26 ms·

Politics is bad because we use an 18th century voting system

• jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  This seems like it'd be worth trying out. I wonder what the barriers would be to try it in state elections?
• bryanlarsen 8y ago
  A quick scan of the transcript didn't let me find what makes his plan "viable". The system is so bad that almost any plan is a massive improvement, but such efforts often end in squabbling over which system is the best. Here in Canada one of Trudeau's platforms was to get rid of first-past-the-post. But he nixed it when he found out the committee was going to recommend mixed-member-proportional (which would probably hurt his parties chances) rather than ranked ballots (which would definitely help his party).
  • emiliobumachar 8y ago
    I think the only way to avoid this brand of self-interest is to, prior to any discussion, agree that the changes will only come into effect 20 years into the future. It's hard to predict who it'll benefit that far into the future. 16 or 12 years might be doable. 8 is definitely too close. 4 is a train wreck, everyone is on campaign already.
    • privong 8y ago
      The downside of doing so is that it still gives plenty of time to cancel the changes at year 12 or 16, once it becomes apparent who will stand to benefit/lose from the change. This type of hacking future benefits is evidence in many of the tax overhauls, which use predicted future savings to offset short-term costs. And often those future savings are legislated away before they come to fruition. (Of course, sometimes those future savings wouldn't have happened anyways, due to unreasonably optimistic assumptions about the performance of the economy.)
      • konschubert 8y ago
        Cancelling such a scheduled change is harder though than simply blocking a change in the first place.
        • jessriedel 8y ago
          Exactly. Sunset provisions have large effects even though in principle they can always be removed if the majority in the future wanted to.
        • garmaine 8y ago
          I encourage you to look into the history of copyright extension laws.
      • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        It's not that simple. First, I'm not sure that anyone knows who would benefit 8 years out. There will be guesses, sure, but nobody's really going to know how it plays out until after the first election under the new system. Even that won't really tell us much, because everyone will adjust their tactics after the first experience. Second, even if everybody knew who was going to be the loser from the changes 8 years in advance, that's not enough. That party would have to be strong enough under the current system to undo the changes. In practice, that would require controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency... unless both parties decide that they would lose power to third parties, and strike a deal.
    • r00fus 8y ago
      That can result in last minute scuttling too.
    • qubex 8y ago
      Or to (infuriatingly for the general public) simultaneously pass a package that ensures present-day personal benefits to all current incumbents, removing all risk from their calculations of personal benefit and thus inducing them to do what is simultaneously best for them and for the future polity.
    • steamer25 8y ago
      I was thinking they need to start recording and widely publicizing exit polls using the approval system so that people can get a sense of what the alternative 'feels' like. The big problem is that it'd take at least ~three election cycles for most people to appreciate the difference it'd make. E.g., in the first cycle, extreme candidate A wins the actual election while the moderate, B, is shown to be widely tolerated under the approval system. Nearly half the voters--those who voted for the opposite extreme, C, end up loathing the results of the actual election and wishing in retrospect that the approval system had been in place. Perhaps in the second election cycle, candidate A wins re-election because they're a known-quantity/incumbent. Finally, in the third cycle, history starts repeating itself and people get tired of A's party. E.g., the Overton window slides back towards C's perspectives leading to C being seated. This time the people who still prefer A are disgusted with the outcome and prefer the outcome of the approval system. At this point, half the voters have long argued that the approval system makes more sense and the other half has also come around to thinking maybe it could bolster their position as well. It'd only remain for less partisan activists to e.g., get a petition going towards a referendum.
    • philwelch 8y ago
      While politicians are notoriously bad at planning 20 years ahead, I wouldn't put it past them to try, especially when that timeframe makes it easier to project the impact of demographic trends rather than merely political ones.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > I think the only way to avoid this brand of self-interest is to, prior to any discussion, agree that the changes will only come into effect 20 years into the future. It's hard to predict who it'll benefit that far into the future. It's hard to predict the short-term beneficiary parties when it goes into effect, sure, but its quite easy to predict the long term ideological benefit of increases in proportionality on modern democracies. Ironically, that may make near immediate implementation more viable, if their is a divergence between the expected short-term and long-term impacts, and those expected to benefit believe they can use that to preempt the naturally expected long term benefit but those who would expect that long term benefit don't believe their opponents will succeed at that.
  • qwerty456127 8y ago
    > which system is the best Can't this be reasoned scientifically?
    • zajd 8y ago
      People disagree on what the purpose of government even is, so... no.
      • dpwm 8y ago
        And this is probably the origin of most political disagreements.
    • jeffreyrogers 8y ago
      Only if you can define your criteria for "best".
      • rectang 8y ago
        Approval voting is biased toward "moderate" candidates. This has all the problems of first-past-the-post in terms of electing representatives who do not allow for a wide range of political opinion. It empowers status quo politicians beholden to special interests.
        • macawfish 8y ago
          Is it really? Or is that your take? You could just as easily say that it's biased toward candidates who work effectively with a broader range of people.
          • knieveltech 8y ago
            We have observed reality to draw conclusions from. Regardless of political affiliation, would anyone really argue that special interests haven't taken over the political process in the US, and made significant inroads in most if not all of the industrialized democracies throughout the world?
  • robertwiblin 8y ago
    "...there's actually a really good track record in the US for passing ballot initiatives on single winner voting methods, so we expect the likelihood of winning some to be pretty high. The way that we look at it is instant runoff voting has been passed as a ballot initiative in a number of cities, but we see approval voting as producing better outcomes, and having better political dynamics compared to instant runoff voting. Approval voting is also so much easier, and it avoids a lot of the problems. If instant runoff voting can win, then surely, a simpler voting method that produces good outcomes and has good dynamics should also be able to do it."
    • sanxiyn 8y ago
      The problem is voting-theoretical good outcomes has no relation with "good outcomes" that lets voting methods to win. cf. Canada case in GP.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      Approval voting is worse than even IRV because of inconsistent meaning of ballot markings, an effect which the naive mathematical analyses which support the claims of it's superiority ignore. This problem is negated when the is a consistent meaning to approval or disapproval markings, which can happen with non-secret ballots tied to concrete commitments. Approval is, for that reason, an excellent voting method to decide group activities in a social group, where an approve vote is a binding opt-in to the activity if it is chosen (or if a disapprove vote is a binding opt-out.) For the same reason (the lack of a concrete definition of what “approve” or “disapprove” means), approval is not really simpler than IRV (or other ranked ballots) methods, even if the space of possible ballot markings is narrower.
  • jasonmaydie 8y ago
    Meanwhile Italy is still struggling to form a government. I prefer Canada's system to Italy's
    • vkou 8y ago
      Successive one-party governments, where the Liberals or the Conservatives have absolute power, from now, till the end of time, despite neither party having ~35% of the vote?
  • JamisonM 8y ago
    I think that political calculations regarding proportional representation were a factor in the Liberal decision to scrap reform but the stated reason for not wanting a MMP system is a pretty good one. In Europe MMP has supported a lot of fringe parties that have used the funding that comes with having full-time representatives on government payrolls to build strength to the detriment of the political environment. Folks cite the fact that fringe parties only receive 1%ish of the vote in Canada as evidence that this is not a valid concern but it is easy to see how voter behaviour would change as campaign mechanics changed due to a PR system. (These arguments rather conveniently ignore the number of Green Party votes that Canadians in most ridings cast knowing they are throwing their vote away when arriving at the 1% number.)
    • ardit33 8y ago
      "has supported a lot of fringe parties that have used the funding that comes with having full-time representatives on government payrolls to build strength to the detriment of the political environment." -- Like the "pirate party", which is really doing a good job on pushback against all kinds of corporate enrochement against copyright laws. (like the stupid Spain link tax). Sometimes these 'fringe' parties bring ideas and raise concerns on issues that the major parties are not considering due to their self interests. Sometimes they are down-righty looney, but I think the positives on having small parties represented outweighs the negatives.
      • petre 8y ago
        That's why I think Holland has quite a progressive voting system with such a small theshold and 17 parties ending up in the Parliament.
      • giobox 8y ago
        Scotland, whose Parliament uses proportional representation via AMS/Additional Member System (one of the main drawbacks of which is that it takes an age to explain...), has had representatives from socialist/green parties win seats they wouldn't have had a chance in hell winning under FPTP ("First Past the Post"), which I think many people feel has lead to some pretty positive policies being debated and implemented which otherwise might not have happened. AMS/PR has had the effect of forcing parties to work together much more in Scotland than has ever happened in the FPTP UK Parliament. I would dearly love for the UK Parliament to learn some positive lessons from the Scottish experience, but I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime. I really like AMS - it retains the direct constituency link of a member for a region elected via FPTP, with the fairness of additional regional members selected proportionally resulting in a pretty proportionate outcome. The downside is that it creates two classes of member - those elected via FPTP, those elected via what AMS calls the 'list', and of course the complexity of giving people two votes instead of one that behave in different ways. The first vote is a classic FPTP, the second vote applies to the list. Your party's performance in the FPTP vote affects the "weight" of any list votes you receive, which is how the system remains proportional. As I said, it's a pain to explain, but one of the fairest systems I've experienced.
  • munk-a 8y ago
    The primary parties will never approve of IRV nor proportional representation because it hurts their chances of winning. The partisan divide is a good motivator for forcing people into one camp or the other.
  • 3pt14159 8y ago
    Disclosure: I'm a Liberal Party member. To me the answer to Trudeau's concerns was so obvious; just do mixed-member-proportional, but limit the number of top-up seats to 2x or 3x the number of riding based seats won by the party. That way we don't have to put up with the lunatic fringe, but we still fix the warping effects of FPTP.
    • bryanlarsen 8y ago
      Yes, but as others have mentioned, Trudeau's stated concerns were total B.S. The "fringe" party he's concerned about is the NDP.
  • EGreg 8y ago
    Here is what I think of representative democracy: http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling But yes, at the very least, use the Approval vote. It has way better statistical properties than Ranked Voting. Maine switched.
  • sunir 8y ago
    It was not just some cynical reason the effort failed. MMP is a party list system. Canadians don’t want it. Over and over again Canadians vote down any change that doesn’t make representatives accountable to voters. Our government system is called Responsible Government for a reason. Also Canadians do not like minority governments. Proportional representation is not that popular on Canada. Also we like simple systems with simple voting strategies. MMP is very complicated. Lots of weird tactics like voting for a small party but a candidate from a bigger party.
    • distances 8y ago
      > Also Canadians do not like minority governments. Proportional representation is not that popular on Canada. Proportional representation doesn't need to result in minority governments. Proportional voting is very common in Europe but minority governments aren't. Just means parties need to find common themes on which they agree, and compromise on some their more controversial goals. Finland has had up to six parties in a single government to make sure tough decisions can be passed.
      • sunir 8y ago
        Coalitions are minority governments. They are super common in Europe.
        • distances 8y ago
          Only when the coalition doesn't have a majority of the parliament seats. I don't think minority governments are common at all in Europe, as the whole point of a coalition is usually to get majority.
    • tlavoie 8y ago
      Personally, I prefer the minority governments. They have to play nice with the other kids, at the risk of being chucked out of power. As a minority, they have to keep at least one other party reasonably content. Harper's minority years were more reasonable than once he got a majority. The NDP/Green coalition in BC is new, but seems OK so far, and that same minority aspect probably tempers the behaviour of both parties. I do need to do some homework before the referendum though.
• deleted 8y ago
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• lynal 8y ago
  Approval voting doesn't have the failed track record in the US because it hasn't been used. But necessarily, it is flawed. I don't know if it's better, but to say "this will solve all our problems" is wrong. Provably wrong. With math and everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • conf9987 8y ago
    That's an overstatement of a mathematical theorem. Arrow's theorem says that for approval voting, yes there are some cases of people's preferences for which one of those conditions fails. Nobody is claiming that approval voting satisfies all of those conditions, so nobody is provably wrong. People are claiming that approval rating works better than first-past-the-post in many important cases, such as introducing a moderate candidate into an established two-party situation. Arrow's theorem does not contradict that.
  • macawfish 8y ago
    Arrow's theorem only applies to ordinal voting systems. Approval voting is a cardinal system to which Arrow's theorem doesn't apply. So yeah... Math and everything! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting
  • tunesmith 8y ago
    All Arrow's theorem does is say that an ordinal voting method can't simultaneously meet a certain arbitrary collection of criteria. It doesn't prove that any of those criteria are necessary. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, for instance, is especially problematic. Finally, Condorcet methods don't even fail Arrow's Theorem when there's actually a Condorcet Winner (which is pretty much always given enough voters).
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  Sounds like an interesting idea. In the end the US needs a system where if a party gets a certain percentage of votes it gets some level of representation in Congress. For example in the 90s Ross Perot got 18% of votes but these voters got 0 percent representation anywhere. This is just extremely unhealthy. The extreme partisanship would get reduced quickly if there were some people in Congress who would vote with one of the big parties one and then with the other another time.
  • zdragnar 8y ago
    We have a federal, not national, government. National percentages of votes earned are meaningless. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but that's what it is.
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      Agreed. But I hope my point makes sense. If 18 percent of people vote for someone and get no representation out of it they quickly will get disillusioned about voting and the country's politics will not be representative of the people.
      • stevenwoo 8y ago
        Is it worse that Clinton got 48 percent of the popular vote or McCain got 46 percent and lost - that is a much bigger disenfranchised proportion.
        • maxxxxx 8y ago
          Yes. Because by definition in a presidential election there can be only one winner. In the House or Senate there is no reason to not have proportional element.
          • nybble41 8y ago
            Presidential elections can't be proportional, true, but they could be made less polarizing. The goal should be consensus, the election of a candidate acceptable to the vast majority of the population, not someone loved by 51% but loathed by the other 49%.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  I've been thinking this for almost all my life: the voting systems used in almost every country are plain ridiculous. The only country I know that uses a system that sounds reasonable is Australia.
  • rectang 8y ago
    Yep, STV: Single Transferable Vote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI Closer to home, it's also used by the Apache Software Foundation for the annual election of the Board of Directors. When the election is only for a single position, this is exactly equivalent to "instant runoff".
    • stephen_g 8y ago
      Yeah, that video explains our Senate voting process almost exactly - each state gets a number of Senators, and you vote preferentially either at the party level (about 15 - 30 choices and you can preference up to six), in which case the party decides which candidate gets the first votes, or you can preference every candidate in the whole state (can be over one hundred - the voting paper is comically large[1,2]!) For the House of Representatives, each electorate is much smaller and parties only have one candidate each, so you only have five or six choices, and you preference all of them. 1. https://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/z/r/7/i/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gmpkck.png/1455006731044.jpg https://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/z/r/7/i/p/image.re... 2. http://farm8.static.flickr.com/7296/9569414534_b3ee06fd84.jpg http://farm8.static.flickr.com/7296/9569414534_b3ee06fd84.jp...
  • lucideer 8y ago
    As far as I'm aware Australia just uses the same voting system as the UK, Ireland and New Zealand–i.e. almost the entirety of the non-American Anglo-sphere. Is there something else unique about how Australia does it? The Open List system used in most of Europe (with France, parts of Germany, and Spanish congress being notable exceptions) seems like a very good, successful one also.
    • 8y ago
• rectang 8y ago
  Terrible, like the "jungle primaries" used in California. These systems are ostensibly biased towards moderate candidates, but when there are no moderates as in these days of wildly antagonistic partisanship, the result is disenfranchisement. Instant runoff is vastly superior in terms of allowing people to express their voting preferences.
  • leot 8y ago
    No. Check this out: http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
  • hackinthebochs 8y ago
    >but when there are no moderates as in these days of wildly antagonistic partisanship But the candidates we have are a reflection of the voting system. That is to say, hyperpartisanship is a feature of FPTP and so our candidates are a reflection of that. A voting system that rewards moderates will bring about more moderate politics.
    • rectang 8y ago
      Are proportional systems "hyperpartisan"? Biasing towards supposed "moderation" marginalizes a broad range of the citizenry outside the mainstream and breeds cynicism and fury. Even if they cannot command a policy-enacting majority, minority opinions deserve a voice. People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them!
      • hackinthebochs 8y ago
        Proportional systems means that a position gets representation in government in proportion to the distribution of that position in the population (to varying degrees). This is the most anyone has any right to expect. >People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them! People need to stop seeing voting as some kind of identity affirmation.
• Nokinside 8y ago
  Single member districts is another reason. Even with good voting system single member district is bad for politics. Proportional representation should be the minimum requirement. Adding additional voting system goodness on top of it is great.
  • deleted 8y ago
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• hv42 8y ago
  In France we have two rounds. Each voter chooses one candidate during the first round and then only two candidates are selected for the second one. Having to choose amongst one candidate only is terribly bad because some candidates may have lot of similar ideas. However they may diverge on some points, such as they decide to make two parties. The votes get then divided between these two candidates, and they may not reach the second round, even though their idea may be more popular... The winning parties has never wanted to change the system since that makes them win I guess. Any other system would be a better idea than that one.
  • namdnay 8y ago
    Yeah the french system is very strange. On the one hand, it forces a second round of "pragmatic voting", which so far has kept out the various extremists. On the other hand, you get a feeling that people only vote for these extremists as a kind of protest, because they know there's a second round. And one day maybe we'll end up with a second round with two extremists (imagine LePen vs Melenchon...). I think what also makes things strange in France is the rule that all parties must be given equal airtime, which leads to a few bizarre weeks every election cycle where complete loons are on TV and Radio 24/7
  • dtech 8y ago
    Are the two candidates of the first round chosen by who gets the most votes? If so it has the exact same problem, as the votes from the 3rd+ most popular candidates will get syphoned off to the two predicted winners.
    • yaantc 8y ago
      Yes, see [1] for details. The "syphoning" exists, but it's not as bad as in a one round system where each vote on a small party is in practice lost. With two rounds, we usually have two "big" parties, flanked by two "small" parties at the extreme. People can push to one side by voting on the extreme side to extreme dissatisfaction with their closer mainline party, and up to a point it won't change the result of the second round with the two big parties. That's typically what happens, and it adds some variety with 4 large enough parties (and more very small ones of course) in the media / national discussions. Then you have exceptional circumstances with many disgruntled people pushing for the extreme. Even then, two rounds can help. A one round system makes it very hard for the fringe to take control, but once this happen they're one of two. With a two round system only one side can go radical, with a likely result of the other side mainstream party winning. Both sides extremes getting stronger is possible, and it's really what happened during the last presidential elections. But we got lucky and one "center" candidate went through (by a very small margin), and as expected won the second round. But as in other places we had about half people disgruntled, it's just that it was evenly split between left and right extreme parties, and only one went to second round (but the other was pretty close). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
• mseebach 8y ago
  Approval voting seems like a great way to make sure we only ever elect bland, inoffensive candidates with carefully focus-group calibrated opinions and policies, whom once in office, should they care for reelection, will steer clear of touching any even mildly controversial subjects.
  • zoul 8y ago
    Sounds like an improvement.
    • filleduchaos 8y ago
      Of course it sounds like an improvement when those controversial issues have never affected you. Who cares about all the people they do affect though?
      • sanxiyn 8y ago
        Voting methods should reflect the will of people. Voting method is not the tool to get your pet issues done.
  • nerdponx 8y ago
    carefully focus-group calibrated opinions and policies, whom once in office, should they care for reelection, will steer clear of touching any even mildly controversial subjects This happens nowadays anyway.
  • leot 8y ago
    That sounds amazing.
  • MBCook 8y ago
    Consistency and planning seem like an improvement from the current system of reversing every policy that the last guy put in every 4-8 years.
  • ng12 8y ago
    This already happens in decidedly Red/Blue states. They're full of incumbents that nobody really cares to keep in but, more importantly, nobody cares to vote out.
• foo101 8y ago
  Why is democracy such a popular system for establishing governments? When a member of our family becomes sick, we don't ask everyone to vote on possible treatments? We go to doctors who are trained to diagnose the cause of sickness and offer appropriate treatment. When a scientist publishes a new study, we don't ask everyone what they think about the study? We ask other accomplished scientists to do a peer-review and offer their opinion on the study. No matter what field we look at, we do not rely on laymen to decide the outcome but we rely on qualified experts and professionals. But in case of establishing a government, which can have a long term impact on millions of livelihood, we ask just about anyone to offer their opinion in the form a vote. Why is this a reasonable system?
  • 0xffff2 8y ago
    Who would the "qualified experts" that are choosing our government be?
    • foo101 8y ago
      I don't have a good answer but I believe that it certainly cannot be everybody. Perhaps people who are accomplished scholars in political theory and economics and a few other relevant areas?
      • repolfx 8y ago
        Economists are famous for repeatedly making predictions that turn out to be hugely wrong, groupthink and massive political biases. Don't think so somehow. As for scholars in political theory, laughable. What does an ivory tower academic know about what people want or need? Marx spent his entire life reading books and writing political theory and his ideas lead to disaster everywhere. Nope. Allowing anyone to take part is a great system.
        • foo101 8y ago
          Can you offer specific examples that make you believe that the cumulative opinion of scholars are going to be objectively worse than the cumulative opinion of everyone?
• monocasa 8y ago
  One part of the 18th century that we left behind that maybe we shouldn't have was the level of representation in the house. Back then, each US rep had about 10,000 constituents, but today each has close to 1,000,000. Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.
  • alistairSH 8y ago
    And as an added benefit, in Presidential elections, low populations states wield less power than they do now. With the current number of representatives, votes in CA and TX count less than those in SD and MN.
    • jethro_tell 8y ago
      I find that to be an added benefit.
      • moate 8y ago
        That's what the Senate is for.
        • jethro_tell 8y ago
          No, the house is supposed to represent the population and the senate is supposed to represent the state. Each member of the house should represent the same number of people, the senate should not. That's not the case though. CA/TX/WA/NY reps represent more people than less populous states.
    • jrs95 8y ago
      The last census included non-citizen residents of those states, so this may be less true than you'd assume just based on census data. A sizable portion of the population in CA and TX are not eligible voters but they are represented in the electoral college anyways.
• denzil_correa 8y ago
  Personally, I think we should go back to first principles to understand the meaning of a representative democracy. The aim is to get a representation of the population. Currently, we get the representation of the people who vote - but this is not the objective. The aim should be to get a representation regardless of vote. There are different ways to get representation. One way is to force everyone to vote like Brazil or Australia but this might not be practical in a country like India where elections go on for 1.5 months. But, there are other ways - where you draw a representation of the entire population and make them vote aka Sortition [0]. We already use this concept in juries and other aspects of life. It would be worthwhile to give this a serious try for alternative voting systems. We could perform alternate experiment systems in parallel and then compare their outcomes to current systems - we don't need to adopt them. But, this has to start somewhere. We could have a debate on "HOW" to draw this representative sample but we should acknowledge that the current system rarely achieves the objective of representation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
  • rekado 8y ago
    Systems like this are described and evaluated in Fishkin, James (2011). When the People Speak. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-960443-2.
  • MBCook 8y ago
    We could fix some of the barriers like automatically registering people at age 18 or making voting day a national holiday so people aren’t stuck at their jobs unable to vote. That alone would help. But every change produces winners and losers, and the losers really don’t want that change to happen.
    • sanxiyn 8y ago
      Automatic voter registration and making voting day a national holiday is such a no-brainer improvement that it's a pity USA can't get it done. As a South Korean voter, this has been standard for decades.
• ebbv 8y ago
  Easy answers like this are always oversimplifications. There's problems with our voting system but there's no serious reason to believe simply switching to a different style of voting system alone would fix anything. We also have terrible gerrymandering that ensures seats are hard to change. Effectively no limits on political contributions thanks to Citizens United (not that things were great before that but they've gotten much worse) means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US. People pushing easy answers like this aren't doing anyone any favors. Even if somehow their favored solution got adopted, when it fails to be the panacea they've promised people will reject it and call it a failure even if it might have helped the situation.
  • repolfx 8y ago
    Didn't Clinton outspend Trump 2:1 and still lose? And in the UK the Remain campaign massively outspent Leave and still lost (the government did a mailshot to every home in the country arguing for Remain and that alone cost more than the entire Leave campaign did .... and then they did lots more campaigning on top!). The theory of the concern about Citizens United is that people can buy elections. That theory appears to be false.
    • ebbv 8y ago
      Did you even read what I said? > means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US. Yes Clinton lost despite outspending Trump, but Obama outspent Romney, and lots and lots of other races go in the favor of the candidate who spent the most. Two high profile exceptions don't prove the rule false.
      • sampo 8y ago
        > Two high profile exceptions don't prove the rule false. Actually, they do.
• trothamel 8y ago
  If you want to fix politics in the US, bring back earmarks. It sounds like I'm advocating corruption, and I kind of am. But at the same time, earmarks served the purpose of providing a good reason for parties to work together, across the aisle. If a little bit of corruption accomplishes that higher purpose, I'm glad to have it.
  • ballenarosada 8y ago
    why would bipartisanship be good?
    • castlecrasher2 8y ago
      Are you saying it's bad?
      • ams6110 8y ago
        If someothing can't be seen as worthwhile by both sides, without payoffs, there's probably a strong argument for not doing it. Gridlock is generally a good thing at the Federal level.
        • kadenshep 8y ago
          Why do these discussions always assume rational or good faith actors, when that so obviously isn't the case?
        • snowwrestler 8y ago
          This is fine as a theoretical construct, but the reality is that a lot of the best features of American government were the result of quid pro quo deal-making. A huge example is the entire Bill of Rights, which was the price of creating a stronger central government. And the movie "Lincoln" illustrates (with only a little exaggeration) the deal-making that went into passing the 13th Amendment. As an aside, I happen to think that there is an important difference between "bipartisan" and "deal-making," and the latter is really where it's at in governance. Earmarks are tools for deal-making. Framing things as "both sides" inappropriately elevates the 2 major political parties as a central feature of our system of government. They're not; in fact the largest political affiliation in the U.S. today is "indepdendent"! And on any serious legislation, there are typically more than two "sides" with an interest in a particular outcome. That's why making deals is so important.
• alvil 8y ago
  If voting could change something, it would be forbidden already. Dreamers.
• SamReidHughes 8y ago
  One time I was in an approval voting election with 100-odd candidates. I decided to be a smart-ass and check off most of the names.
• hodgesrm 8y ago
  This proposal seems really naive. How does the approval voting system make the American South vote more liberal candidates or California vote more conservative ones? How does it create better leadership in either major US political party? A far better solution would be for one or the other party in the US to come up with a program that more than a fraction of the country believes in.
• pklausler 8y ago
  Why have scheduled elections? Maybe a way to ensure direct representation is to give each voter the right to pick her representative, and anybody who currently has at least N votes gets into parliament and stays there as long as they maintain N voters, who can switch at any time.
  • geezerjay 8y ago
    That sounds like Jack Welsh'approach to work force management: fire the lowest performing 10% every year and replace them with new hires.
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      That works for a while and but after the first few cycles the really bad performers are gone and you have to play games to have something you can fire next time.
  • pklausler 8y ago
    A refinement of this idea: every voter gets to vote once for one candidate on their birthday. Any candidate with >=N unexpired votes maintains a seat.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  By the way. I have recently thought about the elections in Russia and came to the conclusion the whole presidential system is flawed: a classic president has too much power and a single person elections are too easy to manipulate. Every time there are presidential elections in Russia everybody knows the outcome in advance, absolutely no viable competition takes place ever. But despite the corrupt system some states/counties/cities in Russia manage to elect reasonable candidates that are in opposition to the president occasionally when it's about parliamentary elections, especially about local parliaments. This makes me conclude the parliamentary republic system is better than the presidential system.
• someguydave 8y ago
  The problem isn't with the voting algorithm - it's with the voter pool. Voters must have skin-in-the-game (ie be responsible for their vote) in order to have responsible government. This means that votes should be weighted according to taxes paid. People who pay no tax shouldn't be excluded, but the fact that they are not personally responsible for funding the government should be taken into account in their vote.
  • icen 8y ago
    Why does having my vote's power scale with my salary make me treat it more responsibly?
    • someguydave 8y ago
      I wrote taxes, not salary. The actual form of the tax system is a separate issue. It seems obvious to me that your vote should be weighted according to how much you are personally responsible for carrying the burden of government. Why should it be otherwise?
      • geezerjay 8y ago
        Because that would directly favour the interests of the wealthy elites at the expense of the vast majority of the population. That idea is only half decent of your goal is to get yet anothet bloody communist revolution on your hands.
• ogennadi 8y ago
  > He advocates an alternative voting method called approval voting, in which you can vote for as many candidates as you want, not just one. That means that you can always support your honest favorite candidate, even when an election seems like a choice between the lesser of two evils. > While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics. Approval voting is adored by voting researchers, who regard it as the best simple voting system available.
• pps43 8y ago
  I don't think first past the post is as bad as the article paints it. Every voting system is suboptimal in some sense due to Arrow's impossibility theorem. With FPTP you're likely to end up with two candidates who have positions right next to the median, which is actually quite reasonable. The main advantage of this system is that it gives incentive to the candidates to pick a position on the political spectrum close to the median voter. From individual voter's perspective this may look like you're given a choice between two equally bad candidates, but that's just an illusion.
  • aaronhamlin 8y ago
    It's not ambiguous. FPTP is the worst voting method there is. It elects partisan winners, causes vote splitting, spoilers, marginalizes good ideas, is inexpressive, makes you vote against your favorite ... That's pretty bad. Here's a full article on how bad FPTP is if list form makes more sense: https://electology.org/blog/top-5-ways-plurality-voting-fails https://electology.org/blog/top-5-ways-plurality-voting-fail...
    • pps43 8y ago
      FPTP satisfies two out of three Arrow's conditions (unanimity and universality). It does not satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives, but in this sense only dictatorship is better (which satisfies all three). If you exclude dictatorship as trivial solution by adding it as the fourth condition, no other voting system can be objectively better (satisfy more than three out of four conditions). You may prefer some side effects to others, but any such comparison is going to be subjective.
  • sampo 8y ago
    > Every voting system is suboptimal in some sense due to Arrow's impossibility theorem. Arrow's theorem only talks about single-winner elections. Most of the world's countries use multi-winner electoral districts and some form of proportional voting for their Parliament elections, totally circumventing Arrow's theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_meth... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
• patrickg_zill 8y ago
  Actually it's bad because we don't. Get rid of the popular election of senators and go back to having them be appointed by their state legislatures. That returns the proper focus on balancing the federal and state government powers.
  • protomyth 8y ago
    Since communications and travel are cheap, I think a nice compromise would be to have the sitting governor serve as the states single senator. It would save some budget (half the number of senators) and put the person on the hook for the state budget in a position to bring that perspective to DC.
    • sanxiyn 8y ago
      We need more representatives, not less. Budget for representatives is the least concern. Representatives are very cost efficient for what they do.
      • protomyth 8y ago
        Not in the Senate we don’t. The Senate is supposed to represent the will of the states, and who better than the sitting Governor?
  • Delmania 8y ago
    Absolutely not, that was a breeding ground for worse corruption that the current administration.
    • patrickg_zill 8y ago
      I'd like to know more about that. How was having the states appoint senators a fount of corruption?
• joshuaheard 8y ago
  I would like to see stricter qualifications for candidates. For instance, you have to be elected to city council before you can run for state assembly. You have to be elected to state assembly before you can run for governor. You have to be elected for governor before you can run for Congress. Something along those lines. That would prevent a random reality TV star from becoming President. Also term limits.
  • geezerjay 8y ago
    > For instance, you have to be elected to city council before you can run for state assembly. You have to be elected to state assembly before you can run for governor. You have to be elected for governor before you can run for Congress. Wouldn't that favour cronyism and enforce a barrier to entry to those who don't fall in line with the dictats of the ruling elite? Furthermore, it also creates a caste of professional politicians.
    • 8_hours_ago 8y ago
      People like to complain about professional politicians, but I haven't heard a good argument against them that outweighs their benefits. Wouldn't a professional politician be better than one who doesn't really know what's going on? Governing is hard. Getting results in our political system requires difficult compromises. Creating policy, understanding the consequences of policy, and evaluating differences between policies requires domain expertise. Wouldn't someone with more experience be better?
  • shakezula 8y ago
    This would worse the situation I think. There would be an increased demand for people qualified to take positions, potentially allowing bad candidates to be the "only legal option" and exacerbating the problems we're trying to fix. The problem isn't that a "random reality TV star" is allowed to hold office like Governor or President, it's that a reality TV star can receive millions fewer popular votes and still win the election. It's the voting system that needs to be fixed first.
  • RIMR 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• aaronhamlin 8y ago
  If after listening to the podcast you feel that there were parts that you wanted to hear in more depth, you may find them detailed in the most recent The Center for Election Science blog post. It includes links to full articles about subtopics. I hope that helps folks! https://electology.org/blog/80000-hours-interviews-ces-executive-director https://electology.org/blog/80000-hours-interviews-ces-execu...
• originalsimba 8y ago
  Politics is bad because our education system hasn't seen a real overhaul in 70 years and we spend a tiny fraction of our national budget on it, approximately 100 billion dollars. Our classroom sizes have skyrocketed in 70 years but the education budget has not. Meanwhile we still have thousands of private "schools" teaching children to believe in completely fictional supermen in the sky, which makes them insane and retards the value of their entire education. There's nothing wrong with punch card voting. The system we use to select "Red" or "Blue" doesn't matter. What matters is that the nation is full of idiots. Which I say because I love my country, and it needs to be said, repeatedly, until it's fixed.
• ektimo 8y ago
  The first step of a vote should be to randomly select 11 people who will be given responsibility for selecting the best choice and given time and resources to take it seriously. By "seriously" I mean like for a US presidential election a paid year of studying. It terms of feasibility it should be popular because everyone wins either an hour of their life back or wins a chance to really make a difference. (Starting out a vote by randomly selecting a smaller set of participants is called "sortition")
• cestith 8y ago
  I prefer net approval voting over straight approval voting. I also think House districts should seat the top two candidates rather than the top one.
  • elihu 8y ago
    What is net approval voting?
    • cestith 8y ago
      It's easiest to explain in reference to plain approval voting. In plain approval voting, you either approve of a candidate or not, and you can approve of more than one. The most approvals wins the race. In net approval voting, you vote up, down, or neutral on each candidate. The candidate with the most approvals minus specific disapprovals wins. Net approval actually works with candidates much like discussion sites with both up and down votes for posts treat those posts. A controversial candidate may get many approvals and many disapprovals. A fairly popular candidate who's not as divisive might have some fewer approvals but far fewer disapprovals. It should feel natural for people accustomed to reddit, HN, similar sites, or call center feedback systems (where often 9 and 10 of 10 are positive scores, 6-8 are neutral, and 1-5 are actually considered negative).
• cirrus-clouds 8y ago
  For those of you in the UK, I wrote the following post a year ago (June 2017) about the UK's antiquated, undemocratic method of voting: https://medium.com/@dontvoteconservativeuk/uk-general-election-2017-why-we-need-to-change-our-method-of-voting-74ac31789910 https://medium.com/@dontvoteconservativeuk/uk-general-electi...
• neilwilson 8y ago
  As ever the article starts at the end of the process not the beginning. The job of politics is to bring about consensus. If you don't get consensus prior to a vote, then all of the candidates that could have done a deal ahead of the election suffer. Under a first past the post system, the job of the candidates is to horse trade so that there are only two candidates at the election. First past the post works because it is simple, understandable and it forces politicians to do the deals ahead of the election - or suffer the consequences of being ignored entirely. Politicians and researchers hate it, because they want to trade for their favourite hobby horses after an election when they no longer have to suffer the scrutiny of the electorate and can use minority positions to drive forward change that would never get anywhere in a consensus system. About the only improvement to a FPTP system you need is a 'none of the above' option, so that everybody on the list can be rejected.
  • deciplex 8y ago
    > First past the post works because it is simple, understandable and it forces politicians to do the deals ahead of the election - or suffer the consequences of being ignored entirely. Let's change this slightly: > First past the post works because it is simple, understandable and it forces politicians to do the deals before voters have expressed their will - or suffer the consequences of being ignored entirely. Your way is much less democratic.
    • neilwilson 8y ago
      My way is fully democratic because you've forgotten you are voting on a list of things, not a single thing. What you like about list A can easily get traded away after the election by politicians when you have no say. However is list A has to be approved before an election, then you get everything on that list and you know what you are going to get.
      • deciplex 8y ago
        If I elect politicians who are likely to trade away list A then that indicates I either don't value list A so highly after all, or that the politicians are liars. I don't see how your system solves the latter problem - either way the solution is to not vote for politicians after they have proven themselves liars. It seems to me that in FPTP you end up with both parties trying to calculate the absolute minimum they have to promise to their base in order to get just enough of their vote to win the election by 50%+1. And, after the election, trying to calculate what is the minimum amount of promises they have to keep, without depressing voter enthusiasm so much that they lose the next election. (The Democrats seem especially bad about this, and I say this as someone who votes Democratic and volunteers for Democratic causes and candidates.) In others words in FPTP you have politicians trying to figure what is the bare minimum they have to do in order to not get fired. These are perverse incentives, and they do not tend to attract the sort of person I want to vote for. Ranked choice voting seems to go a long way toward addressing this: I simply rank candidates in the order that they match my preferences, perhaps also accounting for their perceived trustworthiness as well. And, more or less, the candidate who best matches the aggregated preferences of the voters will win.
• sampo 8y ago
  Every time I discuss voting with Americans, or when I read articles like this, they only focus on how to make a better system for single-winner elections. I think that is missing the main point. I think the main problem is the single-winner election system itself, and even the best voting mathematics can do only very little to help that. They all will still lead to a two-party system. Only the presidential elections need to be single-winner. But for all other political bodies, a proportional system where at least 5 to 10 representatives are chosen from each voting district, would be better. Choosing e.g. 10 winners from a single voting district with a proportional voting system would set the election threshold to 10%, so any party with at least 10% support would get at least one representative. This is how almost every European country runs their elections. (Only UK and France still use single-winner systems.) This is the only way to bring diversity and options to the political landscape. And by having more than 2 viable parties, you would have more diverse political discussions, too. And even for the single-winner presidential elections, more than 2 parties would have the existing organization and funding structures to plausible run campaigns and candidates, so as a byproduct you would get diversity and options for the presidential elections, too. I do recognize that it is problematic to organize proportional voting for (a) the Senate and (b) for those states that have less than 5 House representatives. For example, you'd need to pool Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, N Dakota and S Dakota into one voting district. But even if you went with proportional voting only for the House, you'd still have more than 2 viable parties in each state, who each could make serious attempts to run for the 2 senators. So you would still get more than 2 parties represented in the Senate, too.
  • aaronhamlin 8y ago
    If you listen to the podcast, I think—like nearly every other comment here—that you'll find this is addressed.
  • Glyptodon 8y ago
    I think uncapping the size of the house of Reps and going back to original apportionment would effectively do a similar thing.
    • nybble41 8y ago
• ektimo 8y ago
  Santa Clara (in Silicon Valley) has a measure proposing Ranked Choice Voting. For: https://www.betterelectionsforsantaclara.com https://www.betterelectionsforsantaclara.com Against: https://noasantaclara.com/ https://noasantaclara.com/
• justcauseulost 8y ago
  Just because you lost doesn’t mean that “politics is bad”. This country is in a fugue state or something. Cheers :)
• specialist 8y ago
  Approval Voting is the (most) correct answer for assemblies, councils, houses. Easy to explain, tabulate, verify (audit). Consolidates primaries & general into single event. More robust in presence of (inevitable) errors. Greatly reduces negative campaigning (everyone wants to be your second choice). Per Durverger’s Law, breaks political duopoly.
  • specialist 8y ago
    Crap. I meant approval voting for executive races like president, sheriff, mayor. Use PR (proportional representation) for assemblies, councils, houses.
• neokantian 8y ago
  Politics is bad because the very object of voting is wrong. We are supposed to vote for people who will invent new laws. What if we simply do not want new laws?
• dboreham 8y ago
  First thing to know is that the system was _designed_ 200 years ago to have many of the "bugs" that we notice today. That is : this isn't so much a case of a system that was fine 200 years ago not suiting the modern world but rather a system designed deliberately to have deficiencies; for the benefit of a subset of people, from the beginning. Knowing this should make it more clear why the bugs haven't been fixed yet.
  • trose 8y ago
    care to explain this a little further? Genuinely curious what these deficiencies are and who they benefit.
    • dboreham 8y ago
      There have been many books and articles on this over the years. Re-searching just now I found this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-ame... e.g. "The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on." If I can track down any of the book titles I'll follow up.
      • abvdasker 8y ago
        I'd argue that many of these "features" really ended up being poorly conceived in the long run and caused all kinds of unforeseeable side effects. In particular they completely failed to anticipate the explosion in urban population which has caused the voting power of those in urban areas to be greatly diminished. As a result of the electoral college and winner-take-all systems the interests of urban voters are generally grossly underrepresented at the federal level with respect to population size. The founding fathers were smart, but nobody in the 18th century was smart enough to anticipate the requirements of a modern electoral system. Their real mistake though was making the electoral system both incredibly complicated and very hard to change.
• EGreg 8y ago
  Plurality voting sucks hard https://electology.org/blog/bloombergs-decision-not-run-democracys-dead-canary https://electology.org/blog/bloombergs-decision-not-run-demo...
• joveian 8y ago
  Approval voting seems like a good choice from the "wake up tomorrow and not much changes exept that we have a better voting system" perspective. It is a good choice if "not much changes" is attractive to you. To me it seems like it would be similar to Fusion nominations in effect, maybe a slightly larger effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_voting But IMO it sidesteps the most important issues, which are related to what happens after the election. Currently, only people who vote for a winning candidate are really represented. The system assumes that differences in opinion are largely regional but we actually have strong differences of opinion within each region. It seems to me that there are two basic ways to improve this (that I can think of, I'm sure there are more). 1) Change how elected representatives vote. Instead of each representative getting one vote yes or no, a representative might vote X% yes and Y% no. In this system the representatives would ideally be nonpartisan, with systems outside the government used for collective influence. 2) Look at voting in terms of how each individual picks the representative that best represents them personally with some limitations such as fitting within a particular number of total representatives ("subscribing" to a representative as excalibur puts it). Voting for each individual would then be expected to be between fairly similar candidates, but possibly a completely separate set of candidates than someone you live with who has a significantly different perspective. Lots of complicated possibilities here. One notable suboption would be a two layer system where the person you vote for is not the final representative, but someone who closely monitors politics on behalf of a small number of people and votes for the representatives who make the detailed decisions. This person could be nonpartisan and local as in #1, leaving a combined system where a large number of local nonpartisan representatives are primarily responsible for setting up a partisan government with a composition that accurately reflects constituents (I'm not sure this would be the best option, just one possible option).
  • munk-a 8y ago
    Voting doesn't need to result in a single winner, I'd suggest you check out the concept of a leveling seats, which, coupled with IRV, are probably be enough to knock a lot of western democracies out of partisan lock situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat
• leoc 8y ago
  Broke: 18th century voting systems Woke: 13th century voting systems http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf
• dmayle 8y ago
  I'm a bit disappointed by the proposed alternative, which is approval voting. Every alternative voting method I've seen proposed by voting geeks has flaws that are as serious as the current system. There are two main problems with approval voting (and other similar systems like condorcet). The first is that approval voting assumes that every preference has the same weight. Either yes, I approve, or no I don't approve. If we imagine three candidates, A, B, and C, with 10 voters giving a score of 0 to 100. If 9 people give A a score of 100, B a score of 1, and C a score of 0, while one other person gives C a score of 100, B a score of 1, and A a score of 0, then B will win the election in the earlier methods, despite being 99% unpalatable to the majority of everyone. The second problem is non-voters. Our current system ensures that the will of the non-voter is never accounted for. Now, that seams obvious, because they haven't voted, but it's possible to build a system that accounts for everyone's vote. In the world of single-winner systems, I think the only voting solution that truly represents the will of the people is repeat-stable voting. With repeat-stable voting, you keep repeating the election until the results are stable. An example of this would be voting every day on the exact same election until the results of two subsequent votes produce the same winner. That way there is no such thing as the surprise upset. If the will of the people is not captured in the first vote, they have the chance to mobilize for the second, or the third. In this way, you capture the will of the abstainer, as well, because the abstainer is guaranteed to know the result of their choice to not-vote, which means they have the opportunity to change their vote and haven't done so. To move beyond single winner, however, I think the next big leap forward in voting enabled by technology would be hierarchical vote delegation. Instead of electing a leader, you delegate your vote to a leader. (This holds for any role) An elected representative is not making decisions, but wielding their collection of delegated votes. On any single issue, a person is free to manually control that issue, overriding their chosen delegate, and this ensures that the actions of government are truly those decided by the electorate.
• kazinator 8y ago
  Politics is bad because of the choices on the ballots, not because of how they are counted.
• carlosdp 8y ago
  Nicky Case has a really good interactive article explaining why "better voting" systems aren't as simple as that: http://ncase.me/ballot/ http://ncase.me/ballot/
• 5DFractalTetris 8y ago
  Politics is bad because it runs on people. We are shitty hardware for being nice to one another.
• thetruthseeker1 8y ago
  Isn’t this system equivalent to vote your disapprovals only, the person with the least disapprovals wins?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• tomohawk 8y ago
  Politics is not bad because of the voting system. It's bad because we no longer have limited government, so the stakes are much higher than they should be. Presidents and Congresses no longer are circumscribed by the Constitutionally enumerated federal powers, but feel free to act on anything they want to. That, and lack of term limits.
• wbillingsley 8y ago
  In any system where you select multiple candidates (including approval voting) you'll get horse-trading between parties before the election. Basically, the minor parties say "if you adopt this policy, we'll direct our preferences / recommend voters approve you in our campaign leaflets". And then controversies over "you're doing a deal with them?" It's really quite hard to create an electoral system with no distortion, because whatever you put up gets gamed.
• txsh 8y ago
  “Wisdom of the Crowd” needs to die. We have network theory. We know direct democracy doesn’t work. Repeal the 17th ammendment and reinstall other safeguards we used to have against the herd.
• ClayShentrup 8y ago
  Score Voting, Approval Voting, and STAR Voting are basically the future.
• elihu 8y ago
  I'm glad to see the Center for Election Science getting some funding and attention. They seem to be the loudest voice in favor of approval voting or range voting, but they tend to get drowned out by the IRV bandwagon being promoted mainly by fairvote.org. As far as I know, fairvote.org has good intentions, but IRV (also variously referred to as alternative vote or ranked choice voting) has problems that are kind of hard to explain succinctly but which are likely to cause real problems. Basically, IRV tends to eliminate compromise candidates early and it also fails the monotonicity criterion, which means that there are cases where a candidate could win if some group of voters mark that candidate as their N'th choice, but the candidate loses if those same people mark the candidate as their N-1'th choice. That's a problem that even first-past-the-post doesn't share. In FPTP, you can't cause a candidate to lose by voting for them. I worry that voting reform will be perpetually stalled because IRV sounds good, but then the people in a position of power to enact real legislation do some research and talk to some experts and find out it's not as great as they thought. I don't know if that's what happened in Canada with Trudeau, but it I wouldn't be surprised.
• mikestaub 8y ago
  There are people trying to create solutions. Here is one I am excited about: https://united.vote/ https://united.vote/
• prirun 8y ago
  The problem with any voting system is that politicians lie, so IMO we are actually voting on who is the best liar, ie, the most believable liar. To me, it would be better if we could have continuous voting: everyone can re-vote once a day, for any candidate they are elibigle to vote for. Then a politician can be voted out of office at any time, with a new candidate taking their place. We are still voting for the best liar, but at least when someone in office proves that they are a liar, we can get rid of them.