4 ms·

Here is a very good simulator to get a feel for the different voting systems : https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/

rstuart4133 8y ago
ncase.me is very good, but it neglects what I consider to be the elephant in the room - dictatorship of the majority. If you have a country with 60% A, 30% B and 10% C, then you might like to a parliament roughly representative of that. (A, B, and C could be anything - attitudes to same sex marriage, daylight saving - there are always many ABC sets.) If parliament consists people elected in geographic regions, and A, B and C are uniformly distributed over the regions than all voting systems here will give you a parliament consisting only of A's. People here seem to enjoy pointing out some perverse outcomes for IRV, but the Arrow's impossibility theorem proves (and ncase.me beautifully demonstrates) all voting systems have perverse outcomes. Yet none are as bad as electing all A's to represent a diverse country and every one of them will do that if used the wrong way, which also happens to be the most common way they are used. Back to the topic - IRV does have its downsides, but it's not perverse outcomes. Australia tries to use IRV everywhere. The Australia Federal Senate has a voting system that does fix the dictatorship of the majority and naturally they try to use IRV there too. If you ever have the unfortunate experience of voting in an Australian Senate election you'll see why IRV isn't so good in that situation. In fact it's so bad not even the Australian's can use it in its pure form. If you are wondering why, it leads asking the public to number 100 odd boxes in strictly consecutive order, on a 1m wide ballot paper that can't lie flat in the ballot box with writing so small they had to issue magnifying glasses so you could read the candidate names. https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332 https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332

rstuart4133 8y ago

ncase.me is very good, but it neglects what I consider to be the elephant in the room - dictatorship of the majority. If you have a country with 60% A, 30% B and 10% C, then you might like to a parliament roughly representative of that. (A, B, and C could be anything - attitudes to same sex marriage, daylight saving - there are always many ABC sets.) If parliament consists people elected in geographic regions, and A, B and C are uniformly distributed over the regions than all voting systems here will give you a parliament consisting only of A's. People here seem to enjoy pointing out some perverse outcomes for IRV, but the Arrow's impossibility theorem proves (and ncase.me beautifully demonstrates) all voting systems have perverse outcomes. Yet none are as bad as electing all A's to represent a diverse country and every one of them will do that if used the wrong way, which also happens to be the most common way they are used. Back to the topic - IRV does have its downsides, but it's not perverse outcomes. Australia tries to use IRV everywhere. The Australia Federal Senate has a voting system that does fix the dictatorship of the majority and naturally they try to use IRV there too. If you ever have the unfortunate experience of voting in an Australian Senate election you'll see why IRV isn't so good in that situation. In fact it's so bad not even the Australian's can use it in its pure form. If you are wondering why, it leads asking the public to number 100 odd boxes in strictly consecutive order, on a 1m wide ballot paper that can't lie flat in the ballot box with writing so small they had to issue magnifying glasses so you could read the candidate names. https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332 https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332