A quick scan of the transcript didn't let me find what makes his plan "viable". The system is so bad that almost any plan is a massive improvement, but such efforts often end in squabbling over which system is the best.
Here in Canada one of Trudeau's platforms was to get rid of first-past-the-post. But he nixed it when he found out the committee was going to recommend mixed-member-proportional (which would probably hurt his parties chances) rather than ranked ballots (which would definitely help his party).
I think the only way to avoid this brand of self-interest is to, prior to any discussion, agree that the changes will only come into effect 20 years into the future. It's hard to predict who it'll benefit that far into the future. 16 or 12 years might be doable. 8 is definitely too close. 4 is a train wreck, everyone is on campaign already.
The downside of doing so is that it still gives plenty of time to cancel the changes at year 12 or 16, once it becomes apparent who will stand to benefit/lose from the change. This type of hacking future benefits is evidence in many of the tax overhauls, which use predicted future savings to offset short-term costs. And often those future savings are legislated away before they come to fruition.
(Of course, sometimes those future savings wouldn't have happened anyways, due to unreasonably optimistic assumptions about the performance of the economy.)
It's not that simple. First, I'm not sure that anyone knows who would benefit 8 years out. There will be guesses, sure, but nobody's really going to know how it plays out until after the first election under the new system. Even that won't really tell us much, because everyone will adjust their tactics after the first experience.
Second, even if everybody knew who was going to be the loser from the changes 8 years in advance, that's not enough. That party would have to be strong enough under the current system to undo the changes. In practice, that would require controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency... unless both parties decide that they would lose power to third parties, and strike a deal.
Or to (infuriatingly for the general public) simultaneously pass a package that ensures present-day personal benefits to all current incumbents, removing all risk from their calculations of personal benefit and thus inducing them to do what is simultaneously best for them and for the future polity.
I was thinking they need to start recording and widely publicizing exit polls using the approval system so that people can get a sense of what the alternative 'feels' like. The big problem is that it'd take at least ~three election cycles for most people to appreciate the difference it'd make.
E.g., in the first cycle, extreme candidate A wins the actual election while the moderate, B, is shown to be widely tolerated under the approval system. Nearly half the voters--those who voted for the opposite extreme, C, end up loathing the results of the actual election and wishing in retrospect that the approval system had been in place. Perhaps in the second election cycle, candidate A wins re-election because they're a known-quantity/incumbent.
Finally, in the third cycle, history starts repeating itself and people get tired of A's party. E.g., the Overton window slides back towards C's perspectives leading to C being seated. This time the people who still prefer A are disgusted with the outcome and prefer the outcome of the approval system.
At this point, half the voters have long argued that the approval system makes more sense and the other half has also come around to thinking maybe it could bolster their position as well. It'd only remain for less partisan activists to e.g., get a petition going towards a referendum.
While politicians are notoriously bad at planning 20 years ahead, I wouldn't put it past them to try, especially when that timeframe makes it easier to project the impact of demographic trends rather than merely political ones.
> I think the only way to avoid this brand of self-interest is to, prior to any discussion, agree that the changes will only come into effect 20 years into the future. It's hard to predict who it'll benefit that far into the future.
It's hard to predict the short-term beneficiary parties when it goes into effect, sure, but its quite easy to predict the long term ideological benefit of increases in proportionality on modern democracies.
Ironically, that may make near immediate implementation more viable, if their is a divergence between the expected short-term and long-term impacts, and those expected to benefit believe they can use that to preempt the naturally expected long term benefit but those who would expect that long term benefit don't believe their opponents will succeed at that.
Approval voting is biased toward "moderate" candidates. This has all the problems of first-past-the-post in terms of electing representatives who do not allow for a wide range of political opinion. It empowers status quo politicians beholden to special interests.
Is it really? Or is that your take? You could just as easily say that it's biased toward candidates who work effectively with a broader range of people.
We have observed reality to draw conclusions from. Regardless of political affiliation, would anyone really argue that special interests haven't taken over the political process in the US, and made significant inroads in most if not all of the industrialized democracies throughout the world?
Sure, I’ll argue that. “Special interests” is just code for “people whose opinions I don’t like.” But at the end of the day, our government very closely reflects what you’d expect. If you account for the fact that likely voters skew richer, older, and more conservative than the population as a whole, what exactly do you think would be different if “special interests” were not in charge? Would we spend less on defense? 1 in 3 Americans say we don’t spend enough. Would we spend less on social security, more, etc?
Removing wealthy 'special interests would probably have some interesting effects. Off the top of my head, I expect we'd have better regulations on banks and the like. And perhaps Mickey Mouse (and everything else more than 75 years old) would be public domain.
> “Special interests” is just code for “people whose opinions I don’t like.”
It's code for above-the-median-wealthy, enough to influence opinion outside of the populist opinion. Why you choose to go partisan over a systemic issue, is beyond me.
The guilty flee where none pursueth. You'll note my original post was carefully non-partisan. Your rush to bring conservative talking points into the discussion suggests some kind of bias, or perhaps a guilty conscience.
Bias toward moderation is a trade-off. Attempting to minimize it seems naive.
At the extreme end, a legislature consisting of communists, anarchists, facists, theocrats, and hippies wouldn't accomplish anything but igniting civil war.
> communists, anarchists, facists, theocrats, and hippies
I would think all those groups together would only make what, max 20% of the US electorate? In a proportional system, they would still be a minority of the Parliament. And the internal disagreements within that minority of the representatives would prohibit them from joining forces and using even their 20% of the power. The rest 80% could mostly just ignore those fringe groups.
Or perhaps it would keep the really extreme and unworkable BS out of the law and government policy. Such a diverse body of legislators is going to have a much smaller set of policies they agree is a good idea, and that would result in a smaller body of law. I see a smaller, simpler body of law that more people can think and agree with as a Good Thing.
I think if you had a national legislature with "moderates" (as defined by California and Massachusetts) and "moderates" (as defined by Utah and Mississippi), you'd have a fairly wide range of political opinion represented. You wouldn't have the extremes of California represented, and you wouldn't have the extremes of Mississippi represented, but that may not be that much of a loss...
A wide range of political opinion is sometimes useful (e.g. in one of the houses of a legislative body). Moderate candidates are also useful. Rather than choose one voting system to use for everything, it might be appropriate to use a couple voting systems that have different strengths and weaknesses. So you might imagine one house of a legislature elected with approval voting, and a different house elected with a proportional method.
If a moderate candidate is the one who is acceptable to the largest proportion of the voting public, why shouldn't they win?
Approval voting allows voters to vote for 3rd party candidates without "throwing their vote away". That would be a huge improvement over first-past-the-post, as 3rd party candidates would have a decent chance of winning if they can make a compelling case to voters.
Arrow's Theorem only considers single-winner systems. But most politics is done by the Parliament, not the President.
There is no need to use small, single-winner voting districts to choose the members of the Parliament. Make voting districts 5-10 times larger and use proportional voting. Arrow's Theorem is not valid for that kind of systems.
This interactive graph predicting outcomes for different voting methods convinced me that this is much harder to do than it would seem. Very much worth checking out the link. I think maybe I found it on HN.
The further to the right a voting method is, the more it "maximizes happiness" for the voters
Why should group satisfaction with the winner be the important metric? Surely good governance should be the most important metric. If the quality of government is too hard to measure then length of time before overthrow or revolution should be a good proxy.
Good governance is a loaded term. Good for who? Different stakeholders will frequently have opposing goals, desires, and needs. Cutting foodstamps program helps some by lowering taxes, but hurts others who need help. Then the argument moves into secondary effects, cutting foodstamps will make poor people better off because the economy will grow, or cutting foodstamps will hurt taxpayers because poor nutrition and financial instability fewer people will escape poverty. The problem becomes complex enough that no one really knows the answer and so even the smartest often just end up restating their preheld belief.
Markets are supposed to be efficient they match demand with production efficiently, or some such. Political demand needs to be matched with equal efficiency. Imposing good governance into a voting system will very likely create distortions.
You seem to ignore my point about multiple stakeholders.
I believe that the happiness measure is not a measure of outcomes but happiness with getting a representative closer to his/her choice or preference...meaning one that may best represent their views, desires, and needs in government. Tha seems like good governance.
You seem to ignore my point about the collective good. By definition measuring happiness is measuring feelings. Rule by emotion. When has that ever worked out well?
If closer to personal preference is better, shouldn't direct democracy - absolute majority rule - be the ideal? But it's clearly not the case, at least not in any sizeable country.
"...there's actually a really good track record in the US for passing ballot initiatives on single winner voting methods, so we expect the likelihood of winning some to be pretty high.
The way that we look at it is instant runoff voting has been passed as a ballot initiative in a number of cities, but we see approval voting as producing better outcomes, and having better political dynamics compared to instant runoff voting. Approval voting is also so much easier, and it avoids a lot of the problems.
If instant runoff voting can win, then surely, a simpler voting method that produces good outcomes and has good dynamics should also be able to do it."
Approval voting is worse than even IRV because of inconsistent meaning of ballot markings, an effect which the naive mathematical analyses which support the claims of it's superiority ignore.
This problem is negated when the is a consistent meaning to approval or disapproval markings, which can happen with non-secret ballots tied to concrete commitments. Approval is, for that reason, an excellent voting method to decide group activities in a social group, where an approve vote is a binding opt-in to the activity if it is chosen (or if a disapprove vote is a binding opt-out.)
For the same reason (the lack of a concrete definition of what “approve” or “disapprove” means), approval is not really simpler than IRV (or other ranked ballots) methods, even if the space of possible ballot markings is narrower.
Successive one-party governments, where the Liberals or the Conservatives have absolute power, from now, till the end of time, despite neither party having ~35% of the vote?
I think that political calculations regarding proportional representation were a factor in the Liberal decision to scrap reform but the stated reason for not wanting a MMP system is a pretty good one. In Europe MMP has supported a lot of fringe parties that have used the funding that comes with having full-time representatives on government payrolls to build strength to the detriment of the political environment.
Folks cite the fact that fringe parties only receive 1%ish of the vote in Canada as evidence that this is not a valid concern but it is easy to see how voter behaviour would change as campaign mechanics changed due to a PR system. (These arguments rather conveniently ignore the number of Green Party votes that Canadians in most ridings cast knowing they are throwing their vote away when arriving at the 1% number.)
"has supported a lot of fringe parties that have used the funding that comes with having full-time representatives on government payrolls to build strength to the detriment of the political environment."
-- Like the "pirate party", which is really doing a good job on pushback against all kinds of corporate enrochement against copyright laws. (like the stupid Spain link tax).
Sometimes these 'fringe' parties bring ideas and raise concerns on issues that the major parties are not considering due to their self interests.
Sometimes they are down-righty looney, but I think the positives on having small parties represented outweighs the negatives.
Scotland, whose Parliament uses proportional representation via AMS/Additional Member System (one of the main drawbacks of which is that it takes an age to explain...), has had representatives from socialist/green parties win seats they wouldn't have had a chance in hell winning under FPTP ("First Past the Post"), which I think many people feel has lead to some pretty positive policies being debated and implemented which otherwise might not have happened.
AMS/PR has had the effect of forcing parties to work together much more in Scotland than has ever happened in the FPTP UK Parliament. I would dearly love for the UK Parliament to learn some positive lessons from the Scottish experience, but I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime.
I really like AMS - it retains the direct constituency link of a member for a region elected via FPTP, with the fairness of additional regional members selected proportionally resulting in a pretty proportionate outcome. The downside is that it creates two classes of member - those elected via FPTP, those elected via what AMS calls the 'list', and of course the complexity of giving people two votes instead of one that behave in different ways. The first vote is a classic FPTP, the second vote applies to the list. Your party's performance in the FPTP vote affects the "weight" of any list votes you receive, which is how the system remains proportional. As I said, it's a pain to explain, but one of the fairest systems I've experienced.
Like "Golden Dawn" & Jobbik - are we going to pretend that the good that the "Pirate Party" is doing is outweighed by literal fascists with seats in government?
Sometimes these fringe parties represent things best not funded by parliamentary salaries.
There's nothing stopping the government from saying "A party must have 5% of the vote to be awarded any PR/list seats" in order to keep the fringe parties from grabbing individual seats here and there. BC just released their suggestions for an October referendum on reforming provincial elections, and that was part of all three suggested systems.
I don't think it would be much of a challenge to get a party committed to explicit racism to 8 or 10 percent in Canada with a charismatic leader and decent organizing.
If lightning strikes once and you get an MP into parliament after that as a private member that MP is going to get a lot of media attention, it will immediately change politics because with large parties member discipline is important whereas in an MMP system a party that has no hope of ever winning it all has the reverse incentive - they are 100% committed to whipping up their "base" for their pet issue.
Do the voters of the fringe parties think that it is to the detriment of the political environment? It sounds almost like saying those groups don't deserve representation because of a ideological difference, which is not a justification to deny a certain voting system.
I am perfectly comfortable saying that there are groups that don't deserve a specific type of representation in parliament because of ideological differences between them and the mainstream of the Canadian public.
They are welcome to participate in democracy and do the hard work to get their ideas into the mainstream of Canadian public opinion but they are not "entitled" to a system that gives them representation in a specific way. One should be honest with oneself about how representative democracy works and not pretend that the purpose is to have every hair-brained idea at the table.
My opinion regarding the Republican party is consistent with the above statement and gerrymandering was a key part of building a party system that incentivized the same sort of bad behaviour that an MPP system incentivizes just within the Republican Party instead of as a fringe party acting autonomously.
Canada has mostly solved the gerrymandering problem and where geography makes solving it impossible the strong party system makes MPs that want to act irresponsibly accountable to a party that has battles to win in other places that make their positions untenable.
I am open to some examples of fringe parties that have made significant positive contributions to the status quo, I would like to see some examples that are of more significance than the negative effects pseudo-fascist parties rising Europe have had.
In other words, the best system of government is a sham democracy where the public are mollified by frequent elections, but prevented from changing the status quo.
Many countries (including Germany, where MMP was first used) have a minimum bar of votes for a party to make it to parliament, e.g. 5% in Germany. Where exactly you put the cutoff is a bit arbitrary, but this solves the problem efficiently. There are parties in parliament in Germany that I'd rather not have there, but none is fringe.
The primary parties will never approve of IRV nor proportional representation because it hurts their chances of winning. The partisan divide is a good motivator for forcing people into one camp or the other.
To me the answer to Trudeau's concerns was so obvious; just do mixed-member-proportional, but limit the number of top-up seats to 2x or 3x the number of riding based seats won by the party.
That way we don't have to put up with the lunatic fringe, but we still fix the warping effects of FPTP.
It was not just some cynical reason the effort failed. MMP is a party list system. Canadians don’t want it. Over and over again Canadians vote down any change that doesn’t make representatives accountable to voters. Our government system is called Responsible Government for a reason.
Also Canadians do not like minority governments. Proportional representation is not that popular on Canada.
Also we like simple systems with simple voting strategies. MMP is very complicated. Lots of weird tactics like voting for a small party but a candidate from a bigger party.
> Also Canadians do not like minority governments. Proportional representation is not that popular on Canada.
Proportional representation doesn't need to result in minority governments. Proportional voting is very common in Europe but minority governments aren't.
Just means parties need to find common themes on which they agree, and compromise on some their more controversial goals. Finland has had up to six parties in a single government to make sure tough decisions can be passed.
Only when the coalition doesn't have a majority of the parliament seats. I don't think minority governments are common at all in Europe, as the whole point of a coalition is usually to get majority.
Personally, I prefer the minority governments. They have to play nice with the other kids, at the risk of being chucked out of power. As a minority, they have to keep at least one other party reasonably content. Harper's minority years were more reasonable than once he got a majority.
The NDP/Green coalition in BC is new, but seems OK so far, and that same minority aspect probably tempers the behaviour of both parties.
I do need to do some homework before the referendum though.
That's an overstatement of a mathematical theorem. Arrow's theorem says that for approval voting, yes there are some cases of people's preferences for which one of those conditions fails. Nobody is claiming that approval voting satisfies all of those conditions, so nobody is provably wrong.
People are claiming that approval rating works better than first-past-the-post in many important cases, such as introducing a moderate candidate into an established two-party situation. Arrow's theorem does not contradict that.
Sounds like an interesting idea. In the end the US needs a system where if a party gets a certain percentage of votes it gets some level of representation in Congress. For example in the 90s Ross Perot got 18% of votes but these voters got 0 percent representation anywhere. This is just extremely unhealthy. The extreme partisanship would get reduced quickly if there were some people in Congress who would vote with one of the big parties one and then with the other another time.
Agreed. But I hope my point makes sense. If 18 percent of people vote for someone and get no representation out of it they quickly will get disillusioned about voting and the country's politics will not be representative of the people.
Yes. Because by definition in a presidential election there can be only one winner. In the House or Senate there is no reason to not have proportional element.
Presidential elections can't be proportional, true, but they could be made less polarizing. The goal should be consensus, the election of a candidate acceptable to the vast majority of the population, not someone loved by 51% but loathed by the other 49%.
Those Clinton voters still have their representatives in the House (and probably in Senate, too), so they are represented in the political system, just not in the White House.
I am not even saying we need full proportional representation but just some element so a party that gets voted for by a certain percentage of people can get some foothold. Right now you can't maintain a third party because the threshold to have an impact is way too high.
The Scandinavian countries have voting systems that are approximately proportional in the core. Then they use those leveling seats to fix the sub-5% differences in the vote proportions and the seats. But that's just a small correction if we are comparing voting systems that are not proportional in their design at all.
The argument might better applied to state-level elections for legislative bodies. They are usually FPTP by district, so in a 51/49 split district, a significant portion of the electorate is left out in the cold.
We could adopt some flavor of split system... FPTP for district reps, with some number of positions set aside state-wide for proportional representation.
I believe Germany does something like this, though I'll have to dig up the details.
The german Bundestag (federal level) election rules can be roughly summarized like this:
Each voter gets two votes, one for a candidate and a second for a party list.
Half of the members of the Bundestag are elected by direct vote. The candidate in the election district that gets the most votes is elected.
The other half are distributed so that the total distribution matches the distribution for the party list. A party that fails to accumulate at least 5% doesn't get any seats from the second vote, but gets to keep any direct seats they gained, unless they win a minimum number of direct candidates.
If a party wins more direct candidates in a state than their share of votes per party list would allow for, the Bundestag grows and more seats are distributed to balance the proportion.
The system is designed to allow for direct candidates, but still keeps smaller parties relevant since any party that gets beyond 5% or manages to win direct candidates is part of the Bundestag.
(grossly simplified, but probably good enough for here)
I disagree. I think it is a feature that Congress does not reflect electorates. Even under first-past-the-post Congress is much saner than electorates.
For years Unification Church tried to get representation in South Korean congress. They failed, but votes show that they would have succeeded under proportional representation. Proportional representation enables extremist parties.
I disagree. The idea of approval voting is that if majority is against for you to be a representative, you shouldn't be a representative. This is "the will of the people", per representative basis.
For some definition of "work". It's really just a different set of tradeoffs.
Continental Europe (the UK uses FPTP) is characterised by countries that have governments that are frequently deadlocked or missing in action, because proportional representation results in lots of parties getting into power with none having a majority. Therefore they spend lots of time building coalitions that can agree on very little except preserving the status quo.
These coalitions often result in absurd political configurations, like alliances between parties that are supposedly of the left and right, resulting in an inability to create policy. You also see bizarre compromises that can cause extreme or weird policies to appear that hardly anyone would have voted for, due to the need to bring on board smaller parties to make the coalitions work.
A few examples: in the Netherlands, the ruling coalition has a working majority of 1. It contains many tiny parties and took months to create, because they were determined to ensure that the politician who runs the second largest party in Parliament (Geert Wilders, who is anti-EU) would be entirely frozen out of power.
Germany is ruled by a coalition of two parties that both lost votes in the last election, and whose leaders hate each other. They both believe repeating the same coalition again will severely damage both parties, as it's a coalition of both the left and right meaning ... again ... essentially the coalition has no coherent policies that anyone campaigned on. However they did it anyway to freeze out the second largest party, AfD, again because AfD is anti-EU and that is seen as so bad almost anything is worth it to avoid having to compromise with them. Before the current coalition formed, Merkel tried to create the "Jamaica coalition" ... a truly laughable attempt to break the basic laws of politics by uniting the far left Green party with a libertarian party. Not surprisingly the quasi-communists and Ayn Randians couldn't agree on anything and that attempt failed, but it goes to show how strange proportional representation can get.
Italy has just voted in a coalition of two parties, again, a left and right wing party who have, as a result, economically incoherent policies. The "right wing" party wants devolution of power within Italy and more regional self rule, the 5-Star movement wants the opposite, with more subsidies for southern Italy.
Basically PR gives you messy governments that frequently collapse or deadlock. This may or may not be a better arrangement than FPTP which tends to yield strong governments with clear policies, which frequently see-saw between polar opposites as left and right parties take turns in power.
That's exactly what I see in the US right now. The country has no ability to address issues anymore, be it health care, immigration, infrastructure, housing or education. there is a lot of hot air and screaming and yelling but they can't find compromises and act on them anymore. See Obamacare. Instead of working together and accommodate each others wishes first one party went into full strike and now it has been effectively abandoned at the detriment of most (non-rich) citizens.
Whoops, sorry, it's the third largest but the formal opposition party. If you consider the coalition to be "the ruling party" then AfD would be the second largest, but that would be an abuse of terminology.
It'd have been better to say the second largest power bloc.
I think the problem there is that they have to form a coalition. (I think this is because the coalition elects the leader of government, but I'm not certain of that.)
But what if the parties didn't have to form a coalition? What if they, as individual legislators, just voted on bills? Then you'd have to write a bill that could peel away some votes from some members of some parties other than your own. For a bill to pass, it would have to be a good enough bill that you could sell it to people outside your party. That's not such a bad thing...
Unless all the parties maintain strict party discipline. I think that increasing party discipline is one of the problems that is making Congress so dysfunctional. But hopefully, if you had more than two parties in Congress, not all of them would have strict party discipline.
Lack of party discipline just makes it hard to know what you're voting for. Voting would become about perceived personalities of the candidates rather than party manifestos. That's a problem because for all their faults, the amount of thought that goes into a party's political positions is usually higher than that which an individual puts into theirs. Parties are also a way to combine communication strength.
Considering how diverse and complex the portfolio a politician has to decide on you can't really upfront know what you are voting for. I am fine if my rep deviates from party line if there is some thought behind it. Actually i prefer it that way,
They don't strictly have to form a coalition. The leader of government is elected with a normal vote, so a party could propose somebody as chancellor and if members of other parties vote for them too they get the job. But for now, no party has believed that this would work better than forming an (uneasy) coalition, especially since the parties sadly are fairly strict about voting en bloc. It'd be an interesting experiment though.
>Not surprisingly the quasi-communists and Ayn Randians couldn't agree on anything and that attempt failed, but it goes to show how strange proportional representation can get.
That's a bit of a misinterpretation. One of the leading figures in the FDP party broke up the jamaica band when everyone was about to get together and form the coalition. (Naturally his party was pissed about this but because he won an election for them they just rolled over and went with that).
While the german government can sort of deadlock it's not a situation like in the US where everything shuts down. The government continues to function, although with minimized power, until the new parliament is formed. They can't put out any major new laws but they're not completely dead-in-the-water.
>Germany is ruled by a coalition of two parties that both lost votes in the last election, and whose leaders hate each other.
It's more complicated than that. The SPD-CDU/CSU coalition (which is three party not two depending on how you look at it) is getting a reputation with the voters, under this coalition Merkel has been chancellor for a long time now. They two sides (other than CDU/SPD resenting the CSU for sitting in the backseat of federal politics and screaming incoherent right-wing garbage (I'm bavarian, I know what I'm talking about here)) don't hate eachother but to my knowledge it's a mutual understanding that they cannot continue this coalition any further.
>because proportional representation results in lots of parties getting into power with none having a majority.
Note that Germany has a 5% clause for this; you need 5% of the votes to get into parliament, otherwise you have no say.
This is mainly a result of the previous government turning into the third reich after several parties deadlocked the parliament for real.
> uniting the far left Green party with a libertarian party. Not surprisingly the quasi-communists and Ayn Randians couldn't agree on anything and that attempt failed, but it goes to show how strange proportional representation can get
Those characterizations have very little to do with the actual positions of those parties, so it's no wonder it seems comical to you.
I've been thinking this for almost all my life: the voting systems used in almost every country are plain ridiculous. The only country I know that uses a system that sounds reasonable is Australia.
Yeah, that video explains our Senate voting process almost exactly - each state gets a number of Senators, and you vote preferentially either at the party level (about 15 - 30 choices and you can preference up to six), in which case the party decides which candidate gets the first votes, or you can preference every candidate in the whole state (can be over one hundred - the voting paper is comically large[1,2]!)
For the House of Representatives, each electorate is much smaller and parties only have one candidate each, so you only have five or six choices, and you preference all of them.
As far as I'm aware Australia just uses the same voting system as the UK, Ireland and New Zealand–i.e. almost the entirety of the non-American Anglo-sphere. Is there something else unique about how Australia does it?
The Open List system used in most of Europe (with France, parts of Germany, and Spanish congress being notable exceptions) seems like a very good, successful one also.
In the Republic of Ireland we use single transferable vote with proportional representation (which I think is a really good voting system, although a bit complex to understand the operation of).
UK is still first past the post for MPs. Australia seems to be different again but not first past the post.
STV is complex when there are multiple winners. It still produces a broadly representative result, but it is hard to understand how the mechanism worked near the margins that determine which candidates prevail near the lower threshold.
When there are is only one winner and STV is exactly the same as instant runoff, it is not so difficult to understand.
This surprised me but you're right. NI have(/had?) STV, but not Westminster. Very odd.
> Australia seems to be different again
This was my question really. Australia uses IRV, afaik, which is somewhat equivalent to STV except that it's slightly simpler, though I don't see any major disadvantage to the extra complexities in STV.
Should be noted that it's not perfect. It encourages a rather slow pace in politics. There is also a lot more than simply a proportional system to it (for one there is a 5% minimum for getting into parliament), there are laws and rules around voting such that the government doesn't deadlock because of a single party or complicated political spats
Terrible, like the "jungle primaries" used in California.
These systems are ostensibly biased towards moderate candidates, but when there are no moderates as in these days of wildly antagonistic partisanship, the result is disenfranchisement.
Instant runoff is vastly superior in terms of allowing people to express their voting preferences.
>but when there are no moderates as in these days of wildly antagonistic partisanship
But the candidates we have are a reflection of the voting system. That is to say, hyperpartisanship is a feature of FPTP and so our candidates are a reflection of that. A voting system that rewards moderates will bring about more moderate politics.
Biasing towards supposed "moderation" marginalizes a broad range of the citizenry outside the mainstream and breeds cynicism and fury. Even if they cannot command a policy-enacting majority, minority opinions deserve a voice.
People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them!
Proportional systems means that a position gets representation in government in proportion to the distribution of that position in the population (to varying degrees). This is the most anyone has any right to expect.
>People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them!
People need to stop seeing voting as some kind of identity affirmation.
In France we have two rounds. Each voter chooses one candidate during the first round and then only two candidates are selected for the second one.
Having to choose amongst one candidate only is terribly bad because some candidates may have lot of similar ideas. However they may diverge on some points, such as they decide to make two parties.
The votes get then divided between these two candidates, and they may not reach the second round, even though their idea may be more popular...
The winning parties has never wanted to change the system since that makes them win I guess.
Any other system would be a better idea than that one.
Yeah the french system is very strange. On the one hand, it forces a second round of "pragmatic voting", which so far has kept out the various extremists. On the other hand, you get a feeling that people only vote for these extremists as a kind of protest, because they know there's a second round. And one day maybe we'll end up with a second round with two extremists (imagine LePen vs Melenchon...).
I think what also makes things strange in France is the rule that all parties must be given equal airtime, which leads to a few bizarre weeks every election cycle where complete loons are on TV and Radio 24/7
Are the two candidates of the first round chosen by who gets the most votes? If so it has the exact same problem, as the votes from the 3rd+ most popular candidates will get syphoned off to the two predicted winners.
Yes, see [1] for details. The "syphoning" exists, but it's not as bad as in a one round system where each vote on a small party is in practice lost. With two rounds, we usually have two "big" parties, flanked by two "small" parties at the extreme. People can push to one side by voting on the extreme side to extreme dissatisfaction with their closer mainline party, and up to a point it won't change the result of the second round with the two big parties. That's typically what happens, and it adds some variety with 4 large enough parties (and more very small ones of course) in the media / national discussions.
Then you have exceptional circumstances with many disgruntled people pushing for the extreme. Even then, two rounds can help. A one round system makes it very hard for the fringe to take control, but once this happen they're one of two. With a two round system only one side can go radical, with a likely result of the other side mainstream party winning.
Both sides extremes getting stronger is possible, and it's really what happened during the last presidential elections. But we got lucky and one "center" candidate went through (by a very small margin), and as expected won the second round. But as in other places we had about half people disgruntled, it's just that it was evenly split between left and right extreme parties, and only one went to second round (but the other was pretty close).
The difference is that jungle primaries can have multiple candidates from the same party. In the French system, the individual parties have primaries and send their winners on to the first round of voting.
Approval voting seems like a great way to make sure we only ever elect bland, inoffensive candidates with carefully focus-group calibrated opinions and policies, whom once in office, should they care for reelection, will steer clear of touching any even mildly controversial subjects.
carefully focus-group calibrated opinions and policies, whom once in office, should they care for reelection, will steer clear of touching any even mildly controversial subjects
This already happens in decidedly Red/Blue states. They're full of incumbents that nobody really cares to keep in but, more importantly, nobody cares to vote out.
As some commenters point out, it's not clear whether that's a good or bad thing. But approval voting would broaden out the conversation by allowing more heterodox parties to attract a significant fraction of the vote, reflecting their actual support, rather than just an artificially low 0-3%.
But that's exactly what's missing from all this discussion of voting systems, if the US and UK are your examples of "failed" democracies these experts obviously haven't considered the full range of how voting works. Living in a city that has instant run off voting it is clear that first past the post has some important advantages that voting system gurus seem to discount--namely it forces pre-negotiation and coalitions before questions are put to the voters. It is impossible for a voting system to inquire what the will of the body politic is on all questions as all times like it is an oracle--but if you construct a system that poses choose A or B question and there's education (campaigning) around that choice, the electorate can make a reasonably informed decision about whether A or B is better. Viewing voters as a static oracle to be consulted misses the whole point which is to actually get the electorate to make a decision since all things are not possible and government inevitably picks policies that favor some interests over others. In fact, suppression of heterodox policy party ideas in policy making (while protecting their expression through a strong 1st amendment) seems like one of the greatest features (not a bug) of US democracy.
I think that the citizens have kind of lost the whole idea of "representative".
Voters now want to send people to Congress who will carry out a specific agenda. But the idea of a representative is that you were sending someone with (more or less) your general views, and they would use their own judgment.
This whole "pre-negotiation and coalitions before questions are put to the voters" might be more the problem than the solution.
Your second and third paragraphs seem to be at odds with each other? Negotiating (whether pre or post) and forming coalitions is exactly what you'd expect proper representatives to do.
Representatives, yes. Political parties before elections, not so much (which is the point of the bit I was quoting in the third paragraph). Especially not so much if people expect the representatives to be bound by those negotiations for the duration of their terms, rather than actually using judgment as their term unfolds.
> if the US and UK are your examples of "failed" democracies these experts obviously haven't considered the full range of how voting works.
"Obviously?" Perhaps they have considered it properly and have reasonably concluded both systems are utterly failed in terms of representing the views of the electorate. As an outsider looking in US politics appears equally broken, just sometimes in different ways.
So now let me stay on ground I am more sure of, the UK. It's one of the least representative "democracies" around.
For most of the electorate it simply doesn't matter who they vote for, it's pointless. Most seats are "safe". Where I currently live, if you have anything but Brexit-Tory views don't bother as the seat hasn't changed hands in years. So consider yourself entirely disenfranchised. We get especially poor candidates as a result - from both parties. A cardboard cutout would probably get elected if wearing a blue rosette.
If you have Tory views, and live in one of those nice £1m+ warehouse flat conversions you are probably now in a permanently safe Labour inner-city seat, and are equally disenfranchised. cardboard equally electable, just give it a red rosette.
The percentage in a given constituency who get the government they voted for is often quite shocking. CGP Grey did a video on this if I recall correctly.
What does that do to politics? Well, it's total war, total victory and total annihilation only. Parties only treat the electorate as even vaguely interesting in the 10% of seats that might change hands.
No one negotiates. Beforehand or otherwise, unless every other avenue to grab power has failed. System working as intended then as it tends to reinforce the two party status quo.
"Woo, we got elected, just." Now it's simple. Every policy of the previous government was crap. Even the really good ones that were proven to be working. No matter, we didn't think them up, so get rid of the policy with extreme prejudice. We'll rename the same policy when writing our next manifesto so that we can imply we did invent it next time.
> namely it forces pre-negotiation and coalitions before questions are put to the voters.
When did the US last have a coalition, or even pre-negotiation?
In the UK we had one, successfully, during WW2. Since then there has been one, but a selection of minority governments. The recent coalition is widely considered to have been a failure. Essentially we got Tory govt, with a few rough edges knocked off. Tories got a convenient kicking partner.
> the electorate can make a reasonably informed decision about whether A or B is better.
Gosh that's a positive view of how it works. In our media-first, FPTP, system it is much more about the media friendly face, nice smile, soundbites and dog whistles. Interviews become an excruciating exercise of answering the question you'd like to have been asked like it's a Monty Python sketch.
May gave us a comical example of doing soundbites and interviews wrong with the "strong and stable government" line that everyone, including the media, were sick of on the very first day of campaign. After a term or two "it's about time we gave the other guys a chance" and "I'm sick of these idiots" becomes a significant influence.
In short I am firmly in favour of electoral reform and adoption of PR (and not the second-class incarnation of it we were given a referendum about during the coalition). I'd quite like to figure out a way to weaken party politics too, but I digress. In my twenties I was quite in favour for FPTP as I felt it enabled more to be done. Nowadays I'd like a lot less done and a system that a) encourages consensus day to day and b) provides a parliament representative of the far wider range of views commonly held than two diametrically opposed parties. This became far, far too long so I'll spare yo...
Candidates who don’t take strong stances or don’t take stances at all are unlikely to be acceptable to many voters. A consensus candidate of the kind approval voting would prefer is not the same as a candidate who fills the lowest common denominator.
Why is democracy such a popular system for establishing governments?
When a member of our family becomes sick, we don't ask everyone to vote on possible treatments? We go to doctors who are trained to diagnose the cause of sickness and offer appropriate treatment.
When a scientist publishes a new study, we don't ask everyone what they think about the study? We ask other accomplished scientists to do a peer-review and offer their opinion on the study.
No matter what field we look at, we do not rely on laymen to decide the outcome but we rely on qualified experts and professionals.
But in case of establishing a government, which can have a long term impact on millions of livelihood, we ask just about anyone to offer their opinion in the form a vote. Why is this a reasonable system?
Economists are famous for repeatedly making predictions that turn out to be hugely wrong, groupthink and massive political biases. Don't think so somehow.
As for scholars in political theory, laughable. What does an ivory tower academic know about what people want or need? Marx spent his entire life reading books and writing political theory and his ideas lead to disaster everywhere.
Nope. Allowing anyone to take part is a great system.
Can you offer specific examples that make you believe that the cumulative opinion of scholars are going to be objectively worse than the cumulative opinion of everyone?
Communism was essentially dictatorship of political theorists. People like Lenin, Marx, Trotsky and even Stalin had all written books on political theory. It led to mass starvation, dystopia and economic collapse.
The USA went with cumulative opinion of everyone (democracies, markets).
Which country is the world's remaining superpower?
I absolutely agree that rule by ideologue is terrible. I'm not sure I agree that universal suffrage democracy is a good method of preventing ideological theocracy. How many of those voters are under the spell of charismatic ideological propagandists?
Ah, but who chooses the experts? Whoever gets to do that has the real power. And I don't trust anybody with that level of power - you've given them the right to control the government, and call it "scientific", so that they can dismiss out of hand any arguments or complaints.
I don't like dictatorships, no matter who the dictator is. Spare us the dictatorship of the whoever chooses the "experts".
Dictatorships/oligarchies work very well when you have a good dictator. They work horrifically bad when you have a bad dictator.
Conversely, "democracies" work pretty ok when the people leading are doing a good job, and they work sort of bad when the people leading are sucky.
The difference being, democracy spreads out decision making to effectively limit risk.
Think of it like an investment. You can put all of your money on one really volatile stock. Maybe it will do really great! But maybe you will lose 95% of your money in an hour. Or, you can put it in a basket of carefullly-chosen stocks that have the collective goal of a slow, steady climb in value while limiting volatility.
I see the point you're getting at, but I think you're missing the civil service in your picture. They are the career professionals who should be taking the actual decisions - our elected representatives should stick to overseeing and representing their constituents.
Just like you have an elected board, who represent shareholders, overseeing the unelected executives at the top of any corporate structure.
The problem is that this setup is regularly decried by populists as being "technocratic" (as if that were a bad thing)
That would be a nice picture, except the federal civil service is nearly completely exempt from firing by any of those elected officials.
I agree with you that rule by bureaucrat is better than mob rule. But since you are in favor of limiting government power to a select few - I would choose to limit it to responsible taxpayers rather than unelected bureaucrats.
I wonder how often you've dealt with actual civil servants. Two problems:
1. Many civil services have unionised to the point where civil servants effectively cannot be fired. Guess how competent the resulting staff are.
2. Even if they could be easily fired, their hiring processes are also frequently a joke.
To give an example, the average age of officials at the British Treasury department is 27. This is not widely known, because officials love to hide behind anonymity, especially when publishing reports that sound superficially clever and authoritative but are later proven to be dead wrong about everything. There's no accountability anywhere.
Just look at how much difficulty civil servants have in even just managing contracts with third party providers. Now imagine how much harder they find it to actually do the work themselves.
"Why is democracy is such a popular system for establishing governments?"
Here's an answer that I find satisfying but about which I think reasonable people could disagree:
In the US, at least, "democracy" works tremendously well for distributing the narrative that individual rational actors are the main and only political units.
Your example of a family is quite useful in illustrating that there are limitations to that view, regardless of how useful or destructive that view may be.
However, the utility of that view for maintaining the material situation of labor in the US is high.
That is, individualism as an idea is a useful tool for people with money and power to convince large groups of people that the division of wealth in the country is entirely the product of aggregate individual choices rather than the product of a system that is designed for the rich to get richer.
The truth of that proposition aside, I understand that utility to be the underlying historical motivation for people in the US to try and export their brand of democracy.
Everything corrupts over time so it's best if at least the corruption is at the decision of the majority. And if the power is dispersed wide enough, there is a hint of the possibility of a peaceful revolution if things need to be changed.
Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
“I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.
I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.
The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”
One part of the 18th century that we left behind that maybe we shouldn't have was the level of representation in the house. Back then, each US rep had about 10,000 constituents, but today each has close to 1,000,000.
Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.
And as an added benefit, in Presidential elections, low populations states wield less power than they do now. With the current number of representatives, votes in CA and TX count less than those in SD and MN.
No, the house is supposed to represent the population and the senate is supposed to represent the state. Each member of the house should represent the same number of people, the senate should not. That's not the case though. CA/TX/WA/NY reps represent more people than less populous states.
The last census included non-citizen residents of those states, so this may be less true than you'd assume just based on census data. A sizable portion of the population in CA and TX are not eligible voters but they are represented in the electoral college anyways.
> A sizable portion of the population in CA and TX are not eligible voters but they are represented in the electoral college anyways.
This is intended behavior. IIRC it was to address the question of whether slaves counted as members of the population for the purposes of determining number of congressmen.
California has a total population (census 2010) of about 37,000,000 [1]. And about 87% of those are citizens [2]. CA has 55 electors, so roughly 585,000 citizens per elector.
Wyoming has a total population (census 2010) of about 563,000. And about 98% of those are citizen. WY has 3 electors, so roughly 187,000 citizens per elector.
Citizen in WY have roughly 3x the voting power as citizen in CA, due in large part to a system designed to appease slave-holding states 200 years ago.
>Citizen[s] in WY have roughly 3x the voting power as citizen in CA
Which is the point, so as to prevent high population urban centers from dictating everything to the rest of American that doesn't share their values.
>due in large part to a system designed to appease slave-holding states 200 years ago.
I assume you're referring to the 3/5 Compromise here. While true that this was a consideration, the underlying reasoning is still sound. It makes no more sense for San Francisco to rule over Sac City Iowa than Sac City Iowa to rule over San Francisco. That's the beauty of the system the Founders designed. Otherwise you just drift further and further toward Direct Democracy, which is a euphemism for "chaos".
Sure. But, by capping the total number of representatives, the large, urban states are slowly losing power in relation to the small, rural states (at least when it comes to presidential elections).
Paying representatives is totally worth it. Are you saying that we shouldn't pay even the current number of representatives, or benefit of representatives sharply decline as their numbers increase?
I am saying currently we have 600 reps making 150000 or something like that per year. Having 35000 at the same salary would just cost a little more. In addition 35000 is like a decent town. TO get anything done probably would need some elections to form a council that makes decisions.
While I think the parent was referring to how much a company would need to spend to buy off enough reps for their legislation, it is a valid point that increasing the current $100M or so we currently spend on these guys by 2 orders of magnitude would eat a lot of the national budget. Then again, it would also lower unemployment.
On the other hand, a 35,000-member House would undoubtedly be too large for more than a small handful of important members to actually debate anything. Think of the PRC National People's Congress (setting aside that it would probably be powerless at any size..!), but 10 times as large: all the work in the 3,000-strong NPC is done by a standing committee of only 150.
Oh no... we'd have to more closely approximate a direct democracy in the part of the federal government that is supposed to be the most answerable to the people...
It might be something structural that is general to all such situations; maybe when there is a very large number of 'ordinary legislators' there is a high probability of them becoming, over time, de facto powerless compared to party leadership.
At that scale, they would have to abandon traditional oral parliamentary procedures and switch to a text-based threaded comment medium. Reddit and HN show that it's at least possible to have hundreds and occasionally thousands of people "talking at once" without collapsing into chaos.
By comparison, I think most of us have had the experience of being in a conversation with a small group of people (or even one other person) and wanting to say something but not being given an opportunity to do so without seeming rude.
This could have other advantages as well. No reason why any one bill should block any other bill; anything with N/2+1 upvotes is passed by the House. It would also be possible for representatives to remain in their home districts among their constituents.
> Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.
How? When people complain about money in politics issues these days, they're usually complaining about 3rd party money. I don't see how having 100x more representatives would reduce 3rd party money. It's not like it's hard to target 3rd party ads to small geographic areas.
I'm talking more about the borederline quid pro quo "I donated $10,000 to your campaign so here's my lobbyists, and more importantly if you don't vote the way they want, that $10,000 is going to your most difficult opponent next round". At the same funding levels, that $10,000 is now $100.
But the cost of campaigns downs basically linearly with number of voters too. (TV ads are proportional to eyeballs.) There are some non-linear effects here, but I'm not sure how they operate.
Exactly. Seems to me it would be more plausible for a candidate without deep pockets backing them to be able to run a competitive campaign on issues the district cares about. Simply because they could just go around knocking on doors. A candidate and nine helpers each talking to 100 people a week for ten weeks could theoretically cover the entire district. Not to mention being able reach a good chunk of them by just hanging out at a local grocery store or visiting local bars and other hotspots. Throwing money at a hotspot race would have rapidly diminishing returns compared to a race with several hundred thousand people who can only be reached in numbers by broadcast ads or a truly massive campaign force.
EDIT: Although I suppose the tactic could at that point be turned to buying voters more directly. Spend a ton of money on something that benefits everyone in the district and make it clear that it'll keep coming only if they vote for your candidate, and you might have the same effect.
I believe their point is that you'd have to buy 350 reps to get the same 1% coverage you can get today with 4.
You could probably get the same result by blocking funding external to the district and killing citizens united. And/or shorten campaigns to 60 days so they just don't cost as much. And/or, provide public funding and election spending caps.
I don't think that trying to scale out of it would be that effective but I see what they are getting at. My guess, is that would raise the inequality of the playing field again as the richest would be able to spin up an organization to manage 10k reps, decide whose relevant who to fund, and so on, people who didn't have lobbyists before won't be able to afford that even if the per rep cost gets cheaper, the total influence cost will rise and price additional people out of the market.
The per-person limit is already only $2,700, and only people can give money (not companies), so direct contributions are not particularly compelling as a path for corruption. Plus, quid pro quo is already illegal.
Candidates are far more concerned about 3rd party money than direct donations these days, because 3rd party spending is unlimited. Quid pro quo is not necessary because it's all done in public. You don't need a secret meeting with a lobbyist to know if the NRA likes your position on guns. Just watch the ads.
Of course not every House member has to worry about this; in fact most don't. Most of the big spending on House races is concentrated in the few districts that everyone expects to shift the balance. This would still be true in a House of 35,000. While most races would probably get less expensive, there would still be a small set of "tipping point" races that would attract most of the effort and money.
Not necessarily; it only takes a one-vote margin to pass legislation in the House.
Quite a lot of House races are on "auto pilot", politically--that is, there's not much suspense about which party's candidate is likely to win. This is in part because of gerrymandering that produces districts favorable to one party vs another.
Tiny districts would be like gerrymandering on steroids. It wouldn't take much fancy geometry to produce a map in which the vast majority of House races remain easily predictable. And it is the marginal (unpredictable) races that atract the bulk of the big spending.
Campaign donations are only one form of bribery. There are in-kind gifts, and cash gifts to family and friends, and "consulting contracts" given after the politician resigns.
That's straightforward in the case of massive defederalisation.
50 states. 300 representatives in each state's assembly, almost all power devolved to those states. 15000 representatives. OK, it's not 35,000, but I doubt that makes much difference.
That would result in Wyoming congressmen having less than 2,000 constituents each, while Californian congressmen would have over 127,000 each. Wyoming voters would have about 65x as much power as California voters in the house.
This is a great start, but there's room for improvement. What if we could scale it up to roughly one representative per 10K constituents AND have each constituent represented by someone whose views closely resemble their own?
This is possible if you eliminate congressional districts altogether and have people "subscribe" to a representative. It removes the problem of a single congressman "trying" to represent constituents with widely disparate views equally, and abolishes gerrymandering in the process.
Like YouTube, you would end up with superstar representatives that would capture an even larger share than the most powerful do now. And the fact that they wouldn't even have a home district would mean that they would be accountable to absolutely no-one besides those who helped them achieve their superstar status. So yes, you would have "your rep" but he would be like a small you-tuber compared to PewDiePie—4k subs vs. 100,000,000.
That's a feature, not a bug. The system grants more weight to the voices of those who are thoughtful and contemplative in their selection than it does to lemmings. PewDiePie may have eleventy billion constituents, but he still only gets one vote.
It definitely would be different because the focus would shift from the popular candidates who are clearly going to get in to the ones who are right at the cut off. Depending upon the spread, if a lot of candidates are at the 'barely enough' line, it would mean major swings in policy driven by a small population shift, as long as the general population doesn't shift as well.
I'm guessing the numbers won't be known until after the voting is done, meaning a lot of effort will be spent finding out where the line is at.
I kinda want to simulate it for a few elections to see what happens, but there isn't any sufficient simulation.
Interesting to think about it from this perspective. Just off the top, I wonder if we could have a second level. Then each "Advocate" (just picking a word) that represents 10K people would then be the constituency for the representative. This is a model like the Rep is the CEO and the Advocates are the C suite. The Advocates never go to DC or the state capital, then only remain local. Then to make things simpler and cleaner, outlaw lobbying at the Rep level and make the Rep elected by most votes among the Advocates. Now to get a quorum on the Rep or an issue, lobbyists have to try to convince a majority of the Advocates. Hopefully this increases the cost and decreases the payoff. It could also be that the role of the representative is to just help with the negotiations and wrangling for the bills but doesn't actually get to vote. The act as a Super-Advocate based on the position of the majority of their Advocates and in the end, the must cast their vote on a bill based on a sub-vote of their advocates.
Don't take the above too seriously, I'm sure there are holes. Just a thought experiment in my brain right now.
money? the real issue is party control of the system. money is the only chance anyone has at breaking through the control each party exerts over elections.
if we want to take money out we need to remove the ability of the political parties from spending money on who they chose and require them to fund a set number of candidates equally. Not all candidates as its obvious you can get some kooks, but as it stands now elections are more decided by the party than the voters. the parties decide who gets to run for the seat and it becomes big news when a maverick usually with their own funds upsets this quagmire.
so please by all means try to minimize the money influence elections but understand that most people's views are being heavily manipulated by operatives of both parties to make sure that the only money in politics is money they have full control over.
Even if you go down one representative for ten citizens, chances are that four out of ten won't be represented at all, given enough polarization. Regional representatives, on any level of granularity, solve underrepresented regions, but not underrepresented opinions.
Interesting that ~30,000 was also the number of Athenian citizens. The US framers aimed to avoid some of the problems of their system, but this is also evidence that that number is not unworkable.
> Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.
As much as I like the idea of proportional representation, I don't think getting 35,000 people to agree on anything is a viable solution.
Perhaps a better approach is one that decentralizes power as much as possible, giving more voice to local constituencies versus the Federal government -- and similarly, giving power to continuously smaller communities such as county vs. state, city vs. county and so on and so forth.
An improvement on top of that is having the superior legislature write framework laws that more local communities can elect to follow, should they prefer that over drafting their own legislation, for whatever reason. While this isn't applicable to every legislative issue, the theoretical argument for this approach is quite compelling¹, at least according to one UVA Law professor²
Personally, I think we should go back to first principles to understand the meaning of a representative democracy. The aim is to get a representation of the population. Currently, we get the representation of the people who vote - but this is not the objective. The aim should be to get a representation regardless of vote.
There are different ways to get representation. One way is to force everyone to vote like Brazil or Australia but this might not be practical in a country like India where elections go on for 1.5 months. But, there are other ways - where you draw a representation of the entire population and make them vote aka Sortition [0]. We already use this concept in juries and other aspects of life. It would be worthwhile to give this a serious try for alternative voting systems.
We could perform alternate experiment systems in parallel and then compare their outcomes to current systems - we don't need to adopt them. But, this has to start somewhere. We could have a debate on "HOW" to draw this representative sample but we should acknowledge that the current system rarely achieves the objective of representation.
We could fix some of the barriers like automatically registering people at age 18 or making voting day a national holiday so people aren’t stuck at their jobs unable to vote.
That alone would help.
But every change produces winners and losers, and the losers really don’t want that change to happen.
Automatic voter registration and making voting day a national holiday is such a no-brainer improvement that it's a pity USA can't get it done. As a South Korean voter, this has been standard for decades.
Our system is the way it is for whatever haphazard reasons got us here. My impression is there wasn’t every any real planning outside of Jim Crow laws to keep minorities out of the electorate.
But we can’t automatically register people because young people disproportionately support one of the two major parties, and that would be ‘unfair’.
And we can’t make Election Day a holiday because the people who work so much going voting is a hardship disproportionately support one of the two parties. And it would ‘hurt business’.
On the other end we can’t require IDs to vote people that would disproportionately hur the other party. And we can’t spend the resources to fix that because it would be ‘too expensive’.
Americans are so concerned about how other people vote but why not just vote for who you want if you want to? If you really really want some party to win, then take the day off work somehow, however difficult. If you can't be bothered with that level of effort, then you care about your day at work more than the election, so don't vote and be happy with whoever wins. In my country, for me, voting was complicated so I didn't. Now the winner is doing things I don't like so I've decided to vote next election. I'm not going to go waving banners and insulting people who want to vote for someone else. I'll just privately find a party I like and go vote for them. I don't yet know which party that is! Americans should try that too - research what they actually want and who's likely to do that, instead of voting with their tribe. Once you become locked to a tribe, your vote loses its power because your tribe's party can do anything it wants without losing your vote. If you want election reform, then you'd better not have voted for either other two main parties because it's in their interests not to allow others in.
I'd actually go in the opposite direction, and making voting more difficult.
I'd much prefer a system where you have to "earn" your say in government. This would, I think, show a deeper commitment to the system.
Edit: if you’re downvoting me, irony aside, please detail why making voters more committed to the government they’re informing is a bad idea. Seems fairly reasonable to me.
People who don't vote generally don't have strong opinions, or don't care at all, or haven't really thought about the issues. Why do we think representing the "meh, whatever" component of the population will help?
Stronger: If you don't care enough to learn about what the issues are and where people stand on them, I'm not sure that I want you to vote. In fact, I think I want you not to. You're going to vote either for a label, or for whoever had the most ads. Neither is a good basis for choosing who to vote for.
Those who do not vote generally skew towards certain groups and classes. These groups are not specifically any less knowledgable than the groups that do vote. This adds a skew to the results in favour of the groups that vote.
We should pay people $500 for voting (in the bi-annual national elections). Turnout would be >99% (?). ID and fraud problems would have to be handled correctly, and the people would equate voter fraud with stealing (and thus care about it.) National ID participation would voluntarily increase. This would help with other issues like homelessness, illegal immigration, AWOL soldiers, dead-beat parents, etc... The redistribution of wealth as a direct payment could also serve as the foundation for UBI administration.
Finally, it seems uniquely American to address this problem with money.
I'm not sure about solving the other issues you mentioned, but I've often thought that a ~$100+ payment for voting in a national election would fix the voter turnout problem.
I have a hunch you'd get better policy results if people were paid to consciously abstain from voting – so that the least-informed, now making their decisions based on last-minute TV ads or mass-mailers with crude messages, voluntarily opt-out – delegating the choice to others.
Sounds fantastic. But I can already see a problem of poor people being disproportionately incentivized not to vote. Maybe the payment would be a tax reduction instead that affects everyone proportionally to their income.
Let's temporarily assume for the sake of argument that 'poor people' could wind up significantly better off under the decisions of a system where low-information, low-motivation voters are discouraged – but not disenfranchised. There'd be fewer (Hugo) Chavez- or Trump- type winners.
If under such a system, the 'voluntary, compensated abstentions' are disproportionately 'poor people', what principle is being violated? Is the option-to-vote or the actuality-of-voting the more important value?
Is maximal voting participation a religious goal, to be pursued even if it delivers poor results, such poor results sometimes including the collapse of democratic-processes entirely? Or is voting just one part of a system to be evaluated based on how well it delivers welfare and protects rights?
I think it's arrogant to assume that you know better than (other) voters. If you believe a demagogue is bad, what happens if he turns out to be just what was needed (Churchill perhaps?). Some people say Trump is good for poor people by wanting to reduce welfare which would pressure more people off their ass and into work. Welfare does have that incentive problem so there is a tradeoff and it's not obvious how much welfare is the optimum amount. If you believe democracy itself is too important to leave up to the will of the people, what happens if that turns out to be wrong? China is doing fine without it, while South Africa is going down the gurgler with it and Egypt fell on its face attempting it.
I would lean a little bit in the direction of actually voting being more important than being able to vote. Anything less than 100% turnout is bound to have some bias in how the non-voters are selected, even if they're self selected.
Yes! We use juries for criminal trials not because they're especially good fact-finders but because they're very resistant to regulatory capture. Similarly, Sortition is the real answer to money in politics problems, because there's no such thing as running for re-election to raise money for. You get nice side effects in representation too - 50% of your legislators will be women, for example, but more significantly 50% of them will come from below-average incomes.
In the US at least, we already have a representative body laying around with super-majoritarian rules and long, overlapping terms where citizen-legislators could build institutional knowledge. Conveniently it has both the most anti-democratic setup right now and one that's already been subject to revision via constitutional amendment. Selecting Senators at random is the simplest fix with the biggest potential impact on our democracy.
And that's just first-order effects, not counting the potential civil society benefits of encouraging every citizen to think of themselves as a future Senator, or having that structure mirrored in micro in smaller jurisdictions.
And 50% of them will have below average intelligence and 50% will be the laziest people in the country. 50% will be the most hateful and 50% will be the most racist.
They should because it benefits themselves and the country.
In the long run, the rulers of a country don't condescend to pay attention to voters because it's the right thing to do - rather because it prevents chaos, revolutions and guillotines. Voting is fundamentally an accounting mechanism that is justified by its provision of information about what is best for the country.
It's not so rational for people to participate in voting, because (virtually) no election is ever decided by a single vote. Thus, the electorate, as long as voting is voluntary, is going to inherently be biased towards irrational people motivated by emotion. That's why compulsory voting is a good idea. Voting isn't a privilege, it's a form of feedback that is vital to maintaining a healthy state, and having it be voluntary makes no more sense than voluntary taxes.
Easy answers like this are always oversimplifications. There's problems with our voting system but there's no serious reason to believe simply switching to a different style of voting system alone would fix anything.
We also have terrible gerrymandering that ensures seats are hard to change.
Effectively no limits on political contributions thanks to Citizens United (not that things were great before that but they've gotten much worse) means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.
People pushing easy answers like this aren't doing anyone any favors. Even if somehow their favored solution got adopted, when it fails to be the panacea they've promised people will reject it and call it a failure even if it might have helped the situation.
And in the UK the Remain campaign massively outspent Leave and still lost (the government did a mailshot to every home in the country arguing for Remain and that alone cost more than the entire Leave campaign did .... and then they did lots more campaigning on top!).
The theory of the concern about Citizens United is that people can buy elections. That theory appears to be false.
> means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.
Yes Clinton lost despite outspending Trump, but Obama outspent Romney, and lots and lots of other races go in the favor of the candidate who spent the most.
Two high profile exceptions don't prove the rule false.
Really? That's your reasoned stance? So if I say "Not all blonde people eat boogers." but then find two videos of blonde people eating boogers then my rule is no longer valid?
You haven't proven that they "tend to dominate". You'd have to show that statement with statistics. Even if you did it'd be a correlation/causation fallacy (winners may spend more because they have more supporters who donate to start with).
A new voting system won't solve all of our various failures of democracy, but as long as we pick one of the good voting systems we should be in better shape than we are now.
Opposing reform because it won't magically fix some tangentially related problems doesn't make sense to me.
If you want to fix politics in the US, bring back earmarks.
It sounds like I'm advocating corruption, and I kind of am. But at the same time, earmarks served the purpose of providing a good reason for parties to work together, across the aisle. If a little bit of corruption accomplishes that higher purpose, I'm glad to have it.
If someothing can't be seen as worthwhile by both sides, without payoffs, there's probably a strong argument for not doing it. Gridlock is generally a good thing at the Federal level.
This is fine as a theoretical construct, but the reality is that a lot of the best features of American government were the result of quid pro quo deal-making. A huge example is the entire Bill of Rights, which was the price of creating a stronger central government. And the movie "Lincoln" illustrates (with only a little exaggeration) the deal-making that went into passing the 13th Amendment.
As an aside, I happen to think that there is an important difference between "bipartisan" and "deal-making," and the latter is really where it's at in governance. Earmarks are tools for deal-making.
Framing things as "both sides" inappropriately elevates the 2 major political parties as a central feature of our system of government. They're not; in fact the largest political affiliation in the U.S. today is "indepdendent"!
And on any serious legislation, there are typically more than two "sides" with an interest in a particular outcome. That's why making deals is so important.
What happens, then, when one "side" takes it as an article of faith that any plan proposed by the other side needs to be rejected out of hand? That's the circumstance we're in right now, and have been since 2008 at least.
A slight counterpoint: earmarks are correlated to a time when there were less strict party lines, so you did have people in office who were more moderate politically.
How about less gerrymandering? It results in more extreme candidates on both sides (as you get much more "pure" blue/red districts and fewer purple).
I'd argume that's true, but that earmarks are part of the cause of the less strict party lines. "Sure, I might be moderate. But you can be sure that year in and year out, I can bring West Eastport the bacon."
Earmarks are orthogonal to corruption. An earmark simply allocates money to a specific project; a member of Congress who steers money to their district is not "corrupt," he or she is just looking out for the citizens they represent--which BTW is their job.
An earmark is only corrupt if it is bought--that is, if a citizen or company bribes the member of Congress to steer an earmark to them.
When earmarks were killed, there was actually little evidence that was happening. Earmarks were killed as a talking point about reducing spending. Which is silly, because earmarks allocated funds, they didn't appropriate them. That is, they typically divvied up the pot, not increased its size.
It's sort of like the debt limit. Politicians lie to people about things work, in order to attract votes. I don't know if that's corruption so much as cynical opportunism.
That's fair enough. Maybe stupid is a better word than corrupt. The "bridge to nowhere", grants for absurd causes, that kind of thing. They might seem stupid, but if they would allow a fix to Obamacare to pass (say, smoothing out rough edges, rather than a repeal or nothing) then the bridge is just a monument to getting things done.
Only in theory. In practice, they are 1:1 - You initiate pork A here, I help you add pork B there. You own pork B company, I own pork A. We both win money, forget the constituents.
This proposal seems really naive. How does the approval voting system make the American South vote more liberal candidates or California vote more conservative ones? How does it create better leadership in either major US political party?
A far better solution would be for one or the other party in the US to come up with a program that more than a fraction of the country believes in.
Why have scheduled elections? Maybe a way to ensure direct representation is to give each voter the right to pick her representative, and anybody who currently has at least N votes gets into parliament and stays there as long as they maintain N voters, who can switch at any time.
That works for a while and but after the first few cycles the really bad performers are gone and you have to play games to have something you can fire next time.
By the way. I have recently thought about the elections in Russia and came to the conclusion the whole presidential system is flawed: a classic president has too much power and a single person elections are too easy to manipulate.
Every time there are presidential elections in Russia everybody knows the outcome in advance, absolutely no viable competition takes place ever. But despite the corrupt system some states/counties/cities in Russia manage to elect reasonable candidates that are in opposition to the president occasionally when it's about parliamentary elections, especially about local parliaments.
This makes me conclude the parliamentary republic system is better than the presidential system.
The problem isn't with the voting algorithm - it's with the voter pool. Voters must have skin-in-the-game (ie be responsible for their vote) in order to have responsible government.
This means that votes should be weighted according to taxes paid. People who pay no tax shouldn't be excluded, but the fact that they are not personally responsible for funding the government should be taken into account in their vote.
I wrote taxes, not salary. The actual form of the tax system is a separate issue.
It seems obvious to me that your vote should be weighted according to how much you are personally responsible for carrying the burden of government. Why should it be otherwise?
> He advocates an alternative voting method called approval voting, in which you can vote for as many candidates as you want, not just one. That means that you can always support your honest favorite candidate, even when an election seems like a choice between the lesser of two evils.
> While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics. Approval voting is adored by voting researchers, who regard it as the best simple voting system available.
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.
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-fail...
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.
> 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.
Get rid of the popular election of senators and go back to having them be appointed by their state legislatures. That returns the proper focus on balancing the federal and state government powers.
Since communications and travel are cheap, I think a nice compromise would be to have the sitting governor serve as the states single senator. It would save some budget (half the number of senators) and put the person on the hook for the state budget in a position to bring that perspective to DC.
I would like to see stricter qualifications for candidates. For instance, you have to be elected to city council before you can run for state assembly. You have to be elected to state assembly before you can run for governor. You have to be elected for governor before you can run for Congress. Something along those lines. That would prevent a random reality TV star from becoming President. Also term limits.
> For instance, you have to be elected to city council before you can run for state assembly. You have to be elected to state assembly before you can run for governor. You have to be elected for governor before you can run for Congress.
Wouldn't that favour cronyism and enforce a barrier to entry to those who don't fall in line with the dictats of the ruling elite?
Furthermore, it also creates a caste of professional politicians.
People like to complain about professional politicians, but I haven't heard a good argument against them that outweighs their benefits. Wouldn't a professional politician be better than one who doesn't really know what's going on? Governing is hard. Getting results in our political system requires difficult compromises. Creating policy, understanding the consequences of policy, and evaluating differences between policies requires domain expertise. Wouldn't someone with more experience be better?
This would worse the situation I think. There would be an increased demand for people qualified to take positions, potentially allowing bad candidates to be the "only legal option" and exacerbating the problems we're trying to fix. The problem isn't that a "random reality TV star" is allowed to hold office like Governor or President, it's that a reality TV star can receive millions fewer popular votes and still win the election. It's the voting system that needs to be fixed first.
On the other hand, having nothing but career politicians running the country, and a high barrier to entry for your average citizen to get involved with politics isn't exactly going to work out long-term either.
What we need is completely socialized education so that the population doesn't get so dumbed down that they vote the loudest, least professional people into office.
Trump won because he appealed to a broad group of mostly Democrats who had been overlooked by the career politicians.
Those people had been unrepresented and taken for granted, and a major factor of their motivation in voting for Trump was to signal their anger to DC.
In the long run, it's beneficial to society that this group has gotten recognition and some of their issues are being addressed.
Career politicians tend to have a support structure that identifies their preferred base and caters to them. Simple majority voting would mean that our politics would be dominated by major population areas.
Neither of those things are so bad in the short run, but in the long run you would have significant groups who would never have their concerns and interests addressed.
That our system makes it possible for a minority to win over the majority at times is a real strength.
361 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadHere in Canada one of Trudeau's platforms was to get rid of first-past-the-post. But he nixed it when he found out the committee was going to recommend mixed-member-proportional (which would probably hurt his parties chances) rather than ranked ballots (which would definitely help his party).
(Of course, sometimes those future savings wouldn't have happened anyways, due to unreasonably optimistic assumptions about the performance of the economy.)
Second, even if everybody knew who was going to be the loser from the changes 8 years in advance, that's not enough. That party would have to be strong enough under the current system to undo the changes. In practice, that would require controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency... unless both parties decide that they would lose power to third parties, and strike a deal.
E.g., in the first cycle, extreme candidate A wins the actual election while the moderate, B, is shown to be widely tolerated under the approval system. Nearly half the voters--those who voted for the opposite extreme, C, end up loathing the results of the actual election and wishing in retrospect that the approval system had been in place. Perhaps in the second election cycle, candidate A wins re-election because they're a known-quantity/incumbent.
Finally, in the third cycle, history starts repeating itself and people get tired of A's party. E.g., the Overton window slides back towards C's perspectives leading to C being seated. This time the people who still prefer A are disgusted with the outcome and prefer the outcome of the approval system.
At this point, half the voters have long argued that the approval system makes more sense and the other half has also come around to thinking maybe it could bolster their position as well. It'd only remain for less partisan activists to e.g., get a petition going towards a referendum.
It's hard to predict the short-term beneficiary parties when it goes into effect, sure, but its quite easy to predict the long term ideological benefit of increases in proportionality on modern democracies.
Ironically, that may make near immediate implementation more viable, if their is a divergence between the expected short-term and long-term impacts, and those expected to benefit believe they can use that to preempt the naturally expected long term benefit but those who would expect that long term benefit don't believe their opponents will succeed at that.
Can't this be reasoned scientifically?
It's code for above-the-median-wealthy, enough to influence opinion outside of the populist opinion. Why you choose to go partisan over a systemic issue, is beyond me.
- religious groups wanting faith-based educational programs
- farmers wanting crop subsidies (hugely powerful in the US)
- internet users wanting net neutrality
- conservation groups wanting to preserve parks or endangered species
- unions wanting occupational safety regulations
- retirees wanting increased social security
You might even agree with some of these.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/special-interest-group
a body of persons, corporation, or industry that seeks or receives benefits or privileged treatment, especially through legislation.
At the extreme end, a legislature consisting of communists, anarchists, facists, theocrats, and hippies wouldn't accomplish anything but igniting civil war.
I would think all those groups together would only make what, max 20% of the US electorate? In a proportional system, they would still be a minority of the Parliament. And the internal disagreements within that minority of the representatives would prohibit them from joining forces and using even their 20% of the power. The rest 80% could mostly just ignore those fringe groups.
Wouldn't that only be true if preferences are roughly normally distributed (or some other fat-middle distribution)?
And if that's the case, shouldn't the outcomes of the voting system tend towards a moderate middle?
Approval voting allows voters to vote for 3rd party candidates without "throwing their vote away". That would be a huge improvement over first-past-the-post, as 3rd party candidates would have a decent chance of winning if they can make a compelling case to voters.
There are other voting systems that get around this. Kenneth Arrow himself was into non-ordinal voting systems.
There is no need to use small, single-winner voting districts to choose the members of the Parliament. Make voting districts 5-10 times larger and use proportional voting. Arrow's Theorem is not valid for that kind of systems.
This interactive graph predicting outcomes for different voting methods convinced me that this is much harder to do than it would seem. Very much worth checking out the link. I think maybe I found it on HN.
The further to the right a voting method is, the more it "maximizes happiness" for the voters
Why should group satisfaction with the winner be the important metric? Surely good governance should be the most important metric. If the quality of government is too hard to measure then length of time before overthrow or revolution should be a good proxy.
Markets are supposed to be efficient they match demand with production efficiently, or some such. Political demand needs to be matched with equal efficiency. Imposing good governance into a voting system will very likely create distortions.
The purpose of elections is not to be happy with the outcome of the election, it's to be happy with the policy that results from the election.
If closer to personal preference is better, shouldn't direct democracy - absolute majority rule - be the ideal? But it's clearly not the case, at least not in any sizeable country.
If welfare helps people in the short term, but reinforces cycles of poverty is that good for the country or not?
If nationalized medicine helps people in the short term, but eliminates the incentive for medical innovation is that good or bad?
It's almost like this is a really complicated problem that the best and brightest have been thinking about for centuries.
The way that we look at it is instant runoff voting has been passed as a ballot initiative in a number of cities, but we see approval voting as producing better outcomes, and having better political dynamics compared to instant runoff voting. Approval voting is also so much easier, and it avoids a lot of the problems.
If instant runoff voting can win, then surely, a simpler voting method that produces good outcomes and has good dynamics should also be able to do it."
This problem is negated when the is a consistent meaning to approval or disapproval markings, which can happen with non-secret ballots tied to concrete commitments. Approval is, for that reason, an excellent voting method to decide group activities in a social group, where an approve vote is a binding opt-in to the activity if it is chosen (or if a disapprove vote is a binding opt-out.)
For the same reason (the lack of a concrete definition of what “approve” or “disapprove” means), approval is not really simpler than IRV (or other ranked ballots) methods, even if the space of possible ballot markings is narrower.
Folks cite the fact that fringe parties only receive 1%ish of the vote in Canada as evidence that this is not a valid concern but it is easy to see how voter behaviour would change as campaign mechanics changed due to a PR system. (These arguments rather conveniently ignore the number of Green Party votes that Canadians in most ridings cast knowing they are throwing their vote away when arriving at the 1% number.)
-- Like the "pirate party", which is really doing a good job on pushback against all kinds of corporate enrochement against copyright laws. (like the stupid Spain link tax).
Sometimes these 'fringe' parties bring ideas and raise concerns on issues that the major parties are not considering due to their self interests.
Sometimes they are down-righty looney, but I think the positives on having small parties represented outweighs the negatives.
AMS/PR has had the effect of forcing parties to work together much more in Scotland than has ever happened in the FPTP UK Parliament. I would dearly love for the UK Parliament to learn some positive lessons from the Scottish experience, but I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime.
I really like AMS - it retains the direct constituency link of a member for a region elected via FPTP, with the fairness of additional regional members selected proportionally resulting in a pretty proportionate outcome. The downside is that it creates two classes of member - those elected via FPTP, those elected via what AMS calls the 'list', and of course the complexity of giving people two votes instead of one that behave in different ways. The first vote is a classic FPTP, the second vote applies to the list. Your party's performance in the FPTP vote affects the "weight" of any list votes you receive, which is how the system remains proportional. As I said, it's a pain to explain, but one of the fairest systems I've experienced.
There's nothing stopping the government from saying "A party must have 5% of the vote to be awarded any PR/list seats" in order to keep the fringe parties from grabbing individual seats here and there. BC just released their suggestions for an October referendum on reforming provincial elections, and that was part of all three suggested systems.
If lightning strikes once and you get an MP into parliament after that as a private member that MP is going to get a lot of media attention, it will immediately change politics because with large parties member discipline is important whereas in an MMP system a party that has no hope of ever winning it all has the reverse incentive - they are 100% committed to whipping up their "base" for their pet issue.
They are welcome to participate in democracy and do the hard work to get their ideas into the mainstream of Canadian public opinion but they are not "entitled" to a system that gives them representation in a specific way. One should be honest with oneself about how representative democracy works and not pretend that the purpose is to have every hair-brained idea at the table.
Democracy doesn't start and stop with elections.
Plus, you don't already see the Republican party in the US as the type of extremist party you worry a "fringe party" could become?
Canada has mostly solved the gerrymandering problem and where geography makes solving it impossible the strong party system makes MPs that want to act irresponsibly accountable to a party that has battles to win in other places that make their positions untenable.
I am open to some examples of fringe parties that have made significant positive contributions to the status quo, I would like to see some examples that are of more significance than the negative effects pseudo-fascist parties rising Europe have had.
To me the answer to Trudeau's concerns was so obvious; just do mixed-member-proportional, but limit the number of top-up seats to 2x or 3x the number of riding based seats won by the party.
That way we don't have to put up with the lunatic fringe, but we still fix the warping effects of FPTP.
The "fringe" party he's concerned about is the NDP.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling
But yes, at the very least, use the Approval vote. It has way better statistical properties than Ranked Voting.
Maine switched.
Also Canadians do not like minority governments. Proportional representation is not that popular on Canada.
Also we like simple systems with simple voting strategies. MMP is very complicated. Lots of weird tactics like voting for a small party but a candidate from a bigger party.
Proportional representation doesn't need to result in minority governments. Proportional voting is very common in Europe but minority governments aren't.
Just means parties need to find common themes on which they agree, and compromise on some their more controversial goals. Finland has had up to six parties in a single government to make sure tough decisions can be passed.
The NDP/Green coalition in BC is new, but seems OK so far, and that same minority aspect probably tempers the behaviour of both parties.
I do need to do some homework before the referendum though.
I don't know if it's better, but to say "this will solve all our problems" is wrong. Provably wrong. With math and everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
People are claiming that approval rating works better than first-past-the-post in many important cases, such as introducing a moderate candidate into an established two-party situation. Arrow's theorem does not contradict that.
So yeah... Math and everything! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting
It doesn't prove that any of those criteria are necessary. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, for instance, is especially problematic.
Finally, Condorcet methods don't even fail Arrow's Theorem when there's actually a Condorcet Winner (which is pretty much always given enough voters).
I'm not saying that's good or bad, but that's what it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_meth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
We could adopt some flavor of split system... FPTP for district reps, with some number of positions set aside state-wide for proportional representation.
I believe Germany does something like this, though I'll have to dig up the details.
Each voter gets two votes, one for a candidate and a second for a party list.
Half of the members of the Bundestag are elected by direct vote. The candidate in the election district that gets the most votes is elected.
The other half are distributed so that the total distribution matches the distribution for the party list. A party that fails to accumulate at least 5% doesn't get any seats from the second vote, but gets to keep any direct seats they gained, unless they win a minimum number of direct candidates.
If a party wins more direct candidates in a state than their share of votes per party list would allow for, the Bundestag grows and more seats are distributed to balance the proportion.
The system is designed to allow for direct candidates, but still keeps smaller parties relevant since any party that gets beyond 5% or manages to win direct candidates is part of the Bundestag.
(grossly simplified, but probably good enough for here)
For years Unification Church tried to get representation in South Korean congress. They failed, but votes show that they would have succeeded under proportional representation. Proportional representation enables extremist parties.
Continental Europe (the UK uses FPTP) is characterised by countries that have governments that are frequently deadlocked or missing in action, because proportional representation results in lots of parties getting into power with none having a majority. Therefore they spend lots of time building coalitions that can agree on very little except preserving the status quo.
These coalitions often result in absurd political configurations, like alliances between parties that are supposedly of the left and right, resulting in an inability to create policy. You also see bizarre compromises that can cause extreme or weird policies to appear that hardly anyone would have voted for, due to the need to bring on board smaller parties to make the coalitions work.
A few examples: in the Netherlands, the ruling coalition has a working majority of 1. It contains many tiny parties and took months to create, because they were determined to ensure that the politician who runs the second largest party in Parliament (Geert Wilders, who is anti-EU) would be entirely frozen out of power.
Germany is ruled by a coalition of two parties that both lost votes in the last election, and whose leaders hate each other. They both believe repeating the same coalition again will severely damage both parties, as it's a coalition of both the left and right meaning ... again ... essentially the coalition has no coherent policies that anyone campaigned on. However they did it anyway to freeze out the second largest party, AfD, again because AfD is anti-EU and that is seen as so bad almost anything is worth it to avoid having to compromise with them. Before the current coalition formed, Merkel tried to create the "Jamaica coalition" ... a truly laughable attempt to break the basic laws of politics by uniting the far left Green party with a libertarian party. Not surprisingly the quasi-communists and Ayn Randians couldn't agree on anything and that attempt failed, but it goes to show how strange proportional representation can get.
Italy has just voted in a coalition of two parties, again, a left and right wing party who have, as a result, economically incoherent policies. The "right wing" party wants devolution of power within Italy and more regional self rule, the 5-Star movement wants the opposite, with more subsidies for southern Italy.
Basically PR gives you messy governments that frequently collapse or deadlock. This may or may not be a better arrangement than FPTP which tends to yield strong governments with clear policies, which frequently see-saw between polar opposites as left and right parties take turns in power.
That's exactly what I see in the US right now. The country has no ability to address issues anymore, be it health care, immigration, infrastructure, housing or education. there is a lot of hot air and screaming and yelling but they can't find compromises and act on them anymore. See Obamacare. Instead of working together and accommodate each others wishes first one party went into full strike and now it has been effectively abandoned at the detriment of most (non-rich) citizens.
Citation needed
It'd have been better to say the second largest power bloc.
But what if the parties didn't have to form a coalition? What if they, as individual legislators, just voted on bills? Then you'd have to write a bill that could peel away some votes from some members of some parties other than your own. For a bill to pass, it would have to be a good enough bill that you could sell it to people outside your party. That's not such a bad thing...
Unless all the parties maintain strict party discipline. I think that increasing party discipline is one of the problems that is making Congress so dysfunctional. But hopefully, if you had more than two parties in Congress, not all of them would have strict party discipline.
That's a bit of a misinterpretation. One of the leading figures in the FDP party broke up the jamaica band when everyone was about to get together and form the coalition. (Naturally his party was pissed about this but because he won an election for them they just rolled over and went with that).
While the german government can sort of deadlock it's not a situation like in the US where everything shuts down. The government continues to function, although with minimized power, until the new parliament is formed. They can't put out any major new laws but they're not completely dead-in-the-water.
>Germany is ruled by a coalition of two parties that both lost votes in the last election, and whose leaders hate each other.
It's more complicated than that. The SPD-CDU/CSU coalition (which is three party not two depending on how you look at it) is getting a reputation with the voters, under this coalition Merkel has been chancellor for a long time now. They two sides (other than CDU/SPD resenting the CSU for sitting in the backseat of federal politics and screaming incoherent right-wing garbage (I'm bavarian, I know what I'm talking about here)) don't hate eachother but to my knowledge it's a mutual understanding that they cannot continue this coalition any further.
>because proportional representation results in lots of parties getting into power with none having a majority.
Note that Germany has a 5% clause for this; you need 5% of the votes to get into parliament, otherwise you have no say.
This is mainly a result of the previous government turning into the third reich after several parties deadlocked the parliament for real.
Those characterizations have very little to do with the actual positions of those parties, so it's no wonder it seems comical to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
Closer to home, it's also used by the Apache Software Foundation for the annual election of the Board of Directors.
When the election is only for a single position, this is exactly equivalent to "instant runoff".
For the House of Representatives, each electorate is much smaller and parties only have one candidate each, so you only have five or six choices, and you preference all of them.
1. https://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/z/r/7/i/p/image.re... 2. http://farm8.static.flickr.com/7296/9569414534_b3ee06fd84.jp...
The Open List system used in most of Europe (with France, parts of Germany, and Spanish congress being notable exceptions) seems like a very good, successful one also.
UK is still first past the post for MPs. Australia seems to be different again but not first past the post.
When there are is only one winner and STV is exactly the same as instant runoff, it is not so difficult to understand.
This surprised me but you're right. NI have(/had?) STV, but not Westminster. Very odd.
> Australia seems to be different again
This was my question really. Australia uses IRV, afaik, which is somewhat equivalent to STV except that it's slightly simpler, though I don't see any major disadvantage to the extra complexities in STV.
It's okay IMO but could be improved somewhat.
These systems are ostensibly biased towards moderate candidates, but when there are no moderates as in these days of wildly antagonistic partisanship, the result is disenfranchisement.
Instant runoff is vastly superior in terms of allowing people to express their voting preferences.
Check this out: http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
But the candidates we have are a reflection of the voting system. That is to say, hyperpartisanship is a feature of FPTP and so our candidates are a reflection of that. A voting system that rewards moderates will bring about more moderate politics.
Biasing towards supposed "moderation" marginalizes a broad range of the citizenry outside the mainstream and breeds cynicism and fury. Even if they cannot command a policy-enacting majority, minority opinions deserve a voice.
People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them!
>People should be allowed to vote for representatives who actually represent them!
People need to stop seeing voting as some kind of identity affirmation.
Proportional representation should be the minimum requirement. Adding additional voting system goodness on top of it is great.
Having to choose amongst one candidate only is terribly bad because some candidates may have lot of similar ideas. However they may diverge on some points, such as they decide to make two parties. The votes get then divided between these two candidates, and they may not reach the second round, even though their idea may be more popular...
The winning parties has never wanted to change the system since that makes them win I guess.
Any other system would be a better idea than that one.
I think what also makes things strange in France is the rule that all parties must be given equal airtime, which leads to a few bizarre weeks every election cycle where complete loons are on TV and Radio 24/7
Then you have exceptional circumstances with many disgruntled people pushing for the extreme. Even then, two rounds can help. A one round system makes it very hard for the fringe to take control, but once this happen they're one of two. With a two round system only one side can go radical, with a likely result of the other side mainstream party winning.
Both sides extremes getting stronger is possible, and it's really what happened during the last presidential elections. But we got lucky and one "center" candidate went through (by a very small margin), and as expected won the second round. But as in other places we had about half people disgruntled, it's just that it was evenly split between left and right extreme parties, and only one went to second round (but the other was pretty close).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
This happens nowadays anyway.
Voters now want to send people to Congress who will carry out a specific agenda. But the idea of a representative is that you were sending someone with (more or less) your general views, and they would use their own judgment.
This whole "pre-negotiation and coalitions before questions are put to the voters" might be more the problem than the solution.
"Obviously?" Perhaps they have considered it properly and have reasonably concluded both systems are utterly failed in terms of representing the views of the electorate. As an outsider looking in US politics appears equally broken, just sometimes in different ways.
So now let me stay on ground I am more sure of, the UK. It's one of the least representative "democracies" around.
For most of the electorate it simply doesn't matter who they vote for, it's pointless. Most seats are "safe". Where I currently live, if you have anything but Brexit-Tory views don't bother as the seat hasn't changed hands in years. So consider yourself entirely disenfranchised. We get especially poor candidates as a result - from both parties. A cardboard cutout would probably get elected if wearing a blue rosette.
If you have Tory views, and live in one of those nice £1m+ warehouse flat conversions you are probably now in a permanently safe Labour inner-city seat, and are equally disenfranchised. cardboard equally electable, just give it a red rosette.
The percentage in a given constituency who get the government they voted for is often quite shocking. CGP Grey did a video on this if I recall correctly.
What does that do to politics? Well, it's total war, total victory and total annihilation only. Parties only treat the electorate as even vaguely interesting in the 10% of seats that might change hands.
No one negotiates. Beforehand or otherwise, unless every other avenue to grab power has failed. System working as intended then as it tends to reinforce the two party status quo.
"Woo, we got elected, just." Now it's simple. Every policy of the previous government was crap. Even the really good ones that were proven to be working. No matter, we didn't think them up, so get rid of the policy with extreme prejudice. We'll rename the same policy when writing our next manifesto so that we can imply we did invent it next time.
> namely it forces pre-negotiation and coalitions before questions are put to the voters.
When did the US last have a coalition, or even pre-negotiation?
In the UK we had one, successfully, during WW2. Since then there has been one, but a selection of minority governments. The recent coalition is widely considered to have been a failure. Essentially we got Tory govt, with a few rough edges knocked off. Tories got a convenient kicking partner.
> the electorate can make a reasonably informed decision about whether A or B is better.
Gosh that's a positive view of how it works. In our media-first, FPTP, system it is much more about the media friendly face, nice smile, soundbites and dog whistles. Interviews become an excruciating exercise of answering the question you'd like to have been asked like it's a Monty Python sketch.
May gave us a comical example of doing soundbites and interviews wrong with the "strong and stable government" line that everyone, including the media, were sick of on the very first day of campaign. After a term or two "it's about time we gave the other guys a chance" and "I'm sick of these idiots" becomes a significant influence.
In short I am firmly in favour of electoral reform and adoption of PR (and not the second-class incarnation of it we were given a referendum about during the coalition). I'd quite like to figure out a way to weaken party politics too, but I digress. In my twenties I was quite in favour for FPTP as I felt it enabled more to be done. Nowadays I'd like a lot less done and a system that a) encourages consensus day to day and b) provides a parliament representative of the far wider range of views commonly held than two diametrically opposed parties. This became far, far too long so I'll spare yo...
When a member of our family becomes sick, we don't ask everyone to vote on possible treatments? We go to doctors who are trained to diagnose the cause of sickness and offer appropriate treatment.
When a scientist publishes a new study, we don't ask everyone what they think about the study? We ask other accomplished scientists to do a peer-review and offer their opinion on the study.
No matter what field we look at, we do not rely on laymen to decide the outcome but we rely on qualified experts and professionals.
But in case of establishing a government, which can have a long term impact on millions of livelihood, we ask just about anyone to offer their opinion in the form a vote. Why is this a reasonable system?
Perhaps people who are accomplished scholars in political theory and economics and a few other relevant areas?
As for scholars in political theory, laughable. What does an ivory tower academic know about what people want or need? Marx spent his entire life reading books and writing political theory and his ideas lead to disaster everywhere.
Nope. Allowing anyone to take part is a great system.
The USA went with cumulative opinion of everyone (democracies, markets).
Which country is the world's remaining superpower?
Maybe it just means that extremes don't really work that well.
I don't like dictatorships, no matter who the dictator is. Spare us the dictatorship of the whoever chooses the "experts".
Conversely, "democracies" work pretty ok when the people leading are doing a good job, and they work sort of bad when the people leading are sucky.
The difference being, democracy spreads out decision making to effectively limit risk.
Think of it like an investment. You can put all of your money on one really volatile stock. Maybe it will do really great! But maybe you will lose 95% of your money in an hour. Or, you can put it in a basket of carefullly-chosen stocks that have the collective goal of a slow, steady climb in value while limiting volatility.
Different goals.
Just like you have an elected board, who represent shareholders, overseeing the unelected executives at the top of any corporate structure.
The problem is that this setup is regularly decried by populists as being "technocratic" (as if that were a bad thing)
I agree with you that rule by bureaucrat is better than mob rule. But since you are in favor of limiting government power to a select few - I would choose to limit it to responsible taxpayers rather than unelected bureaucrats.
1. Many civil services have unionised to the point where civil servants effectively cannot be fired. Guess how competent the resulting staff are.
2. Even if they could be easily fired, their hiring processes are also frequently a joke.
To give an example, the average age of officials at the British Treasury department is 27. This is not widely known, because officials love to hide behind anonymity, especially when publishing reports that sound superficially clever and authoritative but are later proven to be dead wrong about everything. There's no accountability anywhere.
Just look at how much difficulty civil servants have in even just managing contracts with third party providers. Now imagine how much harder they find it to actually do the work themselves.
Here's an answer that I find satisfying but about which I think reasonable people could disagree:
In the US, at least, "democracy" works tremendously well for distributing the narrative that individual rational actors are the main and only political units.
Your example of a family is quite useful in illustrating that there are limitations to that view, regardless of how useful or destructive that view may be.
However, the utility of that view for maintaining the material situation of labor in the US is high.
That is, individualism as an idea is a useful tool for people with money and power to convince large groups of people that the division of wealth in the country is entirely the product of aggregate individual choices rather than the product of a system that is designed for the rich to get richer.
The truth of that proposition aside, I understand that utility to be the underlying historical motivation for people in the US to try and export their brand of democracy.
Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.
The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”
― C.S. Lewis
Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.
This is intended behavior. IIRC it was to address the question of whether slaves counted as members of the population for the purposes of determining number of congressmen.
Wyoming has a total population (census 2010) of about 563,000. And about 98% of those are citizen. WY has 3 electors, so roughly 187,000 citizens per elector.
Citizen in WY have roughly 3x the voting power as citizen in CA, due in large part to a system designed to appease slave-holding states 200 years ago.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... 2 - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-ci...
Which is the point, so as to prevent high population urban centers from dictating everything to the rest of American that doesn't share their values.
>due in large part to a system designed to appease slave-holding states 200 years ago.
I assume you're referring to the 3/5 Compromise here. While true that this was a consideration, the underlying reasoning is still sound. It makes no more sense for San Francisco to rule over Sac City Iowa than Sac City Iowa to rule over San Francisco. That's the beauty of the system the Founders designed. Otherwise you just drift further and further toward Direct Democracy, which is a euphemism for "chaos".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People%27s_Congress
By comparison, I think most of us have had the experience of being in a conversation with a small group of people (or even one other person) and wanting to say something but not being given an opportunity to do so without seeming rude.
This could have other advantages as well. No reason why any one bill should block any other bill; anything with N/2+1 upvotes is passed by the House. It would also be possible for representatives to remain in their home districts among their constituents.
How? When people complain about money in politics issues these days, they're usually complaining about 3rd party money. I don't see how having 100x more representatives would reduce 3rd party money. It's not like it's hard to target 3rd party ads to small geographic areas.
What makes you say that? Hell at 10,000 constituents you borderline don't even need to run ads, just go door to door, personally.
EDIT: Although I suppose the tactic could at that point be turned to buying voters more directly. Spend a ton of money on something that benefits everyone in the district and make it clear that it'll keep coming only if they vote for your candidate, and you might have the same effect.
You could probably get the same result by blocking funding external to the district and killing citizens united. And/or shorten campaigns to 60 days so they just don't cost as much. And/or, provide public funding and election spending caps.
I don't think that trying to scale out of it would be that effective but I see what they are getting at. My guess, is that would raise the inequality of the playing field again as the richest would be able to spin up an organization to manage 10k reps, decide whose relevant who to fund, and so on, people who didn't have lobbyists before won't be able to afford that even if the per rep cost gets cheaper, the total influence cost will rise and price additional people out of the market.
Candidates are far more concerned about 3rd party money than direct donations these days, because 3rd party spending is unlimited. Quid pro quo is not necessary because it's all done in public. You don't need a secret meeting with a lobbyist to know if the NRA likes your position on guns. Just watch the ads.
Of course not every House member has to worry about this; in fact most don't. Most of the big spending on House races is concentrated in the few districts that everyone expects to shift the balance. This would still be true in a House of 35,000. While most races would probably get less expensive, there would still be a small set of "tipping point" races that would attract most of the effort and money.
Quite a lot of House races are on "auto pilot", politically--that is, there's not much suspense about which party's candidate is likely to win. This is in part because of gerrymandering that produces districts favorable to one party vs another.
Tiny districts would be like gerrymandering on steroids. It wouldn't take much fancy geometry to produce a map in which the vast majority of House races remain easily predictable. And it is the marginal (unpredictable) races that atract the bulk of the big spending.
50 states. 300 representatives in each state's assembly, almost all power devolved to those states. 15000 representatives. OK, it's not 35,000, but I doubt that makes much difference.
This is possible if you eliminate congressional districts altogether and have people "subscribe" to a representative. It removes the problem of a single congressman "trying" to represent constituents with widely disparate views equally, and abolishes gerrymandering in the process.
Like YouTube, you would end up with superstar representatives that would capture an even larger share than the most powerful do now. And the fact that they wouldn't even have a home district would mean that they would be accountable to absolutely no-one besides those who helped them achieve their superstar status. So yes, you would have "your rep" but he would be like a small you-tuber compared to PewDiePie—4k subs vs. 100,000,000.
I'm guessing the numbers won't be known until after the voting is done, meaning a lot of effort will be spent finding out where the line is at.
I kinda want to simulate it for a few elections to see what happens, but there isn't any sufficient simulation.
Even if we upped it to 5,000-6,000 reps, it would be a huge improvement.
Don't take the above too seriously, I'm sure there are holes. Just a thought experiment in my brain right now.
If 51% of districts are 51% yellow while 49% are 100% pink, yellow wins.
With a second level, you can run that game twice, and 25% are enough to win.
if we want to take money out we need to remove the ability of the political parties from spending money on who they chose and require them to fund a set number of candidates equally. Not all candidates as its obvious you can get some kooks, but as it stands now elections are more decided by the party than the voters. the parties decide who gets to run for the seat and it becomes big news when a maverick usually with their own funds upsets this quagmire.
so please by all means try to minimize the money influence elections but understand that most people's views are being heavily manipulated by operatives of both parties to make sure that the only money in politics is money they have full control over.
As much as I like the idea of proportional representation, I don't think getting 35,000 people to agree on anything is a viable solution.
Perhaps a better approach is one that decentralizes power as much as possible, giving more voice to local constituencies versus the Federal government -- and similarly, giving power to continuously smaller communities such as county vs. state, city vs. county and so on and so forth.
An improvement on top of that is having the superior legislature write framework laws that more local communities can elect to follow, should they prefer that over drafting their own legislation, for whatever reason. While this isn't applicable to every legislative issue, the theoretical argument for this approach is quite compelling¹, at least according to one UVA Law professor²
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1. http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/hein/kitch/70va_l_re...
2. https://content.law.virginia.edu/faculty/profile/ewk/1180712
There are different ways to get representation. One way is to force everyone to vote like Brazil or Australia but this might not be practical in a country like India where elections go on for 1.5 months. But, there are other ways - where you draw a representation of the entire population and make them vote aka Sortition [0]. We already use this concept in juries and other aspects of life. It would be worthwhile to give this a serious try for alternative voting systems.
We could perform alternate experiment systems in parallel and then compare their outcomes to current systems - we don't need to adopt them. But, this has to start somewhere. We could have a debate on "HOW" to draw this representative sample but we should acknowledge that the current system rarely achieves the objective of representation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
That alone would help.
But every change produces winners and losers, and the losers really don’t want that change to happen.
But we can’t automatically register people because young people disproportionately support one of the two major parties, and that would be ‘unfair’.
And we can’t make Election Day a holiday because the people who work so much going voting is a hardship disproportionately support one of the two parties. And it would ‘hurt business’.
On the other end we can’t require IDs to vote people that would disproportionately hur the other party. And we can’t spend the resources to fix that because it would be ‘too expensive’.
early voting? postal ballots?
I'd much prefer a system where you have to "earn" your say in government. This would, I think, show a deeper commitment to the system.
Edit: if you’re downvoting me, irony aside, please detail why making voters more committed to the government they’re informing is a bad idea. Seems fairly reasonable to me.
Finally, it seems uniquely American to address this problem with money.
If under such a system, the 'voluntary, compensated abstentions' are disproportionately 'poor people', what principle is being violated? Is the option-to-vote or the actuality-of-voting the more important value?
Is maximal voting participation a religious goal, to be pursued even if it delivers poor results, such poor results sometimes including the collapse of democratic-processes entirely? Or is voting just one part of a system to be evaluated based on how well it delivers welfare and protects rights?
I would lean a little bit in the direction of actually voting being more important than being able to vote. Anything less than 100% turnout is bound to have some bias in how the non-voters are selected, even if they're self selected.
In the US at least, we already have a representative body laying around with super-majoritarian rules and long, overlapping terms where citizen-legislators could build institutional knowledge. Conveniently it has both the most anti-democratic setup right now and one that's already been subject to revision via constitutional amendment. Selecting Senators at random is the simplest fix with the biggest potential impact on our democracy.
And that's just first-order effects, not counting the potential civil society benefits of encouraging every citizen to think of themselves as a future Senator, or having that structure mirrored in micro in smaller jurisdictions.
In the long run, the rulers of a country don't condescend to pay attention to voters because it's the right thing to do - rather because it prevents chaos, revolutions and guillotines. Voting is fundamentally an accounting mechanism that is justified by its provision of information about what is best for the country.
It's not so rational for people to participate in voting, because (virtually) no election is ever decided by a single vote. Thus, the electorate, as long as voting is voluntary, is going to inherently be biased towards irrational people motivated by emotion. That's why compulsory voting is a good idea. Voting isn't a privilege, it's a form of feedback that is vital to maintaining a healthy state, and having it be voluntary makes no more sense than voluntary taxes.
We also have terrible gerrymandering that ensures seats are hard to change.
Effectively no limits on political contributions thanks to Citizens United (not that things were great before that but they've gotten much worse) means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.
People pushing easy answers like this aren't doing anyone any favors. Even if somehow their favored solution got adopted, when it fails to be the panacea they've promised people will reject it and call it a failure even if it might have helped the situation.
And in the UK the Remain campaign massively outspent Leave and still lost (the government did a mailshot to every home in the country arguing for Remain and that alone cost more than the entire Leave campaign did .... and then they did lots more campaigning on top!).
The theory of the concern about Citizens United is that people can buy elections. That theory appears to be false.
> means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.
Yes Clinton lost despite outspending Trump, but Obama outspent Romney, and lots and lots of other races go in the favor of the candidate who spent the most.
Two high profile exceptions don't prove the rule false.
Actually, they do.
Really? That's your reasoned stance? So if I say "Not all blonde people eat boogers." but then find two videos of blonde people eating boogers then my rule is no longer valid?
Unbelievable.
Opposing reform because it won't magically fix some tangentially related problems doesn't make sense to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
It sounds like I'm advocating corruption, and I kind of am. But at the same time, earmarks served the purpose of providing a good reason for parties to work together, across the aisle. If a little bit of corruption accomplishes that higher purpose, I'm glad to have it.
As an aside, I happen to think that there is an important difference between "bipartisan" and "deal-making," and the latter is really where it's at in governance. Earmarks are tools for deal-making.
Framing things as "both sides" inappropriately elevates the 2 major political parties as a central feature of our system of government. They're not; in fact the largest political affiliation in the U.S. today is "indepdendent"!
And on any serious legislation, there are typically more than two "sides" with an interest in a particular outcome. That's why making deals is so important.
To wit, Merrick Garland would like a word.
How about less gerrymandering? It results in more extreme candidates on both sides (as you get much more "pure" blue/red districts and fewer purple).
An earmark is only corrupt if it is bought--that is, if a citizen or company bribes the member of Congress to steer an earmark to them.
When earmarks were killed, there was actually little evidence that was happening. Earmarks were killed as a talking point about reducing spending. Which is silly, because earmarks allocated funds, they didn't appropriate them. That is, they typically divvied up the pot, not increased its size.
It's sort of like the debt limit. Politicians lie to people about things work, in order to attract votes. I don't know if that's corruption so much as cynical opportunism.
Only in theory. In practice, they are 1:1 - You initiate pork A here, I help you add pork B there. You own pork B company, I own pork A. We both win money, forget the constituents.
I decided to be a smart-ass and check off most of the names.
A far better solution would be for one or the other party in the US to come up with a program that more than a fraction of the country believes in.
Every time there are presidential elections in Russia everybody knows the outcome in advance, absolutely no viable competition takes place ever. But despite the corrupt system some states/counties/cities in Russia manage to elect reasonable candidates that are in opposition to the president occasionally when it's about parliamentary elections, especially about local parliaments.
This makes me conclude the parliamentary republic system is better than the presidential system.
It seems obvious to me that your vote should be weighted according to how much you are personally responsible for carrying the burden of government. Why should it be otherwise?
That idea is only half decent of your goal is to get yet anothet bloody communist revolution on your hands.
> While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics. Approval voting is adored by voting researchers, who regard it as the best simple voting system available.
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.
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.
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_meth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
Get rid of the popular election of senators and go back to having them be appointed by their state legislatures. That returns the proper focus on balancing the federal and state government powers.
Wouldn't that favour cronyism and enforce a barrier to entry to those who don't fall in line with the dictats of the ruling elite? Furthermore, it also creates a caste of professional politicians.
What we need is completely socialized education so that the population doesn't get so dumbed down that they vote the loudest, least professional people into office.
Those people had been unrepresented and taken for granted, and a major factor of their motivation in voting for Trump was to signal their anger to DC.
In the long run, it's beneficial to society that this group has gotten recognition and some of their issues are being addressed.
Career politicians tend to have a support structure that identifies their preferred base and caters to them. Simple majority voting would mean that our politics would be dominated by major population areas.
Neither of those things are so bad in the short run, but in the long run you would have significant groups who would never have their concerns and interests addressed.
That our system makes it possible for a minority to win over the majority at times is a real strength.