15 ms·

To Build a Better Ballot

307 points by bpierre 10y ago

virtuexru 10y ago
-redacted-
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  Saying "it can't be done" and "nothing will change" for decades is why we've built up a massive backlog of absolutely necessary changes.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    I don't understand who's actually against all the common sense changes? Are people really that conservative? Is congress and state legislators more conservative than the electorate? Surely the average US voter has to see the obvious benefits of a ranked/runoff system over the current one? If they do - how can the laws not be passed (even constitutional changes should be within reach).
    - gizmo686 10y ago
      I don't think "conservative" is the correct word in this case. Our current legislators, by definition, got into power under the current system, so for (almost) all of them the current is preferable to an alternative system where their victory is less certain. Additionally, they are almost all part of one of the two major political parties; both of which benefit greatly from our current system. Ultimately, the problem is that it is very difficult to change the rules of the game when the winners are in charge of making the rules.
      - alkonaut 10y ago
        > so for (almost) all of them the current is preferable to an alternative system where their victory is less certain. But publicly holding a position in office that a majority of your constituents disagree with, in a high profile question should be a much worse disadvantage than voting to change the system? > Additionally, they are almost all part of one of the two major political parties; both of which benefit greatly from our current system. At least for primaries, it would be beneficial for the parties themselves (if perhaps not for the candidates) to have both runoff votes and some kind of approval. > Ultimately, the problem is that it is very difficult to change the rules of the game when the winners are in charge of making the rules. This is what I don't understand though as a non american. I don't consider politicians to have much different goals and opinions to my own. If they did, they'd be replaced.
        adrienne 10y ago
        Nah. Here in the US they just pass laws to suppress voters and rejigger districts until they're guaranteed wins. Much less work for them.
      - alkonaut 10y ago
        > I don't think "conservative" is the correct word in this case. I meant in the "I don't want things to change" way, not inthe abortion/guns/small state (US) political meaning of the word.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >Is congress and state legislators more conservative than the electorate? In both the small-c and large-C senses of "conservative", yes, they largely are. The USA currently has an economically progressive, socially moderate majority (when you do non-party-branded, issue-by-issue polling), but a government that largely consists of economic and social conservatives, rather extreme ones actually.
obilgic 10y ago
Why use a 2d map instead of 1 dimensional, seems more practical.
- optimuspaul 10y ago
  Because the political spectrum really is a 2d (if not 3d or 4d) field. Progressive <-> Conservative and Liberal <-> Authoritarian. If it were really just two candidates then perhaps there would be just once metric to track.
  - baddox 10y ago
    It's not just the political spectrum. You need at least 2 spatial dimensions to demonstrate the possibility of non-transitive group preferences (i.e. the community prefers candidate A > B > C > A), which is one fundamental reason Arrow's impossibility theorem is true. If candidates are just on a number line, then the group's preferences would always be transitive and there would always be a Condorcet winner (or a tie).
- tantalor 10y ago
  2 dimensions is required for the examples with a third candidate.
  - obilgic 10y ago
    nope
Finbarr 10y ago
Small point of feedback: the header of this site is extremely distracting.
niftich 10y ago
In addition to the great overview of voting systems and the policy commentary, the interactive parts -- which they call 'Explorable Explanations [1]' -- are fantastic! The code for this one is on Github [2]. [1] http://explorableexplanations.com/ http://explorableexplanations.com/ [2] https://github.com/ncase/ballot https://github.com/ncase/ballot
- YPCrumble 10y ago
  Could someone explain what `index.js`[1] is doing? It looks like code to figure out whether someone is actually reading the article or not but I'm curious why the various timeouts and scroll listeners, and what they're doing exactly. [1] https://github.com/ncase/ballot/blob/gh-pages/js/index.js https://github.com/ncase/ballot/blob/gh-pages/js/index.js
  - niftich 10y ago
    That's exactly what it's doing -- it's trying to figure out if your viewport is looking at the content 'above the fold', so that it can show the "splash iframe" [1] while you're looking at it, and stop JS-animating it when you're not. [1] http://ncase.me/ballot/splash/splash.html http://ncase.me/ballot/splash/splash.html
tantalor 10y ago
See also: Median voter theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem
winstonewert 10y ago
I think the discussion is severely lacking a proper consideration of how strategic voting affects the systems it likes best. For example, score voting encourages people to exaggerate their preferences, and approval voting makes it non-trivial to figure out who you should approve.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  That does deserve deeper consideration, but the page is already long for an intro for a mass audience, who need to hear about this if it's to make a difference. Also it seems very unlikely for strategic voting to become a worse problem for approval voting or score voting than it is for the systems we're stuck with right now. Perhaps they'd end up making no difference, though I doubt it. If you feel like writing up your thoughts on this, or pointing to a good writeup, I'd be interested.
cthor 10y ago
When talking about the effect of voting systems on elections, something I think is overlooked is the game-theoretic implications on the candidates. Take the second diagram in the article and move the candidates around. What's the optimal strategy? To move as close to your opponent as possible, while staying closer to the centre. Now take the diagram with three candidates, and move them around. What's the optimal strategy? To move as far away from both opponents. This works even if you consider an n-dimensional space for every conceivable issue. Two-party system encourages both parties to move towards the centre. Three- (or more) party system encourages them to spread out.
- brianolson 10y ago
  3 parties would take up position around some population center, with some differentiation, but not too much. Probably they each move to the center of mass of the third of the population they represent, except that there's some incentive to be a little centrist of that to try and poach marginal voters from the other two parties. If a party moves too far out from center, centrist voters on their margins defect to the other two parties. I'm not sure what the penalty for being 'too centrist' is.
- tristor 10y ago
  > Two-party system encourages both parties to move towards the centre. Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US, both major parties are moving towards the right and moving towards authoritarian positions.
  - mastax 10y ago
    This is usually explained by the idea that the 'Center' moves about over time. Perhaps in this instance the center was just further right than the parties expected.
  - nosuchthing 10y ago
    Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US, both major parties are moving towards the right and moving towards authoritarian positions. Which seems to be a result of FPTP, which fosters the limited choice between RED/BLUE.
ryandvm 10y ago
I love the topic of voting systems, but... we can't even get rid of the fucking penny over here. The odds of the U.S. changing its voting methodology are so infinitesimal, I'm having trouble conceptualizing it.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  Voting methods are mostly set state by state, as I understand it. (I'm pretty ignorant about politics.) Some states, like California, allow powerful ballot propositions. Thus you could get a change like this on the ballot, starting in a few states, without going through the major parties. In California it doesn't even seem that wild to hope the parties would support the change: in recent years it changed to "open primaries", and I think it'd be rational for the D's and R's to want approval voting in the primary. You get experience with it and it starts to become thinkable elsewhere. Or start using it in nongovernmental orgs, and likewise gain experience and familiarity.
- davidw 10y ago
  STV type systems seem to be gradually catching on. Oregon's Benton County recently passed a rancked choice voting thing. I think it's a 'bottom up' type of reform.
- wamatt 10y ago
  >The odds of the U.S. changing its voting methodology are so infinitesimal, I'm having trouble conceptualizing it. You mean how Maine just passed Rank-Choice (Instant Runoff) voting as law? [1] "On November 8 [2016], Maine voters passed Question 5 and became the first state in the nation to adopt Ranked Choice Voting for state and federal elections. The Yes On 5 campaign was led by the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, a grassroots, Maine-based organization founded by former independent state senator Dick Woodbury of Yarmouth, and led by Kyle Bailey of Gorham." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting [2] http://www.fairvote.org/maine_voters_adopt_ranked_choice_voting http://www.fairvote.org/maine_voters_adopt_ranked_choice_vot...
- noobermin 10y ago
  Not to mention, the current people in power benefit greatly from the current system, so our odds are even worsened.
comex 10y ago
I suspect Gary Johnson getting chosen by a Borda count isn't as weird/surprising as the number of question marks implies. Caveat: I didn't see a raw distribution of preference orders on the Vox survey; if it's linked somewhere, I missed it. But I think Johnson is effectively acting as a compromise candidate: a lot of Clinton voters really hate Trump and a lot of Trump voters really hate Clinton, enough that they'd both prefer Johnson over the other candidate, even if they don't actually know much about him, or even mildly dislike him. Borda count tends to choose compromise candidates, so that's what you end up with. Now, Johnson's policies are fairly fringe and weird, and so are the other third party candidate's (Stein), but that's because serious candidates don't run on third party tickets that have no chance of winning. If the election was actually conducted using a Borda count, you'd probably see a number of relatively boring centrists running, and one of them would win instead of Johnson - which is a perfectly reasonable result. Well, except that that would also fundamentally change the coverage of the race, so there's no reason to expect the election would go anywhere near the same way overall (it would probably be less polarized), but the point is that to the limited extent the survey results reflect this hypothetical world, they don't cast it in a bad light. Edit: Also, I like Clinton, but her being the Concordet winner doesn't mean much in terms of that world either. When almost all of the ballots give the top rank to one of two candidates, whichever of the two gets more votes is the Concordet winner. But that's only the case because of first-past-the-post, both because there aren't any good third-party candidates (neither centrist nor extremist), and because the structure of the race strongly encourages voters to sign up for one bandwagon or the other .
- basseq 10y ago
  But I think Johnson is effectively acting as a compromise candidate: a lot of Clinton voters really hate Trump and a lot of Trump voters really hate Clinton, enough that they'd both prefer Johnson over the other candidate, even if they don't actually know much about him, or even mildly dislike him. That, and a lot of people were voting less for the man and more for an independent ticket. And not even with the expectation that it would pay off in this election, but that it would encourage more (and more mainstream) third-party candidates to run in the future.
asdf1234321 10y ago
Another approach: an ordered subset specifying fall-through candidates you would want your vote to go to if the current one has not path to victory. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1E-bZdxnzc_eTJvLWtsSGE3Y3c/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1E-bZdxnzc_eTJvLWtsSGE3Y3c...
- mjevans 10y ago
  You've more or less described IRV.
Yen 10y ago
So, the biggest complaint about Instant-runoff voting seems to be that it can lead to a counter-intuitive scenario, where a candidate becomes more popular, but loses the election. From what I've seen of constructed scenarios that have this situation, they have 'left', 'compromise', and 'right' candidates, with the majority of voters tending to prefer left>compromise>right, or right>compromise>left. If 'compromise' is the weakest candidate, either left or right ends up winning. But if left or right become popular enough, and make left/right the weakest candidate, than compromise wins out over both extremes. Frankly, this actually doesn't seem like that much of a problem to me. If we end up with everyone's second-favorite choice, everyone is at least second-most happy. For example, in the USA - Without commenting on Gary Johnson's politics or experience, I think the USA would have been happier had he been chosen. Half the population is pulling their hair out over Trump. Had Clinton won, the other half would likely feel the same way. Most of the population would be less-excited to see Johnson in office than their preferred candidate, but relieved that at least opposing candidate didn't get in.
- bigger_cheese 10y ago
  >So, the biggest complaint about Instant-runoff voting seems to be that it can lead to a counter-intuitive scenario, where a candidate becomes more popular, but loses the election. This sentence doesn't make sense the original article failed to mention if you poll 50% of the first preference vote you get elected. So if you are at least 50% "popular" you can't lose. If you poll below 50% it comes down to preferences as it rightly should in my opinion. there is nothing counter intuitive about this. It happens here (in Australia) quite often. http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/guide/mpor/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/guide/mpor/ Here the Right (Liberal party) candidate polled 40% and lost because the two Left parties (Labor + Greens) also polled about 40% combined.
  - anonymoushn 10y ago
    Is it good that sometimes voting A > B > C would cause A to lose, while voting C > B > A would cause A to win?
bluecaribou 10y ago
Recounting my comment from a previous article[1], comparing all these voting systems is not really the right way to think about it. First, you need to separate the mechanism used to express voter preference (i.e the ballot design), from the method used to choose the winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems. In terms of ballot designs, they are basically all just restricted subsets of the "score" voting ballot. That is, any voter preference that can be expressed in an "approval", "ranked choice", "ranked choice with ties", or traditional "single choice" ballot, can also be expressed with a "score" ballot. That means every voting system is a "score ballot" system with some restrictions applied to the ballot. This means that, for example, you could have an election where you allow the voter to choose whichever ballot they are most comfortable with. Then you just interpret the ballot as a score ballot. There are multiple ways to choose a winner from a set of score ballots. But debating between them is counterproductive to getting better voting systems adopted. Just start off with one that's easy to understand (i.e. "sum of ratings", or "only the first choice counts"), and worry about improving it later. The important thing is to give the voter the option to use a more expressive ballot. Whichever one they feel most comfortable with. You could even make it so that initially, all ballots are converted to traditional "single choice" ballots for tallying, but let voters know how the vote would have turned out under other evaluation methods (like "sum of ratings" and Schulze). I think voters would quickly realize the value of counting all of their expressed preferences. ... But that is a very cool site. Probably the kind of site the web was intended for, don't you think? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566#score_12952384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566#score_12952384
- rtkwe 10y ago
  The issue with that is any change, especially how a winner is chosen from a ballot, is a long and politically fraught process so whatever is changed to shouldn't just be 'eh it's not great but we'll change it in a few years' because that's really unlikely to actually happen.
  - bluecaribou 10y ago
    So first of all, I think that only three evaluation methods should be considered - ballot conversion/reduction to traditional "single choice", "sum of ratings", and Schulze. You might need to start off with conversion to traditional "single choice", because it's hard to argue against adopting it. That is, you're not actually changing the election system at all. You're just allowing people to optionally express extra information about their preferences in a way that does not affect the election. But it will give each voter a chance to, if they want, try out more expressive ballots (which will presumably be appealing to most people once they get the hang of it), and the public will be told how the election would have resulted under the other two evaluation systems. Presumably, a more "centrist" candidate would generally have won. And after a few election cycles, people will be able to form an opinion on which evaluation system they think produces the best results. I think the reason why electoral system change has so often been met with public resistance is that most people don't have a feel for how the results would change, and nobody is offering them a chance to get familiar with a different election system without an up-front commitment to the change. If you can get people to accept the "sum of ratings" evaluation method, then I say be happy with that. The fact that "sum of ratings" is arguably not as good as Schulze is a very high class problem to have. (Btw I'm using Schulze as a stand-in for any "good but complex" evaluation system.) Anyway, I'm not sure the improvement in evaluation is worth having an evaluation system that most people wouldn't understand. So just to sum up, I think what I'm proposing is different and more acceptable in that: i) It allows people to use whichever ballot they feel most comfortable with, knowing that no matter which ballot they choose, their vote will count as much as any other voter. ii) It allows voters, if they so choose, to get familiar with the more expressive ballots and different evaluation methods without committing to any change in the election system.
KingMob 10y ago
Kudos to the interactive diagrams, but this seems misinformed about spoiler history. The most famous "spoiler" was Perot, not Nader. Bush v. Gore was an extremely tight election, but there were third parties that drew more votes from Bush than Gore, and wer within the margin of error, possibly counterbalancing Nader's effect. Whereas with Perot, he received 19% of the popular vote, most of which were clearly drawn from George Bush, ensuring a Clinton win.
- mtgx 10y ago
  Yes, the Nader thing was just Democratic propaganda to ensure future left-wing parties are discredited by people and the media right from the start, just like they tried and failed to do this time with Jill Stein. Call it "fake news" if you will, not that Google or Facebook would ever ban a media entity like MSNBC [1] over it... How can you blame Stein for a few thousand lost votes when millions of other voters who voted Democratic in the last election stayed home because they didn't like your candidate? Do you really think those thousands of people that didn't stay home because they didn't like your candidate, but went to vote, and voted for Stein, would've voted your candidate instead? No, best case scenario, they would've stayed home just like the others, otherwise. Also, in some states tens of thousands (more than those that voted for Stein) actually did go to vote, voted on local elections, and didn't vote for president. Either way, blaming Stein is just laughable. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xK5NaH0oy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xK5NaH0oy4
  - tunesmith 10y ago
    That's a little overstated. If you go by national exit polls, both Stein voters and Johnson voters "would have voted" for Clinton over Trump (in a two-person election) about 25-15. The rest wouldn't have. If that margin is applied to each state (which isn't quite right but whatever), that's roughly enough to flip Michigan but probably not any other states. So, true that you can't pin the blame on Stein, but she did have an effect, partly measured by the vote, and partly unmeasurable in terms of enthusiasm dampening, etc. Same sort of thing with Nader - you can't quite draw a mathematical line that he flipped Florida, but all his Gush/Bore stuff - who knows what affect that had in terms of people not voting.
erentz 10y ago
Why do these voting comparisons always only discuss electing single winner? A big part of the change needed is to introduce more proportional representation. Asides from moving strictly to an MMP style system, one way is to enlarge the districts so that each district elects (e.g.) five representatives using STV. Don't get me wrong, IRV is 10x better than what we have today, but only makes sense for the president or senate where there can be only one winner each election.
- ClayShentrup 10y ago
  It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems. http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems. Yes, it is. Proportionality in the legislature is a key determinant of public satisfaction with government amongodern democracies. See Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
  - fryguy 10y ago
    Being way more immune to gerrymandering should be reason enough in my opinion. And besides, most of the things on the "con" list are only problems in some kinds of proportional representation I doubt we would ever use in the US (party list system).
- codys 10y ago
  In this context, it's interesting to note that the US Vice President was originally not a running mate to the President, but the runner-up (2nd most electoral college votes). This theoretically allows more proportional representation by, essentially, preventing 1 group from electing their representatives of choice to (in this case) 2 positions (ignoring an overwhelming majority & certainty of it) I'd be interested to see how effective a "runner-up-selection" methodology would be if applied in a more general case.
belovedeagle 10y ago
I find it truly inspiring how many people suddenly care about democracy, even though "this isn't about the 2016 election". /s Some might say that any support for a better system is good, despite the motivations, but I disagree. All this support will vanish as soon as our current system chooses the "right" (well, the left) candidate.
- lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
  I think the fact that twice now in a generation we've watched the current system pick a candidate who's lost the popular vote while at the same time having to live through an increasingly polarized political climate shouldn't be overlooked. Considering people have been interested in alternative voting schemes for decades, I think your conclusion is likely off the mark.
  - lotharbot 10y ago
    > "twice ... pick a candidate who's lost the popular vote" interestingly, those two elections were massively different. Gore won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote both by tiny margins. The election was statistically speaking basically a tie, and settled by something only slightly stronger than a coin flip. The largest margin in terms of raw votes in any single state was 1.7 million (Gore, NY). Two states were closer than 0.1% (NM and Florida). Clinton won the popular vote by a much bigger margin, and lost the electoral vote by a much bigger margin. She won California by over 4.2 million votes (blowing Obama's 3.2 million vote edge out of the water; he won that election by a total of 10 million votes.) She had stronger-than-expected showings in areas where she was already strong, and weaker-than-expected showings in areas where she was weak. It was a much more polarized election, with fewer close results (no states under 0.1% margin) and more blowouts.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  the end result is that any system electing a leader over many different groups cannot rely on simply majority votes as it tips the power to coastal city areas which tend to be major population centers simply because of commerce. now where voting like that proposed in the article is a good idea is state and local governments where the effect is not so out sized. people always want change when they don't get their way and worse when some get their way they ignore the fact that nothing they supposedly supported happens, they are just merely happy they won. oddly or worse there are those just happy the other person lost and could care less who they themselves vote for
donatj 10y ago
The cutsie graphs make the incorrect presumption that people's political views are evenly distributed around the political spectrum.
- cletusw 10y ago
  Sandbox mode has support for two or three "centers" of political views. And yes, this is just a model. Better to make a decision based on a model than a "gut feeling". This is also why the author recommends experimentation at the local level and not sweeping national changes.
- geowwy 10y ago
  The biggest mistake is assuming people vote for the candidate whose policies are closest to theirs. That almost never happens.
serge2k 10y ago
> Justin Trudeau, Canada's Cutie-In-Chief, ... sigh. > ...will be moving his nation towards a better voting system in 2017. well, you know, maybe. If the people want it in their fancy questionnaire. They might not though, since clearly FPTP is the most effective now that it resulting in a liberal majority.
- jdjb 10y ago
  Yeah, that survey was incredibly lackluster. Also felt some of the questions were pretty leading. Questions like implying online voting would lead to higher electoral costs or that a more mixed representation in the house would immediately slow down government. While some of those effects may occur, it seems disingenuous to pick out one random negative effect to single out in a questionnaire like that.
ypeterholmes 10y ago
Good piece but seems remiss to have this discussion without also acknowledging the ways in which our electoral system + a complete lack of transparency are also undermining confidence in the system. It's 2017 yet somehow people are waiting 10 hours in line to vote? And then there's no way to verify that your vote counted?
quadrangle 10y ago
Needs to add the new best-compromise best-of-both-worlds proposal: SCORE RUNOFF per http://www.equal.vote/ http://www.equal.vote/ That's most of the benefits of score voting (which is acknowledged as superior in the study here) with a runoff stage to address strategic voting.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  "Score voting" is very bad for public elections in a way most analyses ignore; and that is that u like some ordered ranking, numerical scores have no clearly articulable, unambiguous meaning and their assignment is demonstrably variable even with similar actual preferences (notably, it has a strong cultural component.) Approval has a somewhat similar problem. Both are, for related reasons, problematic for simulations like this, as well: while these simulations already tend to assume all axes have equal weighting for all voters (though it's easy enough to vary that, but graphical depictions get harder) which is something of a distorting simplification, you have to also assume a mapping function from preference distance to score to make score voting work in a simulation (or a distance cutoff for approval), either of which is a much bigger distortion of how those things work in the real world.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    What's wrong with happy face, neutral face, frowny face?
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    The meaning of a score is relative to the candidate pool in actual practice. This is not an issue in score runoff at all. 0 means "as bad as any candidate in this pool gets" and 9 means "as great as any candidate in the pool gets". There's NO need AT ALL for there to be some broader meaning.
whytheam 10y ago
This article leaves out proportional representation and single transferable vote. PR is widely used in many democracies and should be considered for the U.S. Senate. Specifically, mixed member proportional which allows each district (in our case State) to elect one member to the legislature and then the rest of the 50 seats would be filled to create the closet proportion to popular support each party has. Single transferable vote, which is actually used in some democracies, would fit the House of Representatives quite well. Duverger's law tells us that we will not see electoral diversity in the U.S. until we change the way we vote.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  STV is a PR system, just one that retains candidate-focussed preference ballots and doesn't resort to party lists for who gets elected (MMP uses candidate-centered ballots, but also uses party lists to fill the additional seats.)
tibarun 10y ago
Ever hear about coalition governments? Or about people who will only come out to vote if they see a different option?
tomohawk 10y ago
Turkey ballot. Always add a 'none of the above' choice. This is the turkey. This also makes the ballot less ambiguous. In the election, if a candidate gets 50% + 1 vote, they win. If not, anyone getting less than the turkey is tossed and cannot run in the runoff. No candidates win? Enroll a new slate.
- actuallyalys 10y ago
  I guess you can think of 'none of the above' as a placebo candidate. To make that work, I think you'd also have to make the initial campaign shorter to account for runoffs and the possibility of having to start over with a new slate.
  - gohrt 10y ago
    And here you see the problem in the US having a fixed inauguration date. In parliamentary countries, where the government can vote to dissolve itself, they tend to call for elections whenever the governing coalition is unstable, and elections can take as long as needed, and be re-held as needed.
    - actuallyalys 10y ago
      True, although my main concern is that making elections take even longer will cause fewer people to pay attention and ultimately vote.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  So, if no candidate wins in your House district is the seat vacant until you get a non-turkey, or does the incumbent's term get extended?
EGreg 10y ago
Actually one method is not really debunked: Approval Voting Can anyone say anything negative about it that FPTP doesn't already have? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
- winstonewert 10y ago
  How do you know which candidates to approve? Given a candidate I like, a candidate I really don't like, and a candidate I can tolerate, which ones do I approve?
  - EGreg 10y ago
    The ones you like and tolerate - obviously!
    - Qwertystop 10y ago
      It's not obvious, though. It's not clear whether you should mark approval for [anyone you think would do the job well] or for [anyone who you don't think would do the job badly]. Different people will read it differently, which muddies the question of whether it's accurate.
    - winstonewert 10y ago
      So, given Trump and Clinton who I both despise, I should not approve either and thus forfeit any say on which is better?
      - dllthomas 10y ago
        You can be strategic about where you draw the line. Unlike FPTP, you never have to say you're giving more support to a candidate you like less.
      - EGreg 10y ago
        First of all it is strictly better than having the option to vote for only one. So you can'5 indicate your preference among the rest either. And secondly if you start ranking then how do you combine the rankings? Do you have instant runoff? Then you have spoiler effects which THIS SYSTEM DOESNT HAVE
bikamonki 10y ago
Voting system isn't broken, Democracy is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority To aggravate: many elections lately are win by tiny margins and with not all citizens casting a vote. Hence, the majority per se is not really setting the course of nations. On a side note, I wonder why close results happen. I do not think it is an accident (some that I can remember now that are almost split in half: the popular vote in 2016 US elections, the yes/no vote for the Peace Treaty with FARC in Colombia, the 2016 presidential elections in Peru). Maybe there is no pattern either, but it seems odd that when facing an important decision, voters split in half. (my own conspiracy theory is that given the lack of grey area options - a raking effect as proposed by the OP - voters MUST pick a side and they are manipulated to veer in one direction by smart and sophisticated communications)
- rtkwe 10y ago
  There's a lot of mechanisms that lead to close races/results. In particular in the US the 2 party defacto system kind of guarantees a close-ish result because our parties (at least in the past hard to tell where things are heading now) can't really be extremely ideologically left or right of center because (baring this bizarre recent result) because if they did they'd likely lose a lot of ground to an opposition willing to be more flexible. So you get 2 parties that are roughly vying for a base + enough of the centrists to get elected.
  - Taek 10y ago
    Which still results in a system where a massive percentage of the people end up unhappy. I think you can do a lot better by giving more power to smaller parts of the government. For example, let's assume that 50% of the most controversial laws were turned over to the states. Suddenly California can be more "blue" in practice and not feel nearly so upset when "red" wins both houses and the presidency.
    - rtkwe 10y ago
      A lot of controversial laws only really work below a national level. You can't turn things like the EPA over to the states because of how closely related many state resources are, an environmentally friendly state down river from a lax state can't do much. Federal taxes and how to spend them is fundamentally a federal issue. There's also the larger question of what kind of nation we'd wind up with, for example take that same approach at any point in history and you wind up with a country that's much less inclusive to any sort of minorities. Finally there's the problem that it's kind of hard for people to move between states below a certain income and education level so you get people stuck in a state that may not be interested in protecting or listening to them at all because they're not required for the political majority. edit: On the issue of federal taxes it actually extends a lot deeper into the fundamental role of the (federal) government. In a totally hand wavey glossing over many different factions into 2 categories: Democrats see it as including a social safety net that redistributes the gains of the better off to ensure a base level of support for everyone. (I'm probably being very unfair to their internal view of things as an outsider but...) Republicans see that a unfair to those who've worked hard to get what they have and that if business were just left alone to use as the market demands things will balance out and everyone will wind up well off. If that decision were left to the states poorer states like South Carolina would have a fundamentally worse safety net (if any at all) further disadvantaging the poor there, so the only moral thing to do is have the federal government step in and redistribute things between the states.
stretchwithme 10y ago
What we need is a system that let's everybody have representation, both in the legislative and executive branches. Proportional representation is much better at this then winner-take-all elections. Why do we need to place all this power in the hands of a single person anyway? Switzerland has an executive branch with 7 members from 5 different parties and a presidency that rotates annually. PR also makes it much harder for lobbyists to influence lawmakers. Candidates don't need to convince everybody in order to represent those who identify with their party. And a candidate that represents one of many parties has to do a good job representing that party in order to keep that job. We could move the House of Representatives to PR and keep the Senate as is.
- Taek 10y ago
  Switzerland style rule is nice because it allows for some rogue candidates to be elected safely. Trump wouldn't be so scary if he had 6 other people holding a leash. But the probe would still get to signal dissatisfaction and the other parties would have a better warning that they aren't in a great position and need to update their stances on the issues.
lifeformed 10y ago
This format of interactive article is really excellent. It's a good example of taking advantage of the medium of the web.
dane-pgp 10y ago
There is actually "One Weird Trick" to fix democracy, and it's the voting system not mentioned in the article: Direct and Party Representative (DPR) voting. At least for parliamentary / congressional elections it is both more proportional than FPTP and simpler to count than all the alternatives mentioned. You simply provide the voters with two ballot papers: one to select a local representative (counted and decided in the same way as a traditional FPTP election), and a second ballot paper where the voter can choose which party they want to have more power at the parliamentary / congressional level. The trick is that these second votes are totalled across the whole nation and used to calculate the ratio of support for each party nationally, then those ratios are used to normalise the voting power of the representatives in the legislature. So if 10% of MPs elected are from the Triangle Party, with 20% of the national vote, then each MP gets effectively a double vote on bills, relative to a nominal MP with a proportionally correct amount of national support.
- pluma 10y ago
  This still sounds like it's based on a polarized two party system. In practice (outside the US) few people fully agree with one political party. In Germany I find most people I talk to don't fully support any party but partly agree with one or more parties on various issues. A scoring or approval system makes more sense in this situation because it would allow voters to express their tendencies towards each party individually rather than having to pick one compromise directly. It's also one of the few systems that allows voters to accurately represent ambivalence or apathy. DPR still sounds like it suffers from all the problems of FPTP with regard to strategic voting and spoilers.
  - grzm 10y ago
    In practice (outside the US) few people fully agree with one political party. I don't think people in the US fully agree with one political party, either. Unfortunately that tends to be forgotten when things get heated, especially around elections. The polarization is artificial.
  - dane-pgp 10y ago
    I don't see why DPR would require or support a polarized two party system. The idea is that the secondary (party) ballot allows you to be completely honest and vote for the party you really prefer, even if that party would be considered a "spoiler" under FPTP. Because the secondary ballots are totalled nationally, there is no danger that your support of a smaller party ends up as a wasted vote. Of course, there are a few extra details to deal with, such as how to include independent candidates (with no party behind them) and whether to introduce a minimum threshold of support for a party to appear on the secondary ballot. These are relatively straightforward questions, though, and are covered by this website about the voting system: http://www.dprvoting.org/ http://www.dprvoting.org/
rrradical 10y ago
These sorts of explanations are very neat and educational, I think, but to me they aren't that effective in actually bringing us closer to using a new voting system. All the discussion here is an example of what tends to happen, which is people arguing over what the very best voting system is. But it's so easy to construct argument for or against any particular system. I think a better tactic to actually use a new system is to share a vision to the general population of what voting under a new system would actually be like. Once the public at large is in favor of the general idea of moving to a new system, actually picking the best system should be more of an implementation detail. In other words, walk the voter through a simulated ballot casting and show them what the results of the election might be under such a system. I gave an effort to do this here: http://asivitz.com/voting/ http://asivitz.com/voting/ I'm not sure how well I succeeded though.
sandGorgon 10y ago
I'm actually very interested in the mathematical implication of score voting. Because in Indian elections - the world's largest elections - IRV is fairly impractical. We have constituencies with more than 10-15 candidates and the "recalculations" will kill the system. We also have very frequent recounts. I'm still thinking of how to explain score voting to an illiterate voter. It requires a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude more involved than a simple checkbox next to a candidate.
- grzm 10y ago
  I'm still thinking of how to explain score voting to an illiterate voter. It requires a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude more involved than a simple checkbox next to a candidate. You've made a very important point. In tech we often talk about UX with apps and sometimes with consumer products, but not enough in my opinion in areas such as voting and paperwork.
  - lotu 10y ago
    I think explaining score voting is pretty easy you just have only 3 categories labeled ️(1) (2) (3) for each candidate and they put a mark on what they think for each one. As an aside I susspect that having more than 3 or 4 catagoreis isn't a good idea and creates false precision that complicates things.
    - sandGorgon 10y ago
      is it 1,2,3 or 3,2,1? you underestimate interface design for a billion people in 20 different languages and in symbols that can be understood by illiterate citizens. fyi, election symbols (like lotus, bicycle, broom) are mandatory in Indian elections for people who cannot read. The American concept of voter registration is fairly puzzling.
    - ClayShentrup 10y ago
      http://scorevoting.net/Complexity http://scorevoting.net/Complexity
a_imho 10y ago
Sortition, closely followed by direct democracy. 1) is also proven for selecting juries?
tunesmith 10y ago
Are n-dimensional spectrum positions really the right way to model voting? I'm not sure 2016's voter behavior can even be modeled dimensionally. A skilled persuader can convince a voter that he/she (persuader) is "close" to their "positions" even when they're not. (Or that the opponent is not a voter's ally even if they are.)
kilotaras 10y ago
>As you could see, every voting system except First Past The Post is immune to the spoiler effect. That's not correct. IRV is also susceptible to spoilers. Lets start with two candidates A (slighty left) and B (farther right) |-------A---B----| 1. A gets 61 vote, B gets 39. 2. A wins. Now lets introduce a farther left candidate C, that is really close to A. |-----C-A---B----| Voting goes as follow. 1. C gets 31 vote, A gets 30, B gets 39. 2. A gets eliminated, his/her votes split between B and C. 3. Because C and B are close, most of the votes for B go to A who now wins the election.
- vacri 10y ago
  ... how does A win the election in step 3 if A was knocked out in step 2? I'm also not following how you meant to write that (apparently a typo) - why would B get more votes than C when A is eliminated? Why would A's voters split evenly down the middle if C is closer to them?
  - kilotaras 10y ago
    I've messed A and B at some point. Should be: A gets split, B wins. Introduction of another left candidate caused right one to win.
vacri 10y ago
The IRV 'fault' is not a fault, but a feature. When the loser drops out, the people who put them at #1 still get a say in the remaining candidates. That's why more voters prefer candidate Hexagon in the example - it's actually a truer result of all the electorate, not [all electorate minus Square voters]. Just because your #1 candidate is knocked out doesn't mean you should lose your say in how you're governed. Similarly, the example paints Triangle as getting more popular, but ignores that Hexagon is also getting more popular. The 'fault' also requires that none of the candidates are particularly representative - look at the example, look at where the locus of voters are, and look at where the candidates are. In order for Triangle to not win any more, all three candidates have to be pretty bad representatives; it's less of a disaster if "not the right candidate" won in this situation (even though that's not what's happening).
btbuildem 10y ago
How about we just have two presidents? It seems absurd that moving the vote result by 0.00001% changes the outcome drastically. Let there be two heads of state, and let them work it out.
- hash-set 10y ago
  Um, no. I think there are a lot of good reasons why two executives wouldn't work--for example, when emergency decisions need to be made such as in war time. Plus, I'm just glad the Clintons are nowhere near the seat of power. The last Clinton Presidency was such an awful trainwreck. People forget--all they remember was the bubble stock market and the fallacy about Clinton reducing the national debt (hint: it was a projection, it was never reality). No more Bushes, no more Clintons. Not ever.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > How about we just have two presidents? What, like Roman consuls? Really, if you want to lower the stakes of small changes in the electorate, get a parliamentary system with basically proportional representation (STV in small multimember districts works, you don't need party list methods), and dial back the policy powers of the head of state (who can continue to.be separately elected.)
nolepointer 10y ago
But we aren't a democracy.
zeveb 10y ago
> The most famous real-world example of this was in 2000, when Ralph Nader "stole" votes from Al Gore, letting George Bush win. Is Nader's 'theft' really more famous than Perot's? I think that Perot really made a much bigger difference than did Nader: in 1992 there were a lot of Perot supporters who would have voted for Bush over Clinton, but for some reason they really did think that their candidate had a chance.
hash-set 10y ago
" In 2011, almost a full quarter of young Americans said democracy was a "bad" or "very bad" way to run a country. And today, one in six Americans say it'd be "good" or "very good" to be under actual military rule." Really, our problem here seems to be one of education, then. People who prefer a military dictatorship have ZERO experience with military dictatorships!

307 points by bpierre 10y ago

virtuexru 10y ago

-redacted-

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
Saying "it can't be done" and "nothing will change" for decades is why we've built up a massive backlog of absolutely necessary changes.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  I don't understand who's actually against all the common sense changes? Are people really that conservative? Is congress and state legislators more conservative than the electorate? Surely the average US voter has to see the obvious benefits of a ranked/runoff system over the current one? If they do - how can the laws not be passed (even constitutional changes should be within reach).
  - gizmo686 10y ago
    I don't think "conservative" is the correct word in this case. Our current legislators, by definition, got into power under the current system, so for (almost) all of them the current is preferable to an alternative system where their victory is less certain. Additionally, they are almost all part of one of the two major political parties; both of which benefit greatly from our current system. Ultimately, the problem is that it is very difficult to change the rules of the game when the winners are in charge of making the rules.
    - alkonaut 10y ago
      > so for (almost) all of them the current is preferable to an alternative system where their victory is less certain. But publicly holding a position in office that a majority of your constituents disagree with, in a high profile question should be a much worse disadvantage than voting to change the system? > Additionally, they are almost all part of one of the two major political parties; both of which benefit greatly from our current system. At least for primaries, it would be beneficial for the parties themselves (if perhaps not for the candidates) to have both runoff votes and some kind of approval. > Ultimately, the problem is that it is very difficult to change the rules of the game when the winners are in charge of making the rules. This is what I don't understand though as a non american. I don't consider politicians to have much different goals and opinions to my own. If they did, they'd be replaced.
      - adrienne 10y ago
        Nah. Here in the US they just pass laws to suppress voters and rejigger districts until they're guaranteed wins. Much less work for them.
    - alkonaut 10y ago
      > I don't think "conservative" is the correct word in this case. I meant in the "I don't want things to change" way, not inthe abortion/guns/small state (US) political meaning of the word.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >Is congress and state legislators more conservative than the electorate? In both the small-c and large-C senses of "conservative", yes, they largely are. The USA currently has an economically progressive, socially moderate majority (when you do non-party-branded, issue-by-issue polling), but a government that largely consists of economic and social conservatives, rather extreme ones actually.

obilgic 10y ago

Why use a 2d map instead of 1 dimensional, seems more practical.

optimuspaul 10y ago
Because the political spectrum really is a 2d (if not 3d or 4d) field. Progressive <-> Conservative and Liberal <-> Authoritarian. If it were really just two candidates then perhaps there would be just once metric to track.
- baddox 10y ago
  It's not just the political spectrum. You need at least 2 spatial dimensions to demonstrate the possibility of non-transitive group preferences (i.e. the community prefers candidate A > B > C > A), which is one fundamental reason Arrow's impossibility theorem is true. If candidates are just on a number line, then the group's preferences would always be transitive and there would always be a Condorcet winner (or a tie).
tantalor 10y ago
2 dimensions is required for the examples with a third candidate.
- obilgic 10y ago
  nope

Finbarr 10y ago

Small point of feedback: the header of this site is extremely distracting.

niftich 10y ago

In addition to the great overview of voting systems and the policy commentary, the interactive parts -- which they call 'Explorable Explanations [1]' -- are fantastic! The code for this one is on Github [2]. [1] http://explorableexplanations.com/ http://explorableexplanations.com/ [2] https://github.com/ncase/ballot https://github.com/ncase/ballot

YPCrumble 10y ago
Could someone explain what `index.js`[1] is doing? It looks like code to figure out whether someone is actually reading the article or not but I'm curious why the various timeouts and scroll listeners, and what they're doing exactly. [1] https://github.com/ncase/ballot/blob/gh-pages/js/index.js https://github.com/ncase/ballot/blob/gh-pages/js/index.js
- niftich 10y ago
  That's exactly what it's doing -- it's trying to figure out if your viewport is looking at the content 'above the fold', so that it can show the "splash iframe" [1] while you're looking at it, and stop JS-animating it when you're not. [1] http://ncase.me/ballot/splash/splash.html http://ncase.me/ballot/splash/splash.html

tantalor 10y ago

See also: Median voter theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem

winstonewert 10y ago

I think the discussion is severely lacking a proper consideration of how strategic voting affects the systems it likes best. For example, score voting encourages people to exaggerate their preferences, and approval voting makes it non-trivial to figure out who you should approve.

abecedarius 10y ago
That does deserve deeper consideration, but the page is already long for an intro for a mass audience, who need to hear about this if it's to make a difference. Also it seems very unlikely for strategic voting to become a worse problem for approval voting or score voting than it is for the systems we're stuck with right now. Perhaps they'd end up making no difference, though I doubt it. If you feel like writing up your thoughts on this, or pointing to a good writeup, I'd be interested.

cthor 10y ago

When talking about the effect of voting systems on elections, something I think is overlooked is the game-theoretic implications on the candidates. Take the second diagram in the article and move the candidates around. What's the optimal strategy? To move as close to your opponent as possible, while staying closer to the centre. Now take the diagram with three candidates, and move them around. What's the optimal strategy? To move as far away from both opponents. This works even if you consider an n-dimensional space for every conceivable issue. Two-party system encourages both parties to move towards the centre. Three- (or more) party system encourages them to spread out.

brianolson 10y ago
3 parties would take up position around some population center, with some differentiation, but not too much. Probably they each move to the center of mass of the third of the population they represent, except that there's some incentive to be a little centrist of that to try and poach marginal voters from the other two parties. If a party moves too far out from center, centrist voters on their margins defect to the other two parties. I'm not sure what the penalty for being 'too centrist' is.
tristor 10y ago
> Two-party system encourages both parties to move towards the centre. Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US, both major parties are moving towards the right and moving towards authoritarian positions.
- mastax 10y ago
  This is usually explained by the idea that the 'Center' moves about over time. Perhaps in this instance the center was just further right than the parties expected.
- nosuchthing 10y ago
  Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US, both major parties are moving towards the right and moving towards authoritarian positions. Which seems to be a result of FPTP, which fosters the limited choice between RED/BLUE.

ryandvm 10y ago

I love the topic of voting systems, but... we can't even get rid of the fucking penny over here. The odds of the U.S. changing its voting methodology are so infinitesimal, I'm having trouble conceptualizing it.

abecedarius 10y ago
Voting methods are mostly set state by state, as I understand it. (I'm pretty ignorant about politics.) Some states, like California, allow powerful ballot propositions. Thus you could get a change like this on the ballot, starting in a few states, without going through the major parties. In California it doesn't even seem that wild to hope the parties would support the change: in recent years it changed to "open primaries", and I think it'd be rational for the D's and R's to want approval voting in the primary. You get experience with it and it starts to become thinkable elsewhere. Or start using it in nongovernmental orgs, and likewise gain experience and familiarity.
davidw 10y ago
STV type systems seem to be gradually catching on. Oregon's Benton County recently passed a rancked choice voting thing. I think it's a 'bottom up' type of reform.
wamatt 10y ago
>The odds of the U.S. changing its voting methodology are so infinitesimal, I'm having trouble conceptualizing it. You mean how Maine just passed Rank-Choice (Instant Runoff) voting as law? [1] "On November 8 [2016], Maine voters passed Question 5 and became the first state in the nation to adopt Ranked Choice Voting for state and federal elections. The Yes On 5 campaign was led by the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, a grassroots, Maine-based organization founded by former independent state senator Dick Woodbury of Yarmouth, and led by Kyle Bailey of Gorham." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting [2] http://www.fairvote.org/maine_voters_adopt_ranked_choice_voting http://www.fairvote.org/maine_voters_adopt_ranked_choice_vot...
noobermin 10y ago
Not to mention, the current people in power benefit greatly from the current system, so our odds are even worsened.

comex 10y ago

I suspect Gary Johnson getting chosen by a Borda count isn't as weird/surprising as the number of question marks implies. Caveat: I didn't see a raw distribution of preference orders on the Vox survey; if it's linked somewhere, I missed it. But I think Johnson is effectively acting as a compromise candidate: a lot of Clinton voters really hate Trump and a lot of Trump voters really hate Clinton, enough that they'd both prefer Johnson over the other candidate, even if they don't actually know much about him, or even mildly dislike him. Borda count tends to choose compromise candidates, so that's what you end up with. Now, Johnson's policies are fairly fringe and weird, and so are the other third party candidate's (Stein), but that's because serious candidates don't run on third party tickets that have no chance of winning. If the election was actually conducted using a Borda count, you'd probably see a number of relatively boring centrists running, and one of them would win instead of Johnson - which is a perfectly reasonable result. Well, except that that would also fundamentally change the coverage of the race, so there's no reason to expect the election would go anywhere near the same way overall (it would probably be less polarized), but the point is that to the limited extent the survey results reflect this hypothetical world, they don't cast it in a bad light. Edit: Also, I like Clinton, but her being the Concordet winner doesn't mean much in terms of that world either. When almost all of the ballots give the top rank to one of two candidates, whichever of the two gets more votes is the Concordet winner. But that's only the case because of first-past-the-post, both because there aren't any good third-party candidates (neither centrist nor extremist), and because the structure of the race strongly encourages voters to sign up for one bandwagon or the other .

basseq 10y ago
But I think Johnson is effectively acting as a compromise candidate: a lot of Clinton voters really hate Trump and a lot of Trump voters really hate Clinton, enough that they'd both prefer Johnson over the other candidate, even if they don't actually know much about him, or even mildly dislike him. That, and a lot of people were voting less for the man and more for an independent ticket. And not even with the expectation that it would pay off in this election, but that it would encourage more (and more mainstream) third-party candidates to run in the future.

asdf1234321 10y ago

Another approach: an ordered subset specifying fall-through candidates you would want your vote to go to if the current one has not path to victory. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1E-bZdxnzc_eTJvLWtsSGE3Y3c/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1E-bZdxnzc_eTJvLWtsSGE3Y3c...

mjevans 10y ago
You've more or less described IRV.

Yen 10y ago

So, the biggest complaint about Instant-runoff voting seems to be that it can lead to a counter-intuitive scenario, where a candidate becomes more popular, but loses the election. From what I've seen of constructed scenarios that have this situation, they have 'left', 'compromise', and 'right' candidates, with the majority of voters tending to prefer left>compromise>right, or right>compromise>left. If 'compromise' is the weakest candidate, either left or right ends up winning. But if left or right become popular enough, and make left/right the weakest candidate, than compromise wins out over both extremes. Frankly, this actually doesn't seem like that much of a problem to me. If we end up with everyone's second-favorite choice, everyone is at least second-most happy. For example, in the USA - Without commenting on Gary Johnson's politics or experience, I think the USA would have been happier had he been chosen. Half the population is pulling their hair out over Trump. Had Clinton won, the other half would likely feel the same way. Most of the population would be less-excited to see Johnson in office than their preferred candidate, but relieved that at least opposing candidate didn't get in.

bigger_cheese 10y ago
>So, the biggest complaint about Instant-runoff voting seems to be that it can lead to a counter-intuitive scenario, where a candidate becomes more popular, but loses the election. This sentence doesn't make sense the original article failed to mention if you poll 50% of the first preference vote you get elected. So if you are at least 50% "popular" you can't lose. If you poll below 50% it comes down to preferences as it rightly should in my opinion. there is nothing counter intuitive about this. It happens here (in Australia) quite often. http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/guide/mpor/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/guide/mpor/ Here the Right (Liberal party) candidate polled 40% and lost because the two Left parties (Labor + Greens) also polled about 40% combined.
- anonymoushn 10y ago
  Is it good that sometimes voting A > B > C would cause A to lose, while voting C > B > A would cause A to win?

bluecaribou 10y ago

Recounting my comment from a previous article[1], comparing all these voting systems is not really the right way to think about it. First, you need to separate the mechanism used to express voter preference (i.e the ballot design), from the method used to choose the winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems. In terms of ballot designs, they are basically all just restricted subsets of the "score" voting ballot. That is, any voter preference that can be expressed in an "approval", "ranked choice", "ranked choice with ties", or traditional "single choice" ballot, can also be expressed with a "score" ballot. That means every voting system is a "score ballot" system with some restrictions applied to the ballot. This means that, for example, you could have an election where you allow the voter to choose whichever ballot they are most comfortable with. Then you just interpret the ballot as a score ballot. There are multiple ways to choose a winner from a set of score ballots. But debating between them is counterproductive to getting better voting systems adopted. Just start off with one that's easy to understand (i.e. "sum of ratings", or "only the first choice counts"), and worry about improving it later. The important thing is to give the voter the option to use a more expressive ballot. Whichever one they feel most comfortable with. You could even make it so that initially, all ballots are converted to traditional "single choice" ballots for tallying, but let voters know how the vote would have turned out under other evaluation methods (like "sum of ratings" and Schulze). I think voters would quickly realize the value of counting all of their expressed preferences. ... But that is a very cool site. Probably the kind of site the web was intended for, don't you think? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566#score_12952384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566#score_12952384

rtkwe 10y ago
The issue with that is any change, especially how a winner is chosen from a ballot, is a long and politically fraught process so whatever is changed to shouldn't just be 'eh it's not great but we'll change it in a few years' because that's really unlikely to actually happen.
- bluecaribou 10y ago
  So first of all, I think that only three evaluation methods should be considered - ballot conversion/reduction to traditional "single choice", "sum of ratings", and Schulze. You might need to start off with conversion to traditional "single choice", because it's hard to argue against adopting it. That is, you're not actually changing the election system at all. You're just allowing people to optionally express extra information about their preferences in a way that does not affect the election. But it will give each voter a chance to, if they want, try out more expressive ballots (which will presumably be appealing to most people once they get the hang of it), and the public will be told how the election would have resulted under the other two evaluation systems. Presumably, a more "centrist" candidate would generally have won. And after a few election cycles, people will be able to form an opinion on which evaluation system they think produces the best results. I think the reason why electoral system change has so often been met with public resistance is that most people don't have a feel for how the results would change, and nobody is offering them a chance to get familiar with a different election system without an up-front commitment to the change. If you can get people to accept the "sum of ratings" evaluation method, then I say be happy with that. The fact that "sum of ratings" is arguably not as good as Schulze is a very high class problem to have. (Btw I'm using Schulze as a stand-in for any "good but complex" evaluation system.) Anyway, I'm not sure the improvement in evaluation is worth having an evaluation system that most people wouldn't understand. So just to sum up, I think what I'm proposing is different and more acceptable in that: i) It allows people to use whichever ballot they feel most comfortable with, knowing that no matter which ballot they choose, their vote will count as much as any other voter. ii) It allows voters, if they so choose, to get familiar with the more expressive ballots and different evaluation methods without committing to any change in the election system.

KingMob 10y ago

Kudos to the interactive diagrams, but this seems misinformed about spoiler history. The most famous "spoiler" was Perot, not Nader. Bush v. Gore was an extremely tight election, but there were third parties that drew more votes from Bush than Gore, and wer within the margin of error, possibly counterbalancing Nader's effect. Whereas with Perot, he received 19% of the popular vote, most of which were clearly drawn from George Bush, ensuring a Clinton win.

mtgx 10y ago
Yes, the Nader thing was just Democratic propaganda to ensure future left-wing parties are discredited by people and the media right from the start, just like they tried and failed to do this time with Jill Stein. Call it "fake news" if you will, not that Google or Facebook would ever ban a media entity like MSNBC [1] over it... How can you blame Stein for a few thousand lost votes when millions of other voters who voted Democratic in the last election stayed home because they didn't like your candidate? Do you really think those thousands of people that didn't stay home because they didn't like your candidate, but went to vote, and voted for Stein, would've voted your candidate instead? No, best case scenario, they would've stayed home just like the others, otherwise. Also, in some states tens of thousands (more than those that voted for Stein) actually did go to vote, voted on local elections, and didn't vote for president. Either way, blaming Stein is just laughable. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xK5NaH0oy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xK5NaH0oy4
- tunesmith 10y ago
  That's a little overstated. If you go by national exit polls, both Stein voters and Johnson voters "would have voted" for Clinton over Trump (in a two-person election) about 25-15. The rest wouldn't have. If that margin is applied to each state (which isn't quite right but whatever), that's roughly enough to flip Michigan but probably not any other states. So, true that you can't pin the blame on Stein, but she did have an effect, partly measured by the vote, and partly unmeasurable in terms of enthusiasm dampening, etc. Same sort of thing with Nader - you can't quite draw a mathematical line that he flipped Florida, but all his Gush/Bore stuff - who knows what affect that had in terms of people not voting.

erentz 10y ago

Why do these voting comparisons always only discuss electing single winner? A big part of the change needed is to introduce more proportional representation. Asides from moving strictly to an MMP style system, one way is to enlarge the districts so that each district elects (e.g.) five representatives using STV. Don't get me wrong, IRV is 10x better than what we have today, but only makes sense for the president or senate where there can be only one winner each election.

ClayShentrup 10y ago
It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems. http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems. Yes, it is. Proportionality in the legislature is a key determinant of public satisfaction with government amongodern democracies. See Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
- fryguy 10y ago
  Being way more immune to gerrymandering should be reason enough in my opinion. And besides, most of the things on the "con" list are only problems in some kinds of proportional representation I doubt we would ever use in the US (party list system).
codys 10y ago
In this context, it's interesting to note that the US Vice President was originally not a running mate to the President, but the runner-up (2nd most electoral college votes). This theoretically allows more proportional representation by, essentially, preventing 1 group from electing their representatives of choice to (in this case) 2 positions (ignoring an overwhelming majority & certainty of it) I'd be interested to see how effective a "runner-up-selection" methodology would be if applied in a more general case.

belovedeagle 10y ago

I find it truly inspiring how many people suddenly care about democracy, even though "this isn't about the 2016 election". /s Some might say that any support for a better system is good, despite the motivations, but I disagree. All this support will vanish as soon as our current system chooses the "right" (well, the left) candidate.

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
I think the fact that twice now in a generation we've watched the current system pick a candidate who's lost the popular vote while at the same time having to live through an increasingly polarized political climate shouldn't be overlooked. Considering people have been interested in alternative voting schemes for decades, I think your conclusion is likely off the mark.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  > "twice ... pick a candidate who's lost the popular vote" interestingly, those two elections were massively different. Gore won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote both by tiny margins. The election was statistically speaking basically a tie, and settled by something only slightly stronger than a coin flip. The largest margin in terms of raw votes in any single state was 1.7 million (Gore, NY). Two states were closer than 0.1% (NM and Florida). Clinton won the popular vote by a much bigger margin, and lost the electoral vote by a much bigger margin. She won California by over 4.2 million votes (blowing Obama's 3.2 million vote edge out of the water; he won that election by a total of 10 million votes.) She had stronger-than-expected showings in areas where she was already strong, and weaker-than-expected showings in areas where she was weak. It was a much more polarized election, with fewer close results (no states under 0.1% margin) and more blowouts.
Shivetya 10y ago
the end result is that any system electing a leader over many different groups cannot rely on simply majority votes as it tips the power to coastal city areas which tend to be major population centers simply because of commerce. now where voting like that proposed in the article is a good idea is state and local governments where the effect is not so out sized. people always want change when they don't get their way and worse when some get their way they ignore the fact that nothing they supposedly supported happens, they are just merely happy they won. oddly or worse there are those just happy the other person lost and could care less who they themselves vote for

donatj 10y ago

The cutsie graphs make the incorrect presumption that people's political views are evenly distributed around the political spectrum.

cletusw 10y ago
Sandbox mode has support for two or three "centers" of political views. And yes, this is just a model. Better to make a decision based on a model than a "gut feeling". This is also why the author recommends experimentation at the local level and not sweeping national changes.
geowwy 10y ago
The biggest mistake is assuming people vote for the candidate whose policies are closest to theirs. That almost never happens.

serge2k 10y ago

> Justin Trudeau, Canada's Cutie-In-Chief, ... sigh. > ...will be moving his nation towards a better voting system in 2017. well, you know, maybe. If the people want it in their fancy questionnaire. They might not though, since clearly FPTP is the most effective now that it resulting in a liberal majority.

jdjb 10y ago
Yeah, that survey was incredibly lackluster. Also felt some of the questions were pretty leading. Questions like implying online voting would lead to higher electoral costs or that a more mixed representation in the house would immediately slow down government. While some of those effects may occur, it seems disingenuous to pick out one random negative effect to single out in a questionnaire like that.

ypeterholmes 10y ago

Good piece but seems remiss to have this discussion without also acknowledging the ways in which our electoral system + a complete lack of transparency are also undermining confidence in the system. It's 2017 yet somehow people are waiting 10 hours in line to vote? And then there's no way to verify that your vote counted?

quadrangle 10y ago

Needs to add the new best-compromise best-of-both-worlds proposal: SCORE RUNOFF per http://www.equal.vote/ http://www.equal.vote/ That's most of the benefits of score voting (which is acknowledged as superior in the study here) with a runoff stage to address strategic voting.

dragonwriter 10y ago
"Score voting" is very bad for public elections in a way most analyses ignore; and that is that u like some ordered ranking, numerical scores have no clearly articulable, unambiguous meaning and their assignment is demonstrably variable even with similar actual preferences (notably, it has a strong cultural component.) Approval has a somewhat similar problem. Both are, for related reasons, problematic for simulations like this, as well: while these simulations already tend to assume all axes have equal weighting for all voters (though it's easy enough to vary that, but graphical depictions get harder) which is something of a distorting simplification, you have to also assume a mapping function from preference distance to score to make score voting work in a simulation (or a distance cutoff for approval), either of which is a much bigger distortion of how those things work in the real world.
- zeveb 10y ago
  What's wrong with happy face, neutral face, frowny face?
- quadrangle 10y ago
  The meaning of a score is relative to the candidate pool in actual practice. This is not an issue in score runoff at all. 0 means "as bad as any candidate in this pool gets" and 9 means "as great as any candidate in the pool gets". There's NO need AT ALL for there to be some broader meaning.

whytheam 10y ago

This article leaves out proportional representation and single transferable vote. PR is widely used in many democracies and should be considered for the U.S. Senate. Specifically, mixed member proportional which allows each district (in our case State) to elect one member to the legislature and then the rest of the 50 seats would be filled to create the closet proportion to popular support each party has. Single transferable vote, which is actually used in some democracies, would fit the House of Representatives quite well. Duverger's law tells us that we will not see electoral diversity in the U.S. until we change the way we vote.

dragonwriter 10y ago
STV is a PR system, just one that retains candidate-focussed preference ballots and doesn't resort to party lists for who gets elected (MMP uses candidate-centered ballots, but also uses party lists to fill the additional seats.)

tibarun 10y ago

Ever hear about coalition governments? Or about people who will only come out to vote if they see a different option?

tomohawk 10y ago

Turkey ballot. Always add a 'none of the above' choice. This is the turkey. This also makes the ballot less ambiguous. In the election, if a candidate gets 50% + 1 vote, they win. If not, anyone getting less than the turkey is tossed and cannot run in the runoff. No candidates win? Enroll a new slate.

actuallyalys 10y ago
I guess you can think of 'none of the above' as a placebo candidate. To make that work, I think you'd also have to make the initial campaign shorter to account for runoffs and the possibility of having to start over with a new slate.
- gohrt 10y ago
  And here you see the problem in the US having a fixed inauguration date. In parliamentary countries, where the government can vote to dissolve itself, they tend to call for elections whenever the governing coalition is unstable, and elections can take as long as needed, and be re-held as needed.
  - actuallyalys 10y ago
    True, although my main concern is that making elections take even longer will cause fewer people to pay attention and ultimately vote.
dragonwriter 10y ago
So, if no candidate wins in your House district is the seat vacant until you get a non-turkey, or does the incumbent's term get extended?

EGreg 10y ago

Actually one method is not really debunked: Approval Voting Can anyone say anything negative about it that FPTP doesn't already have? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

winstonewert 10y ago
How do you know which candidates to approve? Given a candidate I like, a candidate I really don't like, and a candidate I can tolerate, which ones do I approve?
- EGreg 10y ago
  The ones you like and tolerate - obviously!
  - Qwertystop 10y ago
    It's not obvious, though. It's not clear whether you should mark approval for [anyone you think would do the job well] or for [anyone who you don't think would do the job badly]. Different people will read it differently, which muddies the question of whether it's accurate.
  - winstonewert 10y ago
    So, given Trump and Clinton who I both despise, I should not approve either and thus forfeit any say on which is better?
    - dllthomas 10y ago
      You can be strategic about where you draw the line. Unlike FPTP, you never have to say you're giving more support to a candidate you like less.
    - EGreg 10y ago
      First of all it is strictly better than having the option to vote for only one. So you can'5 indicate your preference among the rest either. And secondly if you start ranking then how do you combine the rankings? Do you have instant runoff? Then you have spoiler effects which THIS SYSTEM DOESNT HAVE

bikamonki 10y ago

Voting system isn't broken, Democracy is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority To aggravate: many elections lately are win by tiny margins and with not all citizens casting a vote. Hence, the majority per se is not really setting the course of nations. On a side note, I wonder why close results happen. I do not think it is an accident (some that I can remember now that are almost split in half: the popular vote in 2016 US elections, the yes/no vote for the Peace Treaty with FARC in Colombia, the 2016 presidential elections in Peru). Maybe there is no pattern either, but it seems odd that when facing an important decision, voters split in half. (my own conspiracy theory is that given the lack of grey area options - a raking effect as proposed by the OP - voters MUST pick a side and they are manipulated to veer in one direction by smart and sophisticated communications)

rtkwe 10y ago
There's a lot of mechanisms that lead to close races/results. In particular in the US the 2 party defacto system kind of guarantees a close-ish result because our parties (at least in the past hard to tell where things are heading now) can't really be extremely ideologically left or right of center because (baring this bizarre recent result) because if they did they'd likely lose a lot of ground to an opposition willing to be more flexible. So you get 2 parties that are roughly vying for a base + enough of the centrists to get elected.
- Taek 10y ago
  Which still results in a system where a massive percentage of the people end up unhappy. I think you can do a lot better by giving more power to smaller parts of the government. For example, let's assume that 50% of the most controversial laws were turned over to the states. Suddenly California can be more "blue" in practice and not feel nearly so upset when "red" wins both houses and the presidency.
  - rtkwe 10y ago
    A lot of controversial laws only really work below a national level. You can't turn things like the EPA over to the states because of how closely related many state resources are, an environmentally friendly state down river from a lax state can't do much. Federal taxes and how to spend them is fundamentally a federal issue. There's also the larger question of what kind of nation we'd wind up with, for example take that same approach at any point in history and you wind up with a country that's much less inclusive to any sort of minorities. Finally there's the problem that it's kind of hard for people to move between states below a certain income and education level so you get people stuck in a state that may not be interested in protecting or listening to them at all because they're not required for the political majority. edit: On the issue of federal taxes it actually extends a lot deeper into the fundamental role of the (federal) government. In a totally hand wavey glossing over many different factions into 2 categories: Democrats see it as including a social safety net that redistributes the gains of the better off to ensure a base level of support for everyone. (I'm probably being very unfair to their internal view of things as an outsider but...) Republicans see that a unfair to those who've worked hard to get what they have and that if business were just left alone to use as the market demands things will balance out and everyone will wind up well off. If that decision were left to the states poorer states like South Carolina would have a fundamentally worse safety net (if any at all) further disadvantaging the poor there, so the only moral thing to do is have the federal government step in and redistribute things between the states.

stretchwithme 10y ago

What we need is a system that let's everybody have representation, both in the legislative and executive branches. Proportional representation is much better at this then winner-take-all elections. Why do we need to place all this power in the hands of a single person anyway? Switzerland has an executive branch with 7 members from 5 different parties and a presidency that rotates annually. PR also makes it much harder for lobbyists to influence lawmakers. Candidates don't need to convince everybody in order to represent those who identify with their party. And a candidate that represents one of many parties has to do a good job representing that party in order to keep that job. We could move the House of Representatives to PR and keep the Senate as is.

Taek 10y ago
Switzerland style rule is nice because it allows for some rogue candidates to be elected safely. Trump wouldn't be so scary if he had 6 other people holding a leash. But the probe would still get to signal dissatisfaction and the other parties would have a better warning that they aren't in a great position and need to update their stances on the issues.

lifeformed 10y ago

This format of interactive article is really excellent. It's a good example of taking advantage of the medium of the web.

dane-pgp 10y ago

There is actually "One Weird Trick" to fix democracy, and it's the voting system not mentioned in the article: Direct and Party Representative (DPR) voting. At least for parliamentary / congressional elections it is both more proportional than FPTP and simpler to count than all the alternatives mentioned. You simply provide the voters with two ballot papers: one to select a local representative (counted and decided in the same way as a traditional FPTP election), and a second ballot paper where the voter can choose which party they want to have more power at the parliamentary / congressional level. The trick is that these second votes are totalled across the whole nation and used to calculate the ratio of support for each party nationally, then those ratios are used to normalise the voting power of the representatives in the legislature. So if 10% of MPs elected are from the Triangle Party, with 20% of the national vote, then each MP gets effectively a double vote on bills, relative to a nominal MP with a proportionally correct amount of national support.

pluma 10y ago
This still sounds like it's based on a polarized two party system. In practice (outside the US) few people fully agree with one political party. In Germany I find most people I talk to don't fully support any party but partly agree with one or more parties on various issues. A scoring or approval system makes more sense in this situation because it would allow voters to express their tendencies towards each party individually rather than having to pick one compromise directly. It's also one of the few systems that allows voters to accurately represent ambivalence or apathy. DPR still sounds like it suffers from all the problems of FPTP with regard to strategic voting and spoilers.
- grzm 10y ago
  In practice (outside the US) few people fully agree with one political party. I don't think people in the US fully agree with one political party, either. Unfortunately that tends to be forgotten when things get heated, especially around elections. The polarization is artificial.
- dane-pgp 10y ago
  I don't see why DPR would require or support a polarized two party system. The idea is that the secondary (party) ballot allows you to be completely honest and vote for the party you really prefer, even if that party would be considered a "spoiler" under FPTP. Because the secondary ballots are totalled nationally, there is no danger that your support of a smaller party ends up as a wasted vote. Of course, there are a few extra details to deal with, such as how to include independent candidates (with no party behind them) and whether to introduce a minimum threshold of support for a party to appear on the secondary ballot. These are relatively straightforward questions, though, and are covered by this website about the voting system: http://www.dprvoting.org/ http://www.dprvoting.org/

rrradical 10y ago

These sorts of explanations are very neat and educational, I think, but to me they aren't that effective in actually bringing us closer to using a new voting system. All the discussion here is an example of what tends to happen, which is people arguing over what the very best voting system is. But it's so easy to construct argument for or against any particular system. I think a better tactic to actually use a new system is to share a vision to the general population of what voting under a new system would actually be like. Once the public at large is in favor of the general idea of moving to a new system, actually picking the best system should be more of an implementation detail. In other words, walk the voter through a simulated ballot casting and show them what the results of the election might be under such a system. I gave an effort to do this here: http://asivitz.com/voting/ http://asivitz.com/voting/ I'm not sure how well I succeeded though.

sandGorgon 10y ago

I'm actually very interested in the mathematical implication of score voting. Because in Indian elections - the world's largest elections - IRV is fairly impractical. We have constituencies with more than 10-15 candidates and the "recalculations" will kill the system. We also have very frequent recounts. I'm still thinking of how to explain score voting to an illiterate voter. It requires a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude more involved than a simple checkbox next to a candidate.

grzm 10y ago
I'm still thinking of how to explain score voting to an illiterate voter. It requires a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude more involved than a simple checkbox next to a candidate. You've made a very important point. In tech we often talk about UX with apps and sometimes with consumer products, but not enough in my opinion in areas such as voting and paperwork.
- lotu 10y ago
  I think explaining score voting is pretty easy you just have only 3 categories labeled ️(1) (2) (3) for each candidate and they put a mark on what they think for each one. As an aside I susspect that having more than 3 or 4 catagoreis isn't a good idea and creates false precision that complicates things.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    is it 1,2,3 or 3,2,1? you underestimate interface design for a billion people in 20 different languages and in symbols that can be understood by illiterate citizens. fyi, election symbols (like lotus, bicycle, broom) are mandatory in Indian elections for people who cannot read. The American concept of voter registration is fairly puzzling.
  - ClayShentrup 10y ago
    http://scorevoting.net/Complexity http://scorevoting.net/Complexity

a_imho 10y ago

Sortition, closely followed by direct democracy. 1) is also proven for selecting juries?

tunesmith 10y ago

Are n-dimensional spectrum positions really the right way to model voting? I'm not sure 2016's voter behavior can even be modeled dimensionally. A skilled persuader can convince a voter that he/she (persuader) is "close" to their "positions" even when they're not. (Or that the opponent is not a voter's ally even if they are.)

kilotaras 10y ago

>As you could see, every voting system except First Past The Post is immune to the spoiler effect. That's not correct. IRV is also susceptible to spoilers. Lets start with two candidates A (slighty left) and B (farther right) |-------A---B----| 1. A gets 61 vote, B gets 39. 2. A wins. Now lets introduce a farther left candidate C, that is really close to A. |-----C-A---B----| Voting goes as follow. 1. C gets 31 vote, A gets 30, B gets 39. 2. A gets eliminated, his/her votes split between B and C. 3. Because C and B are close, most of the votes for B go to A who now wins the election.

vacri 10y ago
... how does A win the election in step 3 if A was knocked out in step 2? I'm also not following how you meant to write that (apparently a typo) - why would B get more votes than C when A is eliminated? Why would A's voters split evenly down the middle if C is closer to them?
- kilotaras 10y ago
  I've messed A and B at some point. Should be: A gets split, B wins. Introduction of another left candidate caused right one to win.

vacri 10y ago

The IRV 'fault' is not a fault, but a feature. When the loser drops out, the people who put them at #1 still get a say in the remaining candidates. That's why more voters prefer candidate Hexagon in the example - it's actually a truer result of all the electorate, not [all electorate minus Square voters]. Just because your #1 candidate is knocked out doesn't mean you should lose your say in how you're governed. Similarly, the example paints Triangle as getting more popular, but ignores that Hexagon is also getting more popular. The 'fault' also requires that none of the candidates are particularly representative - look at the example, look at where the locus of voters are, and look at where the candidates are. In order for Triangle to not win any more, all three candidates have to be pretty bad representatives; it's less of a disaster if "not the right candidate" won in this situation (even though that's not what's happening).

btbuildem 10y ago

How about we just have two presidents? It seems absurd that moving the vote result by 0.00001% changes the outcome drastically. Let there be two heads of state, and let them work it out.

hash-set 10y ago
Um, no. I think there are a lot of good reasons why two executives wouldn't work--for example, when emergency decisions need to be made such as in war time. Plus, I'm just glad the Clintons are nowhere near the seat of power. The last Clinton Presidency was such an awful trainwreck. People forget--all they remember was the bubble stock market and the fallacy about Clinton reducing the national debt (hint: it was a projection, it was never reality). No more Bushes, no more Clintons. Not ever.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> How about we just have two presidents? What, like Roman consuls? Really, if you want to lower the stakes of small changes in the electorate, get a parliamentary system with basically proportional representation (STV in small multimember districts works, you don't need party list methods), and dial back the policy powers of the head of state (who can continue to.be separately elected.)

nolepointer 10y ago

But we aren't a democracy.

zeveb 10y ago

> The most famous real-world example of this was in 2000, when Ralph Nader "stole" votes from Al Gore, letting George Bush win. Is Nader's 'theft' really more famous than Perot's? I think that Perot really made a much bigger difference than did Nader: in 1992 there were a lot of Perot supporters who would have voted for Bush over Clinton, but for some reason they really did think that their candidate had a chance.

hash-set 10y ago

" In 2011, almost a full quarter of young Americans said democracy was a "bad" or "very bad" way to run a country. And today, one in six Americans say it'd be "good" or "very good" to be under actual military rule." Really, our problem here seems to be one of education, then. People who prefer a military dictatorship have ZERO experience with military dictatorships!