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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

by 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

by pps43 8y ago

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