13 ms·

America’s Hidden Duopoly

147 points by laurex 8y ago

gammateam 8y ago
With regard to Washington, this quickly devolves into a semantical discussion about what "broken" means. The observation is that it is working as intended, an outcome that is perpetuated by both parties pandering to everyone that it is broken and they can fix it. That doesn't mean it ISN'T broken, that proves that it is. Correct, it is a selective evolution that works the way selective evolution works. But it doesn't cross the threshold of egalitarian representative democracy where the representatives get to express the will of the people they represent, which is what the masses of people it represents mean by "its broken".
CarVac 8y ago
I don't understand why so many people working for reform support ranked choice voting instead of approval voting, which on top of performing more consistently [0], is simpler to explain and understand. It only takes one sentence to describe: "Vote for everyone you approve of." It also gracefully handles incomplete information—if you don't know about someone, just don't vote for them. [0] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Approval voting collapses to FPTP once the parties tell their voters "just mark one box". This is an unavoidable vulnerability in any scheme that doesn't involve an exhaustive and exlusive ranking.
  - Epenthesis 8y ago
    Why would the voters listen to them if they did in fact approve of multiple candidates?
    - mtgx 8y ago
      For the same reason they don't vote for a third-party candidate in the general, even if they like that candidate much more - they want to maximize the chance of winning for the "lesser evil" and not risk the "greater evil" winning. I do like approval voting as well, for the same mentioned reasons, but I worry that after a few elections people would start voting strategically, and then it could take another few decades to change the voting system again. The more important part isn't ranked choice or approval voting anyway - both are single-winner voting systems which are far from ideal for elections involving Congress/Parliaments and local legislature. It's much preferable to have a proportional representation voting system for those.
      - CarVac 8y ago
        How is there any increased risk of "greater evil" winning from third party voting in approval voting?
        jacques_chester 8y ago
        You may safely rely on both the greater evil and lesser evils saying so.
        dllthomas 8y ago
        Maybe. But it should be less effective when it's obviously bullshit than when there's at least a kernel of truth.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      First, because the parties will say "don't risk your vote!" and deliberately muddy the waters. Second, because in a voluntary voting situation the voter population is dominated by partisans, who are more motivated to vote. This isn't a hypothetical. Queensland introduced "optional" preferential voting and one of the majors promptly campaigned on "Just Vote 1" in order to wedge the opposing coalition.
  - carry_bit 8y ago
    People understand the current system well, so the new system collapsing to it isn't that bad.
  - kragen 8y ago
    It's okay if some voters decide to throw away 90% of their vote by approval-voting for one candidate instead of, say, 10 candidates. If half of the voters do that, while the other half vote rationally, then the voters who voted more rationally will have cast 91% of the votes in the election, and the voters who decided to "Just Vote 1" will be almost irrelevant, except in a close choice between two broadly-appealing candidates. In approval voting, the strategy to maximize the influence of your vote is to vote for half of the candidates, or at least half of the candidates who are likely to win. (Well, except that arguably in nearly all election schemes, the instrumentally rational strategy is to stay home and do something productive, like baking a pie, having sex, or writing some software; this is why voting is obligatory in nearly all functioning democracies.)
- gowld 8y ago
  Ranked choice is simple to explain and understand. Approval voting would encourage people to NOT vote for people they would accept, for fear that it would hurt their favorite.
  - pspeter3 8y ago
    Is ranked choice voting not susceptible to strategic voting?
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      It is, but if the ranking is exhaustive then it cannot regress to de facto FPTP. You wind up with an arguably more benign form of strategic voting: preference deals. The point here is that approval voting, range voting etc work better than IRV under a number of ideal conditions. But political parties have no incentive to cooperate with the ideal conditions. They want to beat the other party.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > It is, but if the ranking is exhaustive then it cannot regress to de facto FPTP. Requiring exhaustive (or even second-level) ranking has been ruled unconstitutional (at the state level) in a couple of US states when forms of Bucklin voting were used; which makes any method that relies on compulsory multiple ranking (rather than accepting truncated rankings) more difficult to implement. Which isn't a fundamental problem, but it's something to be tactically aware of.
        jboles 8y ago
        It seems the US cannot have so many nice things (like preferential voting, and therefore a diversity of candidates) because someone might feel that their freedoms are under threat. (I have thought this before about other things I have come across. Universal healthcare, and taxes to pay for it, come to mind)
      - ClayShentrup 8y ago
- mikeash 8y ago
  Let’s say there are three candidates, one I think is literally Satan, one I think is horrendous but a lot better than Satan, and then some boring but somehow unelectable person. Obviously I vote for the last one and don’t vote for Satan, but do I vote for the middle one?
  - CarVac 8y ago
    Some in your position would, some wouldn't. It's effectively stochastic sampled ranked choice across the population.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      How do I decide which to do? You make it sound simple, but “approve of” is not a simple concept.
      - Spivak 8y ago
        Completely serious, no /s here's your strategy. * Get a 5 sided die. * Rank each candidate from 0-5. * For each candidate roll the die and vote for them if your roll is less than or equal to your rank. I very much dislike approval voting because the way to make people the happiest is to turn it into stochastic STAR.
        ClayShentrup 8y ago
        I think you mean rate, not rank. In any case this is silly. The correct strategy is outlined here. http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Approval Voting works well, arriving at outcomes that represent the will of the people. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
        Spivak 8y ago
        Correct, I meant rate. My strategy isn't about strategic voting, it's how to represent the actual preferences of voters when all you have is approve/not approve.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Yeah. Now answer every clarifying question about what it means to "approve of" someone. Edit: I wasn't asking you to explain it to me; I was asking how you break it down for the average person so that they don't need to keep depending on the election officials to disambiguate every case.
  - CarVac 8y ago
    The beauty of it is that it doesn't have to be the same for everyone.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Is that really necessary? Use the same definition you were already using. You recon “approve” is exclusive? Write down the one you would have voted for in FPTP. Had trouble deciding which of three to vote for? List all three. Someone’s borderline? Go with your gut. Or your head, whichever.
  - imh 8y ago
    You can give any candidates you like a tally. The one with the most tallies wins. Do you want to increase some candidates' total tallies? Then "approve" of them on your ballot.
- nessus42 8y ago
  I'm going to have to spend some time reading over your reference when I have the free time, since it looks quite interesting. But I can already tell you by the complexity of what that article is trying to show that most people won't understand it and won't care. When I vote, it's in part to declare what I want and what I believe in. I generally don't like Democrats and I don't like Republicans. If I want to vote for the Green Party candidate, then I want to vote for the Green Party candidate and make it known that that's who I want to win. I don't want to be stating that I equally approve of both the Green Party candidate and the Democratic candidate since that doesn't accurately represent my opinion. Given that the Green Party candidate is not going to win, I generally vastly prefer the Democratic candidate to the Republican candidate, even if I don't like the Democratic candidate one bit. I don't want to vote in a way in which my statement is that I equally prefer the Democratic candidate to Green Party candidate. I want to vote in a way that states, "I want the Green Party candidate to win. And if I can't have that, I'll reluctantly settle for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate." Voting in a way in which one's desires are clearly indicated is what most people would want, I imagine, even if it has some counterintuitive results at times. Also, at least on a cursory reading, it seems that the author of the article has a bias towards "moderate" candidates winning. Who says that I want a moderate candidate to win? I want some serious progressive change!
  - CarVac 8y ago
    It's not that the author is biased towards moderate candidates; the author wants the moderate candidate to win when the mean of the population's normally distributed political beliefs lie closest to the moderate candidate. The posit is that the spoiler effect is bad: Fielding an additional extreme candidate on one side should not be helpful to the other side.
    - nessus42 8y ago
      Well, I really should read the article you cite because it looks interesting, but take this example: There are three candidates: Republican, Democrat, and Green. 60% of the population wants the Green candidate to win, but will settle for the Democrat reluctantly. They absolutely, positively do not want the Republican to win. 40% of the population wants the Republican to win but under no circumstance wants the Green candidate to win. So with Instant Runoff elections, the majority gets their wish. The Green Candidate wins. With Approval Voting, 60% of the people vote the Green Party Candidate, 40% of the people vote for the Republican Party Candidate, and 100% of the people vote for the Democratic Candidate. The Democratic candidate wins. I don't see how this is a win for Approval Voting. The candidate that wins is a candidate that no one really wanted. Well, clearly my example is rather contrived, but I suspect (perhaps out of ignorance) that any situation in which Instant Runoff would cause counter-intuitive results is also rather unlikely. I'll definitely have to look at your reference, though. I do find such issues very interesting
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > I don't understand why so many people working for reform support ranked choice voting instead of approval voting Because IRV (“ranked choice voting”) may be the worst non-malicious use known of ranked choice ballots, but approval allows even less information about preferences to be expressed and does so in a way where the honest marking of ballots isn't even clear. Plus, once you get people using ranked ballots, debate over better counting procedure is possible without disrupting how people cast ballots. Approval is a worse method from which any improvement is more disruptive.
- cabalamat 8y ago
  On problem with approval voting is you can only vote yes or no to each candidate. Imagine there are 3 candidates, Candidate-A you like, Candidate-B you dislike and Candidate-C you are so-so about. It's obvious how to vote for A and B, but not obvious for C. Under ranking voting systems (such as AV) is is obvous how to vote. You do it in this in this order: Candidate-A, Candidate-C, Candidate-B. Under scoring systems, where you give each candidate a score (say 10 for the best to 0 for the worst), it is also reasonably simple for to vote: Candidate-A 10, Candidate-B 0, Candidate-C somewhere in between. But here again there are problems? If I give C a high score, he is more likely to beat B (which I want) but also more likely to beat A (which I don't want). So that's an incentive for dishonest voting.
  - CarVac 8y ago
    The fact that the decision to approve of candidate C is not easy makes you effectively a swing voter; the chance that you do or don't vote for them is reflective of your approval of them. Either way it doesn't incentivize dishonesty, and it doesn't cause weird squeeze-outs of the middle candidate the way IRV does. I can see how that's less clear cut to a voter, though.
  - ThinkingGuy 8y ago
    Here's the voting system I would like to see implemented: Every voter still gets a single vote in each race, but you can have your vote apply either toward or against a single candidate. The candidate with the highest total of "# of 'against' votes" subtracted from "# of 'for' votes" wins. This would allow voters more freedom of expression than the current system, while being simpler than ranked voting. I understand that it could conceivably (and probably frequently would) result in the winner being the person with the smaller negative number of votes. But at least then they couldn't claim a "mandate for change" based on a broad support of the populace.
    - desdiv 8y ago
      FYI what you are describing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disapproval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disapproval_voting
- kibwen 8y ago
  Let's hold a vote on the matter. Then, once we've determined the winner, let's hold another vote using the winner and cross our fingers that we reach a fixpoint. (Seriously, if we get anything at all other than first-past-the-post in my lifetime, I'll be happy.)
- bradbeattie 8y ago
  I get that a single-winner voting system can't satisfy all criteria, but the contortions Range/Approval voting advocates go through to rationalize its failure of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_criterion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_criterion is concerning.
  - abecedarius 8y ago
    Candidate X is loved by a slight majority and hated by the rest. (Maybe he campaigned on kicking the minority out of the country.) Literally everyone is lukewarm about candidate Y. What outcome should we want? I can’t see this majority criterion as an absolute good.
    - yourbandsucks 8y ago
      Candidate X for sure. I'd rather have some occasional chaos than guaranteed stagnation.
- deleted 8y ago
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- mjevans 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method VERY Roughly: Eliminate the weakest candidates until there's a winner. Only this method is a formal mathematical twist on that to make it computationally easier for computers to process while yielding the same result. In previous posts I've wanted two additions to this method, but I'm modifying the second after thinking about it. * None of the Above / No Confidence (same, this wins == new vote all old candidates banned) * Allow for a single preference list but don't require all candidates ranked. Confusingly, allowing NotA above other candidates should only yield a warning. It might technically express desired behavior (if my candidates don't win, I have no confidence) while placing it ABOVE some candidates implies that there's not critical confidence in them, a re-run without them would be preferable, BUT that a win with them over another candidate in the race or no-confidence if it isn't stronger than them overall is still preferable.
- Terr_ 8y ago
  I have an "engineering reason" for you. Look at this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redesign the user-interface and API of a major product with a huge and diverse set of extremely conservative users. 1. You need to support transitional back-ends for certain users (e.g. instant runoffs) 2. You strongly want to avoid a "new system" that cannot be replaced and has no room for expansion. ___ Any voting system able to handle ranked-preference voting can trivially be "dumbed down" for a certain set of customers who want approval-voting -- it's almost as simple as mapping integers to booleans. In contrast, if everything is built assuming inputs are boolean values for each item in a set, your system is crippled. You either have to hope that everybody loves approval-voting, or admit defeat and switch it back to the old (i.e. current) stupid system of "pick one".
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Or you could go for an even richer system of score voting with integers out of a limited set. You can convert ordinal ranks to scores directly meaning the set exactly same as number of candidates. By that, each median score represents median ordering in a ranked ballot. You may lose certain properties that are relevant in case of direct ties but nobody really cares about that in big constituencies. Heck, you can also keep counts of each score in case the dominant is needed for a tie breaker. Approval voting is a score system with a binary score. Rules are simple: in case of rank scores, candidate with lowest median rank wins, if there is a tie candidate with higher count of low scores wins. This converts IRV or other ranked system to Bucklin vote. In case of approval scores, replace lowest with highest.
- deleted 8y ago
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harshreality 8y ago
The three stated solutions: > 1. Non-partisan, single-ballot primaries. Seems reasonable by itself, but it won't scale to more than a few parties. > 2. Instant-runoff voting, (commonly known as IRV, but in the article/transcript they call it Ranked-choice voting). No. Absolutely not. IRV is awful. https://rangevoting.org/ https://rangevoting.org/ The good options are range voting (which collapses in the pathological case to simple approval voting, which isn't too bad itself). Or, if you're willing to live with some compromises, one of the Condorcet variants. The problem with the Condorcet voting system family is that it's more complex, less intuitive, and doesn't nicely aggregate: to break ties/loops you have to have granular voting data. The complexity means that when someone doesn't like the voting outcome, FOX or CNN can find some talking head to say "voting system is unfair! election stolen!" nonsense, and get traction because most people wouldn't understand Condorcet or why it works the way it does. > 3. Non-biased non-gerrymandered redistricting. Sure, but this needs to be defined strictly, with each voting district bounded by significant geographical features (rivers, mountains), and when geo features aren't available as boundaries, the boundary must be within a certain percentage of a convex hull. In other words, severely constraining the volume of concave points. Nothing like (-1,-1) to (-1, 1) to (1, 1) to (-0.5, 0), to (1, -1). That -0.5, 0 takes a big pacman-like bite out of the square volume, so it wouldn't be permitted. There are actual districts like that, or more like a blocky-letter-C or a blocky-letter-L shape, and it's absurd.
- kkylin 8y ago
  Prescriptions #3 are nice in spirit, but there are practical constraints to consider. For one thing, in addition to geographical boundaries, congressional districts also need to conform to existing administrative boundaries like county lines. These, in turn, are tied to services, taxes, etc. Not to say whether it can or cannot be done, nor whether it should or should not, but it's far from simple to just redraw congressional districts. For anyone interested in gerrymandering and related issues, I've found this to be a nice resource: https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering . (In full disclosure, I know some of the people responsible for this but am not involved in the work.)
- gowld 8y ago
walrus1066 8y ago
I think this is inevitable in a 'first past the post' voting system. The dynamic is identical in the UK.
chadaustin 8y ago
I listened to this episode yesterday. Several interesting points and discussion, and the political industrial complex is real, but I'm not 100% convinced by the argument that the two parties are a duopoly therefore they do not serve the public. While the political system basically ensures that there are only two parties, they rotate over time and adopt or discard ideas as the public needs them to. Clay Shirky discusses this argument in https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protest-vote-c2fdacabd704 https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protes...
- conanbatt 8y ago
  One stern warning is that in multiple party systems, you can get one party that dominates everything, and then all the smaller representative powers are meaningless. Argentina is a case-study with Peronism. Since the return of democracy, no party has yet to finish a term but the peronists.
  - kragen 8y ago
    While that's true, the current president, Mauricio Macri, is currently non-Peronist, and although he's unpopular and the economy is collapsing, he's made it three years, and he has a substantial chance of lasting to the end of his term in December 2019.
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      The exception that proves the rule. And maybe not even, as he actually got to power thanks to the peronists, and keeps it becuase they need him.
- gowld 8y ago
  What if the public prefers some ideas from one party, and other ideas from the other party?
crooked-v 8y ago
A political duopoly is the inevitable consequence of a first-past-the-post voting system existing at every layer of government. Compare to some parliamentary systems, where proportional voting means that no vote is ever "wasted" as long as you can scrape together the bare minimum for at least a single MP.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Parliaments are not defined by proportional representation; the defining feature is that government is formed on the floor of the lower house. Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess. Executive government needs at least some stability, so single-member electorates for the lower house and multi-member electorates for the upper house is a reasonable compromise.
  - Tarq0n 8y ago
    > Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess. Citation needed. There are many European countries where very diverse lower houses work fine.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Parliaments are not defined by proportional representation; the defining feature is that government is formed on the floor of the lower house. > Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess. If by “be a mess” you mean have higher public participation in elections, higher public satisfaction with government, and lower rate of cabinet turnover...you're right. > Executive government needs at least some stability, Proportional systems have greater stability; while coalitions may change more frequent than in FPTP systems, there is less frequent total turnover in membership in either the governing coalition in Parliament or the Cabinet itself in proportional systems. This is sometimes masked by the fact that the same language of government “falling” being used for partial and total turnover.
baybal2 8y ago
There are no shortage of precedents when "winner takes all" systems were broken square and fair, keep trying
- harshreality 8y ago
  The point isn't that it can't be done, it's that voters are strongly incentivized against trying, so they only do so when the political system is completely broken and they feel like they have nothing left to lose, or they feel like there's such massive support for their third party candidate that the party shift has already occurred. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Depending on that to fix problems with the two dominant parties is like seeing an infection and doing nothing to treat it until gangrene sets in and you have to cut off their leg (and give them a robotic prosthetic that you hope will be better than their real leg). It can and does happen, there's even a term for it, iirc: electoral realignment. But it hasn't happened recently, despite a clear sense by everyone that our political system is broken and stupid. Ross Perot tried to incite one in '92 and look what happened.
cbanek 8y ago
So just to talk about the Coke vs Pepsi thing a bit... I love Diet Coke, I'm a Coke person for sure. But I have to admit that Pepsi is winning the business wars, not because of their beverage business, but because of all their other investments. Pepsi used to own KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut (later spun off into Yum! brands), and they still own Frito Lay chips. Coke I don't think has been as good about diversifying their income stream. To take this to the political sphere, the way to win a Duopoly is to cheat and outsmart your opponent. I'd say the republicans are winning this one though, with the electoral college, citizens united, and the way they are playing for votes with fear and hatred. Now to be sure, I'm a democrat, and I don't like what is going on, but even I have to admire an evil genius and how they manage to somehow hold on. It's finding ways around your opponent, not trying to attack them head on. I think if we changed the voting system to a ranked choice system, this would be a big way to swing things back toward the democrats. I'm still always freaked out by people that vote green, and you can see how blue + green > red, but red is still the plurality. Ranked voting would really change this. Even I want to vote green, but am worried that I will affect the spread. Being able to bring in new blood with low risk of going with the worst option would be a huge improvement.
- jaquetheduck 8y ago
  > Coke I don't think has been as good about diversifying their income stream Coca Cola definitely has a diverse brand set of income streams including Minute Made, Nature's Own, Odwalla, and Vitamin Water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands
  - cbanek 8y ago
    It's true they have a lot of brands, but a lot of them are drinks (for example, Monster energy drinks too are on that list). Whereas I think the combination of salty snack food + drinks is a winning combination.
Animats 8y ago
No mention of the problems of the countries that have multiparty systems. Italy (6 major parties) and Israel (18 parties in the Knesset) have dysfunctional governments with too many parties. The UK has five parties with 10 or more seats in Parliament. The US is having lockup trouble with two parties, but that's historically unusual.
- davidw 8y ago
  In Italy, it has happened in the past that you had a result like Party A: 45%, Party B: 45%, Party C: 10%. Party C forms a coalition with Party A to form a government, but constantly bargains for 'more' than their 10% would merit - because otherwise, they pull their support and you have new elections. They eventually did and IIRC, Berlusconi got voted in again...
- calyth2018 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_G... There are a handful for Germany, and they generally form coalitions.
- zanny 8y ago
  I think the goal should be so have so much factional diversity you never reach a coalition state. It only degrades into the status quo when politicians see a path to enshrining their ideology into law without compromise. Part of the problem is also that most governments have flawed establishing documents that make it possible for legislatures to put innumerable barriers up against a propositioned bill. It should be much easier to force a proposal to vote and that should always be public record. Politicians love being able to kept their intentions "in committee" forever or on a divided floor where nobody ever calls for cloture. Having a firm record of actionable legislative motions is the last thing anyone wants when they expect a lifelong career on a house floor.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  I would rather have a 18 parties and a dysfunctional government than 2 and a dysfunctional government. At least with the 18 party situation, the flip/flopping is not straight forward and predictable.
B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
My pet theory is that Trump managed to get elected because he's good for audience ratings. So, what were the ratings for the 2018 election show? (In past years they barely cleared 30% of voters. QED?)
Bodhisattya 8y ago
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pravda 8y ago
Duopoly? To paraphrase the late Gore Vidal, "We have one political party, the property party, with two wings." Here's the full quote: “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.” ― Gore Vidal
- aaron_m04 8y ago
  You could replace "property" with some other totally common sense and reasonable position and lo and behold, both parties agree with it! Where is the problem here?
- mattnewton 8y ago
  This kind of thinking trivializes real progressive policies that “help the poor, the black, and the anti-imperialist” as “small adjustments”, and not the matter of life or death as things like torte law, affordable healthcare, unions, and public infrastructure can be. I hope there is more to that in the full context. Worse, in this context it seems to suggest that you should bargain with neither side and instead seek some new power dynamic. That would be a recipe for disappointment, especially when I think an engaged citizenry can make real (albeit slow) progress by bargaining with the major political parties.
- tacostakohashi 8y ago
  Hotelling's law is at work here. Changing the voting system doesn't actually solve that, either.
mberning 8y ago
Why is it commonly assumed that "our system is broken"? What is the evidence for it? Do people consider the evidence against it? Usually not. It is very easy to fixate on things which could be better, and completely ignore things that are already great. I am reminded of Justice Scalia's testimony regarding "gridlock" https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4580812/scalia-gridlock https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4580812/scalia-gridlock
- giobox 8y ago
  FPTP elections are broken almost anywhere they are used, because FPTP’s only real positive feature is that it is simple to understand. It demonstrably rarely delivers electoral results that actually reflect the desires of the electorate. Combine FPTP with the electoral college system and you get arguably absurd presidential outcomes like we saw in 2016, where the winning candidate can receive less votes than the runner up and still win. Huge majorities on minority shares are often found in FPTP systems, because anyone who didn’t vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted. It can also create the opposite outcomes, minority seat shares in the legislature on majority vote shares. It’s just a plain bad voting system if you believe the legislature should at least vaguely reflect the wishes of voters.
  - arkis22 8y ago
    FPTP elections are where the candidate with the most votes wins. By that definition, it ALWAYS delivers results that reflect the desires of the electorate. I think you're overstating it when you say that it leads to situations where anyone who didn't vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted. I think it's more accurate to say that every vote mattered, but the voters who pushed the leading candidate above the runner up mattered more. Of course, the underlying problem with those situations is that minorities are ignored via the tyranny of the majority. So if you think the presidential outcome was absurd because Hillary received the majority of votes you're arguing that in just this particular election ignoring the minority, and going solely by majority vote, would have been a good thing. You can't pick and choose like that. Combining FPTP with the electoral college did what it was supposed to, it compensated for the tyranny of the majority.
jorblumesea 8y ago
While neither party has serious incentive to increase competition in politics, one party engages in government breaking behavior, which it then uses as an argument for small government. It's frustrating to see the Republican party actively sabotage government, then turn around and use it as proof the government doesn't work. All the while gerrymandering their way into house seats.
laurex 8y ago
The point that the interviewees make, as I understand it, is that money is not really the "problem" in American national politics, it's the way a two-party system has emerged and over the past century, increased its 'duopoly' with policy, gerrymandering, etc. I found this argument very compelling. I'm not sure if there is enough will to make the changes that might lead to some changes here, but it does seem that the intention of the constitutional framers has been lost by creating a binary that doesn't allow for some ideas, such as fiscal conservatism, to succeed at all (though I wouldn't say the framers themselves were always on the good side of history). Great book on that topic is "The Founders' Coup," which puts a lot of where we've come into perspective.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
So the comments here seem to be debating the merit of various kinds of voting systems. Does that mean we fairly unanimously agree that non-partisan primaries are a good thing? Those are something that could be passed state by state via ballot measure.
golemotron 8y ago
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davidw 8y ago
I think the Coke/Pepsi remarks are a bit facile, and play into some people's cynical attitude that "they're all the same". For someone with pre-existing conditions, that was manifestly not true. For Iraq, its people, and the thousands of soldiers who served there, it was not true. Just to rattle off a couple of examples.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  I think they get that, but it's a kind of carrot-and-stick tactic. You don't really get an option; you get a guarantee that you either vote for 1: pure, eldritch evil, 2: milquetoast status quo with vague promises of reform that you aren't really enthused for but at least it's not Satan himself, or 3: throwing your vote directly into a landfill for a foolish ideal that is literally impossible under the current system. Pragmatists should vote for the realistic option that benefits us the most, but that's not how most people work. People aren't really rational actors. If you continuously prove to the public that real reform is a stupid dream and that they must play the game and take the shitty carrot instead of the incredibly shitty stick, they rebel--even if it's not in their best interest. It's not reasonable to point out that they shouldn't do this. Of course they shouldn't, but they always will. For authoritarians, they see options 1: and 2: from the first paragraph switched around relative to progressives. They aren't the same at all--not even a little--yet still there isn't really any meaningful choice to be made. There is only a vicious, cynical threat. Vote for what your region's culture considers least evil or watch as Armageddon devours you and your loved ones. The constant near-perfect tie races are suspicious as hell. Haven't you ever noticed that? It's always 51-49 or somewhere thereabouts after the electoral college, gerrymandering and all the other forms of sophistry obfuscate the direct vote tallies--which always differ far more. Always. Also notice the incumbency rate compared to approval ratings. Incumbency is nearly perfect, even though approval is always sub-20%. Often it's far lower than 20%. This should obviously be impossible in pure democracy, but it should also be incredibly rare in our representative republic. But it's the rule, not the exception. In my opinion this is a smoking gun that just can't be dismissed. This is rigged. Not the same way that crude authoritarian regimes fake their elections, with blatant but effective mafia tactics. This is structurally rigged. This is a hateful ploy that is designed to make real reform impossible, or at least slow enough for existing power structures to readjust and maintain full ownership of new trends, and furthermore to make us grateful for the barest minimum of political functioning: simply that we aren't living under a violent totalitarian state. Both sides are certainly not the same. But the structure within which both sides operate is not designed with the best interests of the American people or the world in mind. I don't think it's some shadowy conspiracy that was masterminded by a single agent, it's just a ludicrously shitty system that naturally evolved out of our country and was taken advantage of by various opportunists. Our market style makes that very easy and very rewarding. Or at least it was at the outset, before power structures ossified and became strongly entrenched.
bebop 8y ago
Can we bring back the Bull Moose part? http://www.progressivebullmoose.party/ http://www.progressivebullmoose.party/
specialist 8y ago
Does one ask virgins for sex advice? Criticisms like Porter's aren't even wrong. They're not even talking about politics as practiced in the USA. At best, they're kibitzing about folk notions of democracy. Everyone should run for office at least once. Give stump speeches. Earn endorsements. GOTV. Cold call strangers for cash. Wrestle over policy. Build coalitions. Etc. People should still criticize, make demands. I'm just saying that once you've played the game, everyone's behaviour will make perfect sense. And then you'll see where reform is needed, desirable, useful. Source: Election integrity activist, ran for office.
tboyd47 8y ago
They touch on how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, but legislation tends to get passed based on which party has the majority of reps at that time. (Then they immediately digress into a long discussion about Trump, unfortunately). This, to me, is a much more interesting issue than assessing the different ways of counting ballots like ranked choice or approval voting, which seem more like a dry mathematical exercise in tweaking some technical process that we don't fully understand to begin with. There was this interview I heard on C-Span with Sue Myrick where they asked her about this lack of bipartisanship in Washington. She said that it's simply because politicians no longer relocate there, but just fly in on Monday and fly back out on Friday. So their spouses don't get together anymore for social events, and their kids don't play on the same baseball teams anymore. They don't socialize in any meaningful way with the other representatives. If representatives are anything like normal people, then I'd wager the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine in 1985 had something to do with it, too. The news media does a pretty good job conditioning people into hating the other party.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > They also mention how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, The New Deal and Civil Rights Act were earthshaking bills that broke the existing partisan alignment and caused a realignment around them; they didn't happen often before, the two of them happening without a few decades was essentially unprecedented in US history. Bemoaning that things like that don't happen anymore is...odd. And, yes, the period of realignment that started with the New Deal, was just seeming to settle out before being reignited with the Civil Rights Act, and was largely complete by the mid-1990s, when the few surviving conservative Democratic holdouts finally jumped ship in the wake of the 1994 election had more other “bipartisan” legislation than was normal before or since, because the national parties and the major national ideological factions were out of alignment.
zenpaul 8y ago
Radiolab just did a similar podcast "Tweak the Vote" about new voting variations. It digs into some real examples in Ireland, San Francisco and Maine. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/tweak-vote https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/tweak-vote
tunesmith 8y ago
I don't understand how this keeps happening where certain people get all this free marketing and mysterious drum-up, and then their panacea is frigging Instant Runoff Voting. At some point the discussion is going to have to evolve past IRV. One thing to remember - ranked choice voting is just the UI/UX. It doesn't mean you have to count it IRV style. The IRV zealots know this, which is why they re-branded it to name it "Ranked Choice Voting". It's a weak method. And Condorcet is not complicated. If one candidate would beat all others head to head, that candidate wins. It's only the tiebreaking methods that are complicated, and ties (loops; smith sets) are rare in large elections. Much rarer than additional-round Instant Runoff scenarios. There was a long discussion just a week ago here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757) on voting variants.
ClayShentrup 8y ago
Fargo, ND just adopted Approval Voting (better and simpler than Ranked Choice Voting/IRV) by a 64% supermajority. https://ballot-access.org/2018/11/06/fargo-north-dakota-voters-pass-approval-voting/ https://ballot-access.org/2018/11/06/fargo-north-dakota-vote...
throw-far-away 8y ago
Minimum feature-set of a sensible psephocracy: - no campaigning or special interest ads a week before voting - only public funding and named individual small donations for public servant campaigns: no PACs, no super-PACs, no huge check fundraisers and no dark-money SIGs. - nationally-unified, same-day voting, no prior registration required - nationally-unified, three prior weeks of voting-by-mail - media blackout on counts until all final results are in - overturn Citizens' United (by amendment via state legislatures) - eliminate the primary - end the Electoral College - free & open source tech unified, national e-voting system, open for all to audit - public blockchain for permanent results - printed receipt with barcode of hash saved in the blockchain - ranked choice voting (as it provides an instant run-off should the favorite be disqualified, die or resign; also provides N picks for boards, vice positions and directors)
- civilian 8y ago
  It's sad you liked ranked choice voting last. That's all we need to end the duopoly. I also feel, as the supreme court does, that Citizens United is a free speech issue. You should listen to this podcast about it to get some perspective: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/citizens-united https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/citizens-united In a beautiful piece of irony, if it hadn't been for Michael Moore shamelessly using his corporation to produce political speech, the Citizens United court case might not have been successful.
mac01021 8y ago
Hidden?

147 points by laurex 8y ago

With regard to Washington, this quickly devolves into a semantical discussion about what "broken" means. The observation is that it is working as intended, an outcome that is perpetuated by both parties pandering to everyone that it is broken and they can fix it. That doesn't mean it ISN'T broken, that proves that it is. Correct, it is a selective evolution that works the way selective evolution works. But it doesn't cross the threshold of egalitarian representative democracy where the representatives get to express the will of the people they represent, which is what the masses of people it represents mean by "its broken".

CarVac 8y ago

I don't understand why so many people working for reform support ranked choice voting instead of approval voting, which on top of performing more consistently [0], is simpler to explain and understand. It only takes one sentence to describe: "Vote for everyone you approve of." It also gracefully handles incomplete information—if you don't know about someone, just don't vote for them. [0] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

jacques_chester 8y ago
Approval voting collapses to FPTP once the parties tell their voters "just mark one box". This is an unavoidable vulnerability in any scheme that doesn't involve an exhaustive and exlusive ranking.
- Epenthesis 8y ago
  Why would the voters listen to them if they did in fact approve of multiple candidates?
  - mtgx 8y ago
    For the same reason they don't vote for a third-party candidate in the general, even if they like that candidate much more - they want to maximize the chance of winning for the "lesser evil" and not risk the "greater evil" winning. I do like approval voting as well, for the same mentioned reasons, but I worry that after a few elections people would start voting strategically, and then it could take another few decades to change the voting system again. The more important part isn't ranked choice or approval voting anyway - both are single-winner voting systems which are far from ideal for elections involving Congress/Parliaments and local legislature. It's much preferable to have a proportional representation voting system for those.
    - CarVac 8y ago
      How is there any increased risk of "greater evil" winning from third party voting in approval voting?
      - jacques_chester 8y ago
        You may safely rely on both the greater evil and lesser evils saying so.
        dllthomas 8y ago
        Maybe. But it should be less effective when it's obviously bullshit than when there's at least a kernel of truth.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    First, because the parties will say "don't risk your vote!" and deliberately muddy the waters. Second, because in a voluntary voting situation the voter population is dominated by partisans, who are more motivated to vote. This isn't a hypothetical. Queensland introduced "optional" preferential voting and one of the majors promptly campaigned on "Just Vote 1" in order to wedge the opposing coalition.
- carry_bit 8y ago
  People understand the current system well, so the new system collapsing to it isn't that bad.
- kragen 8y ago
  It's okay if some voters decide to throw away 90% of their vote by approval-voting for one candidate instead of, say, 10 candidates. If half of the voters do that, while the other half vote rationally, then the voters who voted more rationally will have cast 91% of the votes in the election, and the voters who decided to "Just Vote 1" will be almost irrelevant, except in a close choice between two broadly-appealing candidates. In approval voting, the strategy to maximize the influence of your vote is to vote for half of the candidates, or at least half of the candidates who are likely to win. (Well, except that arguably in nearly all election schemes, the instrumentally rational strategy is to stay home and do something productive, like baking a pie, having sex, or writing some software; this is why voting is obligatory in nearly all functioning democracies.)
gowld 8y ago
Ranked choice is simple to explain and understand. Approval voting would encourage people to NOT vote for people they would accept, for fear that it would hurt their favorite.
- pspeter3 8y ago
  Is ranked choice voting not susceptible to strategic voting?
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    It is, but if the ranking is exhaustive then it cannot regress to de facto FPTP. You wind up with an arguably more benign form of strategic voting: preference deals. The point here is that approval voting, range voting etc work better than IRV under a number of ideal conditions. But political parties have no incentive to cooperate with the ideal conditions. They want to beat the other party.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > It is, but if the ranking is exhaustive then it cannot regress to de facto FPTP. Requiring exhaustive (or even second-level) ranking has been ruled unconstitutional (at the state level) in a couple of US states when forms of Bucklin voting were used; which makes any method that relies on compulsory multiple ranking (rather than accepting truncated rankings) more difficult to implement. Which isn't a fundamental problem, but it's something to be tactically aware of.
      - jboles 8y ago
        It seems the US cannot have so many nice things (like preferential voting, and therefore a diversity of candidates) because someone might feel that their freedoms are under threat. (I have thought this before about other things I have come across. Universal healthcare, and taxes to pay for it, come to mind)
    - ClayShentrup 8y ago
mikeash 8y ago
Let’s say there are three candidates, one I think is literally Satan, one I think is horrendous but a lot better than Satan, and then some boring but somehow unelectable person. Obviously I vote for the last one and don’t vote for Satan, but do I vote for the middle one?
- CarVac 8y ago
  Some in your position would, some wouldn't. It's effectively stochastic sampled ranked choice across the population.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    How do I decide which to do? You make it sound simple, but “approve of” is not a simple concept.
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Completely serious, no /s here's your strategy. * Get a 5 sided die. * Rank each candidate from 0-5. * For each candidate roll the die and vote for them if your roll is less than or equal to your rank. I very much dislike approval voting because the way to make people the happiest is to turn it into stochastic STAR.
      - ClayShentrup 8y ago
        I think you mean rate, not rank. In any case this is silly. The correct strategy is outlined here. http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Approval Voting works well, arriving at outcomes that represent the will of the people. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
        Spivak 8y ago
        Correct, I meant rate. My strategy isn't about strategic voting, it's how to represent the actual preferences of voters when all you have is approve/not approve.
SilasX 8y ago
Yeah. Now answer every clarifying question about what it means to "approve of" someone. Edit: I wasn't asking you to explain it to me; I was asking how you break it down for the average person so that they don't need to keep depending on the election officials to disambiguate every case.
- CarVac 8y ago
  The beauty of it is that it doesn't have to be the same for everyone.
- ben_w 8y ago
  Is that really necessary? Use the same definition you were already using. You recon “approve” is exclusive? Write down the one you would have voted for in FPTP. Had trouble deciding which of three to vote for? List all three. Someone’s borderline? Go with your gut. Or your head, whichever.
- imh 8y ago
  You can give any candidates you like a tally. The one with the most tallies wins. Do you want to increase some candidates' total tallies? Then "approve" of them on your ballot.
nessus42 8y ago
I'm going to have to spend some time reading over your reference when I have the free time, since it looks quite interesting. But I can already tell you by the complexity of what that article is trying to show that most people won't understand it and won't care. When I vote, it's in part to declare what I want and what I believe in. I generally don't like Democrats and I don't like Republicans. If I want to vote for the Green Party candidate, then I want to vote for the Green Party candidate and make it known that that's who I want to win. I don't want to be stating that I equally approve of both the Green Party candidate and the Democratic candidate since that doesn't accurately represent my opinion. Given that the Green Party candidate is not going to win, I generally vastly prefer the Democratic candidate to the Republican candidate, even if I don't like the Democratic candidate one bit. I don't want to vote in a way in which my statement is that I equally prefer the Democratic candidate to Green Party candidate. I want to vote in a way that states, "I want the Green Party candidate to win. And if I can't have that, I'll reluctantly settle for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate." Voting in a way in which one's desires are clearly indicated is what most people would want, I imagine, even if it has some counterintuitive results at times. Also, at least on a cursory reading, it seems that the author of the article has a bias towards "moderate" candidates winning. Who says that I want a moderate candidate to win? I want some serious progressive change!
- CarVac 8y ago
  It's not that the author is biased towards moderate candidates; the author wants the moderate candidate to win when the mean of the population's normally distributed political beliefs lie closest to the moderate candidate. The posit is that the spoiler effect is bad: Fielding an additional extreme candidate on one side should not be helpful to the other side.
  - nessus42 8y ago
    Well, I really should read the article you cite because it looks interesting, but take this example: There are three candidates: Republican, Democrat, and Green. 60% of the population wants the Green candidate to win, but will settle for the Democrat reluctantly. They absolutely, positively do not want the Republican to win. 40% of the population wants the Republican to win but under no circumstance wants the Green candidate to win. So with Instant Runoff elections, the majority gets their wish. The Green Candidate wins. With Approval Voting, 60% of the people vote the Green Party Candidate, 40% of the people vote for the Republican Party Candidate, and 100% of the people vote for the Democratic Candidate. The Democratic candidate wins. I don't see how this is a win for Approval Voting. The candidate that wins is a candidate that no one really wanted. Well, clearly my example is rather contrived, but I suspect (perhaps out of ignorance) that any situation in which Instant Runoff would cause counter-intuitive results is also rather unlikely. I'll definitely have to look at your reference, though. I do find such issues very interesting
dragonwriter 8y ago
> I don't understand why so many people working for reform support ranked choice voting instead of approval voting Because IRV (“ranked choice voting”) may be the worst non-malicious use known of ranked choice ballots, but approval allows even less information about preferences to be expressed and does so in a way where the honest marking of ballots isn't even clear. Plus, once you get people using ranked ballots, debate over better counting procedure is possible without disrupting how people cast ballots. Approval is a worse method from which any improvement is more disruptive.
cabalamat 8y ago
On problem with approval voting is you can only vote yes or no to each candidate. Imagine there are 3 candidates, Candidate-A you like, Candidate-B you dislike and Candidate-C you are so-so about. It's obvious how to vote for A and B, but not obvious for C. Under ranking voting systems (such as AV) is is obvous how to vote. You do it in this in this order: Candidate-A, Candidate-C, Candidate-B. Under scoring systems, where you give each candidate a score (say 10 for the best to 0 for the worst), it is also reasonably simple for to vote: Candidate-A 10, Candidate-B 0, Candidate-C somewhere in between. But here again there are problems? If I give C a high score, he is more likely to beat B (which I want) but also more likely to beat A (which I don't want). So that's an incentive for dishonest voting.
- CarVac 8y ago
  The fact that the decision to approve of candidate C is not easy makes you effectively a swing voter; the chance that you do or don't vote for them is reflective of your approval of them. Either way it doesn't incentivize dishonesty, and it doesn't cause weird squeeze-outs of the middle candidate the way IRV does. I can see how that's less clear cut to a voter, though.
- ThinkingGuy 8y ago
  Here's the voting system I would like to see implemented: Every voter still gets a single vote in each race, but you can have your vote apply either toward or against a single candidate. The candidate with the highest total of "# of 'against' votes" subtracted from "# of 'for' votes" wins. This would allow voters more freedom of expression than the current system, while being simpler than ranked voting. I understand that it could conceivably (and probably frequently would) result in the winner being the person with the smaller negative number of votes. But at least then they couldn't claim a "mandate for change" based on a broad support of the populace.
  - desdiv 8y ago
    FYI what you are describing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disapproval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disapproval_voting
kibwen 8y ago
Let's hold a vote on the matter. Then, once we've determined the winner, let's hold another vote using the winner and cross our fingers that we reach a fixpoint. (Seriously, if we get anything at all other than first-past-the-post in my lifetime, I'll be happy.)
bradbeattie 8y ago
I get that a single-winner voting system can't satisfy all criteria, but the contortions Range/Approval voting advocates go through to rationalize its failure of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_criterion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_criterion is concerning.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Candidate X is loved by a slight majority and hated by the rest. (Maybe he campaigned on kicking the minority out of the country.) Literally everyone is lukewarm about candidate Y. What outcome should we want? I can’t see this majority criterion as an absolute good.
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Candidate X for sure. I'd rather have some occasional chaos than guaranteed stagnation.
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mjevans 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method VERY Roughly: Eliminate the weakest candidates until there's a winner. Only this method is a formal mathematical twist on that to make it computationally easier for computers to process while yielding the same result. In previous posts I've wanted two additions to this method, but I'm modifying the second after thinking about it. * None of the Above / No Confidence (same, this wins == new vote all old candidates banned) * Allow for a single preference list but don't require all candidates ranked. Confusingly, allowing NotA above other candidates should only yield a warning. It might technically express desired behavior (if my candidates don't win, I have no confidence) while placing it ABOVE some candidates implies that there's not critical confidence in them, a re-run without them would be preferable, BUT that a win with them over another candidate in the race or no-confidence if it isn't stronger than them overall is still preferable.
Terr_ 8y ago
I have an "engineering reason" for you. Look at this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redesign the user-interface and API of a major product with a huge and diverse set of extremely conservative users. 1. You need to support transitional back-ends for certain users (e.g. instant runoffs) 2. You strongly want to avoid a "new system" that cannot be replaced and has no room for expansion. ___ Any voting system able to handle ranked-preference voting can trivially be "dumbed down" for a certain set of customers who want approval-voting -- it's almost as simple as mapping integers to booleans. In contrast, if everything is built assuming inputs are boolean values for each item in a set, your system is crippled. You either have to hope that everybody loves approval-voting, or admit defeat and switch it back to the old (i.e. current) stupid system of "pick one".
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Or you could go for an even richer system of score voting with integers out of a limited set. You can convert ordinal ranks to scores directly meaning the set exactly same as number of candidates. By that, each median score represents median ordering in a ranked ballot. You may lose certain properties that are relevant in case of direct ties but nobody really cares about that in big constituencies. Heck, you can also keep counts of each score in case the dominant is needed for a tie breaker. Approval voting is a score system with a binary score. Rules are simple: in case of rank scores, candidate with lowest median rank wins, if there is a tie candidate with higher count of low scores wins. This converts IRV or other ranked system to Bucklin vote. In case of approval scores, replace lowest with highest.
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harshreality 8y ago

The three stated solutions: > 1. Non-partisan, single-ballot primaries. Seems reasonable by itself, but it won't scale to more than a few parties. > 2. Instant-runoff voting, (commonly known as IRV, but in the article/transcript they call it Ranked-choice voting). No. Absolutely not. IRV is awful. https://rangevoting.org/ https://rangevoting.org/ The good options are range voting (which collapses in the pathological case to simple approval voting, which isn't too bad itself). Or, if you're willing to live with some compromises, one of the Condorcet variants. The problem with the Condorcet voting system family is that it's more complex, less intuitive, and doesn't nicely aggregate: to break ties/loops you have to have granular voting data. The complexity means that when someone doesn't like the voting outcome, FOX or CNN can find some talking head to say "voting system is unfair! election stolen!" nonsense, and get traction because most people wouldn't understand Condorcet or why it works the way it does. > 3. Non-biased non-gerrymandered redistricting. Sure, but this needs to be defined strictly, with each voting district bounded by significant geographical features (rivers, mountains), and when geo features aren't available as boundaries, the boundary must be within a certain percentage of a convex hull. In other words, severely constraining the volume of concave points. Nothing like (-1,-1) to (-1, 1) to (1, 1) to (-0.5, 0), to (1, -1). That -0.5, 0 takes a big pacman-like bite out of the square volume, so it wouldn't be permitted. There are actual districts like that, or more like a blocky-letter-C or a blocky-letter-L shape, and it's absurd.

kkylin 8y ago
Prescriptions #3 are nice in spirit, but there are practical constraints to consider. For one thing, in addition to geographical boundaries, congressional districts also need to conform to existing administrative boundaries like county lines. These, in turn, are tied to services, taxes, etc. Not to say whether it can or cannot be done, nor whether it should or should not, but it's far from simple to just redraw congressional districts. For anyone interested in gerrymandering and related issues, I've found this to be a nice resource: https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering . (In full disclosure, I know some of the people responsible for this but am not involved in the work.)
gowld 8y ago

walrus1066 8y ago

I think this is inevitable in a 'first past the post' voting system. The dynamic is identical in the UK.

chadaustin 8y ago

I listened to this episode yesterday. Several interesting points and discussion, and the political industrial complex is real, but I'm not 100% convinced by the argument that the two parties are a duopoly therefore they do not serve the public. While the political system basically ensures that there are only two parties, they rotate over time and adopt or discard ideas as the public needs them to. Clay Shirky discusses this argument in https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protest-vote-c2fdacabd704 https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protes...

conanbatt 8y ago
One stern warning is that in multiple party systems, you can get one party that dominates everything, and then all the smaller representative powers are meaningless. Argentina is a case-study with Peronism. Since the return of democracy, no party has yet to finish a term but the peronists.
- kragen 8y ago
  While that's true, the current president, Mauricio Macri, is currently non-Peronist, and although he's unpopular and the economy is collapsing, he's made it three years, and he has a substantial chance of lasting to the end of his term in December 2019.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    The exception that proves the rule. And maybe not even, as he actually got to power thanks to the peronists, and keeps it becuase they need him.
gowld 8y ago
What if the public prefers some ideas from one party, and other ideas from the other party?

crooked-v 8y ago

A political duopoly is the inevitable consequence of a first-past-the-post voting system existing at every layer of government. Compare to some parliamentary systems, where proportional voting means that no vote is ever "wasted" as long as you can scrape together the bare minimum for at least a single MP.

jacques_chester 8y ago
Parliaments are not defined by proportional representation; the defining feature is that government is formed on the floor of the lower house. Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess. Executive government needs at least some stability, so single-member electorates for the lower house and multi-member electorates for the upper house is a reasonable compromise.
- Tarq0n 8y ago
  > Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess. Citation needed. There are many European countries where very diverse lower houses work fine.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Parliaments are not defined by proportional representation; the defining feature is that government is formed on the floor of the lower house. > Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess. If by “be a mess” you mean have higher public participation in elections, higher public satisfaction with government, and lower rate of cabinet turnover...you're right. > Executive government needs at least some stability, Proportional systems have greater stability; while coalitions may change more frequent than in FPTP systems, there is less frequent total turnover in membership in either the governing coalition in Parliament or the Cabinet itself in proportional systems. This is sometimes masked by the fact that the same language of government “falling” being used for partial and total turnover.

baybal2 8y ago

There are no shortage of precedents when "winner takes all" systems were broken square and fair, keep trying

harshreality 8y ago
The point isn't that it can't be done, it's that voters are strongly incentivized against trying, so they only do so when the political system is completely broken and they feel like they have nothing left to lose, or they feel like there's such massive support for their third party candidate that the party shift has already occurred. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Depending on that to fix problems with the two dominant parties is like seeing an infection and doing nothing to treat it until gangrene sets in and you have to cut off their leg (and give them a robotic prosthetic that you hope will be better than their real leg). It can and does happen, there's even a term for it, iirc: electoral realignment. But it hasn't happened recently, despite a clear sense by everyone that our political system is broken and stupid. Ross Perot tried to incite one in '92 and look what happened.

cbanek 8y ago

So just to talk about the Coke vs Pepsi thing a bit... I love Diet Coke, I'm a Coke person for sure. But I have to admit that Pepsi is winning the business wars, not because of their beverage business, but because of all their other investments. Pepsi used to own KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut (later spun off into Yum! brands), and they still own Frito Lay chips. Coke I don't think has been as good about diversifying their income stream. To take this to the political sphere, the way to win a Duopoly is to cheat and outsmart your opponent. I'd say the republicans are winning this one though, with the electoral college, citizens united, and the way they are playing for votes with fear and hatred. Now to be sure, I'm a democrat, and I don't like what is going on, but even I have to admire an evil genius and how they manage to somehow hold on. It's finding ways around your opponent, not trying to attack them head on. I think if we changed the voting system to a ranked choice system, this would be a big way to swing things back toward the democrats. I'm still always freaked out by people that vote green, and you can see how blue + green > red, but red is still the plurality. Ranked voting would really change this. Even I want to vote green, but am worried that I will affect the spread. Being able to bring in new blood with low risk of going with the worst option would be a huge improvement.

jaquetheduck 8y ago
> Coke I don't think has been as good about diversifying their income stream Coca Cola definitely has a diverse brand set of income streams including Minute Made, Nature's Own, Odwalla, and Vitamin Water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands
- cbanek 8y ago
  It's true they have a lot of brands, but a lot of them are drinks (for example, Monster energy drinks too are on that list). Whereas I think the combination of salty snack food + drinks is a winning combination.

Animats 8y ago

No mention of the problems of the countries that have multiparty systems. Italy (6 major parties) and Israel (18 parties in the Knesset) have dysfunctional governments with too many parties. The UK has five parties with 10 or more seats in Parliament. The US is having lockup trouble with two parties, but that's historically unusual.

davidw 8y ago
In Italy, it has happened in the past that you had a result like Party A: 45%, Party B: 45%, Party C: 10%. Party C forms a coalition with Party A to form a government, but constantly bargains for 'more' than their 10% would merit - because otherwise, they pull their support and you have new elections. They eventually did and IIRC, Berlusconi got voted in again...
calyth2018 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_G... There are a handful for Germany, and they generally form coalitions.
zanny 8y ago
I think the goal should be so have so much factional diversity you never reach a coalition state. It only degrades into the status quo when politicians see a path to enshrining their ideology into law without compromise. Part of the problem is also that most governments have flawed establishing documents that make it possible for legislatures to put innumerable barriers up against a propositioned bill. It should be much easier to force a proposal to vote and that should always be public record. Politicians love being able to kept their intentions "in committee" forever or on a divided floor where nobody ever calls for cloture. Having a firm record of actionable legislative motions is the last thing anyone wants when they expect a lifelong career on a house floor.
craftyguy 8y ago
I would rather have a 18 parties and a dysfunctional government than 2 and a dysfunctional government. At least with the 18 party situation, the flip/flopping is not straight forward and predictable.

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago

My pet theory is that Trump managed to get elected because he's good for audience ratings. So, what were the ratings for the 2018 election show? (In past years they barely cleared 30% of voters. QED?)

Bodhisattya 8y ago

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pravda 8y ago

Duopoly? To paraphrase the late Gore Vidal, "We have one political party, the property party, with two wings." Here's the full quote: “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.” ― Gore Vidal

aaron_m04 8y ago
You could replace "property" with some other totally common sense and reasonable position and lo and behold, both parties agree with it! Where is the problem here?
mattnewton 8y ago
This kind of thinking trivializes real progressive policies that “help the poor, the black, and the anti-imperialist” as “small adjustments”, and not the matter of life or death as things like torte law, affordable healthcare, unions, and public infrastructure can be. I hope there is more to that in the full context. Worse, in this context it seems to suggest that you should bargain with neither side and instead seek some new power dynamic. That would be a recipe for disappointment, especially when I think an engaged citizenry can make real (albeit slow) progress by bargaining with the major political parties.
tacostakohashi 8y ago
Hotelling's law is at work here. Changing the voting system doesn't actually solve that, either.

mberning 8y ago

Why is it commonly assumed that "our system is broken"? What is the evidence for it? Do people consider the evidence against it? Usually not. It is very easy to fixate on things which could be better, and completely ignore things that are already great. I am reminded of Justice Scalia's testimony regarding "gridlock" https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4580812/scalia-gridlock https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4580812/scalia-gridlock

giobox 8y ago
FPTP elections are broken almost anywhere they are used, because FPTP’s only real positive feature is that it is simple to understand. It demonstrably rarely delivers electoral results that actually reflect the desires of the electorate. Combine FPTP with the electoral college system and you get arguably absurd presidential outcomes like we saw in 2016, where the winning candidate can receive less votes than the runner up and still win. Huge majorities on minority shares are often found in FPTP systems, because anyone who didn’t vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted. It can also create the opposite outcomes, minority seat shares in the legislature on majority vote shares. It’s just a plain bad voting system if you believe the legislature should at least vaguely reflect the wishes of voters.
- arkis22 8y ago
  FPTP elections are where the candidate with the most votes wins. By that definition, it ALWAYS delivers results that reflect the desires of the electorate. I think you're overstating it when you say that it leads to situations where anyone who didn't vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted. I think it's more accurate to say that every vote mattered, but the voters who pushed the leading candidate above the runner up mattered more. Of course, the underlying problem with those situations is that minorities are ignored via the tyranny of the majority. So if you think the presidential outcome was absurd because Hillary received the majority of votes you're arguing that in just this particular election ignoring the minority, and going solely by majority vote, would have been a good thing. You can't pick and choose like that. Combining FPTP with the electoral college did what it was supposed to, it compensated for the tyranny of the majority.

jorblumesea 8y ago

While neither party has serious incentive to increase competition in politics, one party engages in government breaking behavior, which it then uses as an argument for small government. It's frustrating to see the Republican party actively sabotage government, then turn around and use it as proof the government doesn't work. All the while gerrymandering their way into house seats.

laurex 8y ago

The point that the interviewees make, as I understand it, is that money is not really the "problem" in American national politics, it's the way a two-party system has emerged and over the past century, increased its 'duopoly' with policy, gerrymandering, etc. I found this argument very compelling. I'm not sure if there is enough will to make the changes that might lead to some changes here, but it does seem that the intention of the constitutional framers has been lost by creating a binary that doesn't allow for some ideas, such as fiscal conservatism, to succeed at all (though I wouldn't say the framers themselves were always on the good side of history). Great book on that topic is "The Founders' Coup," which puts a lot of where we've come into perspective.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

So the comments here seem to be debating the merit of various kinds of voting systems. Does that mean we fairly unanimously agree that non-partisan primaries are a good thing? Those are something that could be passed state by state via ballot measure.

golemotron 8y ago

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davidw 8y ago

I think the Coke/Pepsi remarks are a bit facile, and play into some people's cynical attitude that "they're all the same". For someone with pre-existing conditions, that was manifestly not true. For Iraq, its people, and the thousands of soldiers who served there, it was not true. Just to rattle off a couple of examples.

vertexFarm 8y ago
I think they get that, but it's a kind of carrot-and-stick tactic. You don't really get an option; you get a guarantee that you either vote for 1: pure, eldritch evil, 2: milquetoast status quo with vague promises of reform that you aren't really enthused for but at least it's not Satan himself, or 3: throwing your vote directly into a landfill for a foolish ideal that is literally impossible under the current system. Pragmatists should vote for the realistic option that benefits us the most, but that's not how most people work. People aren't really rational actors. If you continuously prove to the public that real reform is a stupid dream and that they must play the game and take the shitty carrot instead of the incredibly shitty stick, they rebel--even if it's not in their best interest. It's not reasonable to point out that they shouldn't do this. Of course they shouldn't, but they always will. For authoritarians, they see options 1: and 2: from the first paragraph switched around relative to progressives. They aren't the same at all--not even a little--yet still there isn't really any meaningful choice to be made. There is only a vicious, cynical threat. Vote for what your region's culture considers least evil or watch as Armageddon devours you and your loved ones. The constant near-perfect tie races are suspicious as hell. Haven't you ever noticed that? It's always 51-49 or somewhere thereabouts after the electoral college, gerrymandering and all the other forms of sophistry obfuscate the direct vote tallies--which always differ far more. Always. Also notice the incumbency rate compared to approval ratings. Incumbency is nearly perfect, even though approval is always sub-20%. Often it's far lower than 20%. This should obviously be impossible in pure democracy, but it should also be incredibly rare in our representative republic. But it's the rule, not the exception. In my opinion this is a smoking gun that just can't be dismissed. This is rigged. Not the same way that crude authoritarian regimes fake their elections, with blatant but effective mafia tactics. This is structurally rigged. This is a hateful ploy that is designed to make real reform impossible, or at least slow enough for existing power structures to readjust and maintain full ownership of new trends, and furthermore to make us grateful for the barest minimum of political functioning: simply that we aren't living under a violent totalitarian state. Both sides are certainly not the same. But the structure within which both sides operate is not designed with the best interests of the American people or the world in mind. I don't think it's some shadowy conspiracy that was masterminded by a single agent, it's just a ludicrously shitty system that naturally evolved out of our country and was taken advantage of by various opportunists. Our market style makes that very easy and very rewarding. Or at least it was at the outset, before power structures ossified and became strongly entrenched.

bebop 8y ago

Can we bring back the Bull Moose part? http://www.progressivebullmoose.party/ http://www.progressivebullmoose.party/

specialist 8y ago

Does one ask virgins for sex advice? Criticisms like Porter's aren't even wrong. They're not even talking about politics as practiced in the USA. At best, they're kibitzing about folk notions of democracy. Everyone should run for office at least once. Give stump speeches. Earn endorsements. GOTV. Cold call strangers for cash. Wrestle over policy. Build coalitions. Etc. People should still criticize, make demands. I'm just saying that once you've played the game, everyone's behaviour will make perfect sense. And then you'll see where reform is needed, desirable, useful. Source: Election integrity activist, ran for office.

tboyd47 8y ago

They touch on how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, but legislation tends to get passed based on which party has the majority of reps at that time. (Then they immediately digress into a long discussion about Trump, unfortunately). This, to me, is a much more interesting issue than assessing the different ways of counting ballots like ranked choice or approval voting, which seem more like a dry mathematical exercise in tweaking some technical process that we don't fully understand to begin with. There was this interview I heard on C-Span with Sue Myrick where they asked her about this lack of bipartisanship in Washington. She said that it's simply because politicians no longer relocate there, but just fly in on Monday and fly back out on Friday. So their spouses don't get together anymore for social events, and their kids don't play on the same baseball teams anymore. They don't socialize in any meaningful way with the other representatives. If representatives are anything like normal people, then I'd wager the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine in 1985 had something to do with it, too. The news media does a pretty good job conditioning people into hating the other party.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> They also mention how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, The New Deal and Civil Rights Act were earthshaking bills that broke the existing partisan alignment and caused a realignment around them; they didn't happen often before, the two of them happening without a few decades was essentially unprecedented in US history. Bemoaning that things like that don't happen anymore is...odd. And, yes, the period of realignment that started with the New Deal, was just seeming to settle out before being reignited with the Civil Rights Act, and was largely complete by the mid-1990s, when the few surviving conservative Democratic holdouts finally jumped ship in the wake of the 1994 election had more other “bipartisan” legislation than was normal before or since, because the national parties and the major national ideological factions were out of alignment.

zenpaul 8y ago

Radiolab just did a similar podcast "Tweak the Vote" about new voting variations. It digs into some real examples in Ireland, San Francisco and Maine. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/tweak-vote https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/tweak-vote

tunesmith 8y ago

I don't understand how this keeps happening where certain people get all this free marketing and mysterious drum-up, and then their panacea is frigging Instant Runoff Voting. At some point the discussion is going to have to evolve past IRV. One thing to remember - ranked choice voting is just the UI/UX. It doesn't mean you have to count it IRV style. The IRV zealots know this, which is why they re-branded it to name it "Ranked Choice Voting". It's a weak method. And Condorcet is not complicated. If one candidate would beat all others head to head, that candidate wins. It's only the tiebreaking methods that are complicated, and ties (loops; smith sets) are rare in large elections. Much rarer than additional-round Instant Runoff scenarios. There was a long discussion just a week ago here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757) on voting variants.

ClayShentrup 8y ago

Fargo, ND just adopted Approval Voting (better and simpler than Ranked Choice Voting/IRV) by a 64% supermajority. https://ballot-access.org/2018/11/06/fargo-north-dakota-voters-pass-approval-voting/ https://ballot-access.org/2018/11/06/fargo-north-dakota-vote...

throw-far-away 8y ago

Minimum feature-set of a sensible psephocracy: - no campaigning or special interest ads a week before voting - only public funding and named individual small donations for public servant campaigns: no PACs, no super-PACs, no huge check fundraisers and no dark-money SIGs. - nationally-unified, same-day voting, no prior registration required - nationally-unified, three prior weeks of voting-by-mail - media blackout on counts until all final results are in - overturn Citizens' United (by amendment via state legislatures) - eliminate the primary - end the Electoral College - free & open source tech unified, national e-voting system, open for all to audit - public blockchain for permanent results - printed receipt with barcode of hash saved in the blockchain - ranked choice voting (as it provides an instant run-off should the favorite be disqualified, die or resign; also provides N picks for boards, vice positions and directors)

civilian 8y ago
It's sad you liked ranked choice voting last. That's all we need to end the duopoly. I also feel, as the supreme court does, that Citizens United is a free speech issue. You should listen to this podcast about it to get some perspective: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/citizens-united https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/citizens-united In a beautiful piece of irony, if it hadn't been for Michael Moore shamelessly using his corporation to produce political speech, the Citizens United court case might not have been successful.

mac01021 8y ago

Hidden?