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My vote on voting systems

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Re: My vote on voting systems

#31

Post by slyall »

yellowapple wrote: post #6

It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.

The problem is the US is still running off best practice from 200 years ago and is famously hostile to change or copying another from other countries.

Any change is also going to disadvantage the two current parties so they will be hostile to it. Which with the hard-to-amend US constitution makes things very hard to change.

Some form of proportional representation or maybe STV in multi-member districts is actually what you'd do. Single member districts with fancy voting systems just gets you a token 3rd party representation.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#32

Post by KenSF »

My vote is 'any 1 election runoff system'[score, star, approval, ranked choice, ...]. Every 1ER is better than first past the post. It would be nice if vote nerds would shut the frak up about this one is better than that on. Open primaries; top 4 or 5 go through to the general; general uses any 1ER. Were I writing a law to put this in place, I would say we should revisit which 1ER after X number of years or Y voting cycles.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#33

Post by Spivak »

smitty1e wrote: post #25

12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters. However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have: - Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework? - Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading? - How…

Even when you use the digital voting machines it spits out a paper ballot that you deposit into the ballot box so the country already agrees with you.

It's not security vs convenience it's security vs turnout. Our turnout is embarrassingly low, especially on non-presidential election years, we should be expending voting access to methods that have even less friction. If we can conduct banking via an app or website we can vote via an app or website too. We can start talking about reigning it in once we don't have a third of the country not voting.

You deal with the abusive spouse problem by letting an in-person vote override the mail-in ballot while everyone else gets an easy way to vote.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#34

Post by EdwardDiego »

smitty1e wrote: post #25

12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters. However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have: - Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework? - Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading? - How…

NZ switched from FPP to to MMP [0] after a few elections where a) the government was formed by a party that achieved I'm not sure MMP is the ultimate ideal, but I much prefer it to FPP. It's a very rare government that isn't a coalition government, and while we get the occasional tail wagging the dog moment, we also get a more diverse set of parties in power, and also more diverse representation.

Often what voters want to know before voting is who a party is willing to go into coalition with, there's usually no big surprises (e.g., the righter-wing ACT party and the centre-right (by NZ standards, they're still left of the Democrats at least when measured by public healthcare etc.) National always dance together, Labour and the Greens typically get along via a confidence and supply agreement even if the Greens are not formally in coalition) but then you have New Zealand First, who are openly mercenary about their choices, and the original Maori Party that went into coalition with National which doomed them in the next election.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

Re: My vote on voting systems

#35

Post by theluketaylor »

jfengel wrote: post #14
theluketaylor wrote: post #11

The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise. Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win.…

Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the sam…

I'm really against mixed-member proportional (and pretty much all form of proportional representation) since you end up with party hacks unaccountable to voters. When parties control the order of the lists there is also really strong incentive by representatives to tow the party line to avoid relegation.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#36

Post by theluketaylor »

johngladtj wrote: post #26
jfengel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the sam…

>Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition. The solution for that is to not make it a simple binary pass/fail, but to have how it passes and fails affect the outcome. A simple and consistent way of doing this is by making it so that all laws have a…

> A 50% + 1 margin of victory should result in the law becoming void the moment the parliament composition changes.

I do like the idea of built in timers on laws, but instant revocation seems too extreme. A marginal law expiring at the end of the new term seems more conducive to stability. That gives time to debate, discuss, and pass (or not) a modified version so everyone affected has time to participate and plan for revisions.

> Constitutional changes should essentially require unanimity ( and a referendum on top of it) since they are the only permanent laws.

Here in Canada the bar on constitutional amendments has been set so high it's unlikely we will ever be able to change it for any reason. Too much change isn't healthy, but neither is none.

Not American, but I do think their bar for constitutional amendments has also been set too high and I think it's contributing to polarization. Setting it even higher seems counter-productive. I have similar feelings about the filibuster.

More laws passing would let people live with the consequences, good or bad, of all the stuff being proposed. Voters would be able to vote based on reality rather than the boogey-man each side portrays of what the other side might do with power. There should be a high bar to change a constitution, but it needs to be clearable more often.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#37

Post by JanisErdmanis »

theluketaylor wrote: post #35
jfengel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the sam…

I'm really against mixed-member proportional (and pretty much all form of proportional representation) since you end up with party hacks unaccountable to voters. When parties control the order of the lists there is also really strong incentive by representatives to tow the party line to avoid relegation.

It can still be made possible for the voters to rank the candidates within the list. This is true in Latvia where we do add +/- for each candidate in the list that eventually determines their rank. The elected candidates sometimes do change their parties when elected or become independent if they no longer want to follow the party line.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#38

Post by ekimekim »

yellowapple wrote: post #10
ekimekim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others. And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to a…

> Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less l…

> I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too.

To clarify, I never intended that as a defence of FPTP. It's awful and I'll take any of the systems being discussed here over it. It was a statement specifically towards IRV over score/approval.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#39

Post by tanewishly »

jfengel wrote: post #14
theluketaylor wrote: post #11

The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise. Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win.…

Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the sam…

I must be not quite following your explanation... In most of the EU, there are multi-party systems. From what I can tell, that is because of multi-member districts. Eg. The Netherlands has only one district for parliamentary elections (150 seats). There are more than 2 parties in Parliament there.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#40

Post by mdp2021 »

dang wrote: post #12

We replaced the linkbait "you" in the title with a nicely first-person phrase from the end of the article. If there's a better* title, we can change it again. * better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

# "Voting system[s hardly] work"
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