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Electoral systems can do little for democracy other than promote majority rule. STV and related systems do this well and also provide proportional representatio

Electoral systems can do little for democracy other than promote majority rule. STV and related systems do this well and also provide proportional representation on non-party matters. Civil society also has a role to play in keeping democracy healthy. Instant Runoff Voting is really only suitable for single winner elections like presidential, gubernatorial and mayoral elections, and not for the multi-winner legislative elections it is used for in Australia. There are better forms of STV than that used for the Australian Senate, but I'd take any form of STV over FPTP.

eru 10y ago
FPTF is definitely awfully. STV might be marginally better or not. But why settle for something so marginal and still clearly suboptimal. It's also complicated to explain, yet alone count votes. Approval Voting or Range Voting are much simpler to explain and to execute, and they have much better properties. (And, yes, I can well believe that the Australian system can be improved up on, and doesn't present the best version of STV. There's lots wrong with Australia, so this aspect probably too. Eg, their STV system requires a valid ballot to rank all parties, making sure that every vote cast will eventually be counted for one of the major parties. The guy who came up with a hack to avoid having to choose a major party got jailed for promoting it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote) Range Voting is literally the same procedure people know from figure skating competitions in the olympics: the judges (=voters) give the candidates numbers, candidate with the highest average wins. Approval voting can be explained as: just like FPTP, but ticking multiple candidates (eg everybody but Trump or Hillary) doesn't void your ballot. (Or you can see it as a special case of Range Voting, that only allows the numbers 0 and 1. Approval voting was my favourite system to elect a single winner, until I learned about Range Voting.) The range voting guys wrote about STV, too, see http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html
- lambertsimnel 10y ago
  By "STV" I mean the multi-winner form ("quota-preferential" or "PR-STV"). Neither range voting nor approval voting is a substitute for it; they don't provide proportional representation. For that you need Reweighted Range Voting: http://rangevoting.org/RRVr.html http://rangevoting.org/RRVr.html I'd be happy to see STV, RRV or both used more widely.
  - eru 10y ago
    Oh, I don't have too much of an opinion on multi-winner systems right now---apart from the practical observation that the post-war German systems seems to produce appropriately boring consensus politicians. (But I highly doubt it's an particularly optimal system.) I'll look into it, thanks. My note was about single-winner systems.

eru 10y ago

FPTF is definitely awfully. STV might be marginally better or not. But why settle for something so marginal and still clearly suboptimal. It's also complicated to explain, yet alone count votes. Approval Voting or Range Voting are much simpler to explain and to execute, and they have much better properties. (And, yes, I can well believe that the Australian system can be improved up on, and doesn't present the best version of STV. There's lots wrong with Australia, so this aspect probably too. Eg, their STV system requires a valid ballot to rank all parties, making sure that every vote cast will eventually be counted for one of the major parties. The guy who came up with a hack to avoid having to choose a major party got jailed for promoting it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote) Range Voting is literally the same procedure people know from figure skating competitions in the olympics: the judges (=voters) give the candidates numbers, candidate with the highest average wins. Approval voting can be explained as: just like FPTP, but ticking multiple candidates (eg everybody but Trump or Hillary) doesn't void your ballot. (Or you can see it as a special case of Range Voting, that only allows the numbers 0 and 1. Approval voting was my favourite system to elect a single winner, until I learned about Range Voting.) The range voting guys wrote about STV, too, see http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html

lambertsimnel 10y ago
By "STV" I mean the multi-winner form ("quota-preferential" or "PR-STV"). Neither range voting nor approval voting is a substitute for it; they don't provide proportional representation. For that you need Reweighted Range Voting: http://rangevoting.org/RRVr.html http://rangevoting.org/RRVr.html I'd be happy to see STV, RRV or both used more widely.
- eru 10y ago
  Oh, I don't have too much of an opinion on multi-winner systems right now---apart from the practical observation that the post-war German systems seems to produce appropriately boring consensus politicians. (But I highly doubt it's an particularly optimal system.) I'll look into it, thanks. My note was about single-winner systems.