of mind. The man that invented the combustion engine did not do so at the expense of the ones that didn't. He got paid for it but the value of that invention was many orders of magnitude higher. We all benefit from the work of his mind. It is people like that our existence depends on and they are also the first ones to get screwed in a system ruled by the ideal of mediocrity.
You say that the small business owners are not different from their employees. In many cases they are as they had the ambition and the ability to implement their idea. If you look back through history you'll see that technological development is seldom a collective effort. Almost all major technological inventions have been done by individuals or at most a handful of people. In case they have a sense for business t
Parent
Re:Right choice vs Majority choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Not forgetting of course that every "genius" that ever existed based his achievements on the work of countless others who went before him and that all his/her contributions never amounted to more then a few percentile points of the knowlege he was given by those predecessors. A matter of perspetive which is usually lost in human propensity for "hero" worship and other unwarranted personality cults.
That is of course another mis-conception. The Soviet economy started as a total disatser inhereited from the Tzarist feudal nightmare, further impoverished by the WWI. Under those circumstances one cannot easily attribute these effects to such experimentation as you would like. In the latter years the "managers" and other "betters" did precisely what you suggest: took charge from the goofy "unqualified" peons, "for their own good". The results we all know.
Not so. A "manager" is just another worker, his expertise is simply in a different area. That however does not make him "elite" in any objective way, other then his and his peers desire to re-create soeme degree of feudal stratification. The "elite" forms simply because it wants to be "elite". Its members see themselves as "superior" and require hordes of "inferiors" to validate their self-worth.
That maybe so, but large-scale tasks do not automatically warrant "superiority" to those who manage them. That is a self-serving lie spread by those who wish to be "superior" to the rest of us.
Those are the "tradesmen" I mentioned. Remove them and the whole economy dies. Managers and investors would starve to death within days. Reverse is not true, remove the investors, managers and moneyed classes and the economy would suffer loss of efficiency but it would not cease to function permanently. That, if anything, is proof positive of the relative "merit" of these social strata.
I am not advocating revolutions, nor trying to somehow glorify past ones. I am merely pointing out that the patently false idea that we are all somehow completely indebted to tiny "meritorious" "elites" and thus in obligation to worship them and shower them with wealth and power is a rather old and worn out one. Its ugly and self-serving nature did not improve with the passage of centuries.
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Approval voting makes more sense than Range voting (Score:5, Insightful)
Might as well just go with the simpler Approval voting, mentioned in the wikipedia article you linked:
Scrap voting completely (Score:5, Interesting)
The government that anyone can edit.
Two party system? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Two party system? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Well, I'm from Belgium as well, and our electoral system is one of the worst ones around! For these reasons:
- As a resident of Flanders, I can only vote for Flemish parties, this means that, at best, I'm only allowed to vote for a bit more then half the decisions made in this country... This means that I, being Flemish, can only vote for Flemish interests, how absurd is that?
- Up until a month ago, the 3 major tendencies (Liberals, Conservatives/Catholics/Humanists and socialists) were all in the government (either regional or national), and guess what, we will now have the same 3 tendencies (except for the Flemish socialists) in our future government! How is it exactly that the people chose if everyone is still in the government anyways?
- Whatever party you chose, you _know_ that they won't be able to fulfill what they promised us, since they will have to make a coalition and find middle solution for everything anyways...
The Belgian system in all its glory has become a particracy, where the heads of the different political parties have much more to say about who rules what then the people. Our system is probably one of the most anti-democratic systems there is around, and this had grave consequences... In Flanders up until the last elections, the biggest party was an extreme rights party (well duh, they're the only opposition), in Walloon, the French socialists have had their hands on on local and regional matters for the best part of the last and the beginning of this century, leading to corruption scandal after corruption scandal, and since they have only been thought to think for themselves, their education system is so lame language wise that most of them never even get a chance at working in the Flemish part. Our country became just two cultures stuck together round a common economic interest (Brussels), without any prospect of ever forming a true nation.
Bravo, please copy our electoral system, it's great!
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spoilers? Or serious candidates. (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Other Countries (Score:4, Informative)
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".
I would be wary (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
STV sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Not so. Single Transferrable Voting fails the monotonocity criterion [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Wrong premise (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Less Power to the Third Party? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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There are better reasons to oppose it (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a recipe for disaster.
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I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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