Time for another thinking-out-loud post…
My Dad and I have been having a lot of discussions over the course of the past few weeks about that big bad beast we’re faced with this year: the elections. Our general conclusion is that there are some problems with the way that we elect the members of the executive branch.
So, some thoughts, and then I hope that there’s a least a little bit of discussion.
Term Limits
We currently have a law on the books saying that a President can only serve two terms before it’s time for him or her to step aside to let someone else try their hand at running the country. Unfortunately, this means that the fourth year of a sitting President’s first term is an utter waste as he or she focuses more on getting reelected than on doing what they feel needs to get done. How many times have you heard that something is not “an election year issue”?
To that end, I propose that we set a term limit of one term. That takes away the bother of reelection politics so that, one can hope, the President would do his or her job for the entirety of his or her term. Currently terms last four years, which seems a reasonable amount of time to me, but perhaps an easier transition from a two-term limit to a one-term limit would be to effectively split the difference and make the single term last six years.
The Electoral College
Why do we have one? It’s an anachronistic quirk that doesn’t really serve a legitimate purpose any longer. Getting rid of the Electoral College would, of course, change the way that elections were run because a politician could no longer simply do the electoral math straight into the White House. But really, what’s so difficult about “one person, one vote”?
Required Voting
Citizens who take advantage of the benefits of citizenship (so, everyone really, what with our system of law and socialized roads) should be required to participate in the governmental system they take advantage of.
The “No” Vote
One interesting idea that my dad put forth, that I haven’t thought through the implications of, is that when voting for offices there should be a “None of the above” option. If you don’t like the candidates put to you, why can’t you reject them at the ballot box without having to vote for a different, “throwaway” candidate.
As I understand it, in some places this is a ballot option.
Alternative Forms of Voting
There’s instant run-off voting, there’s a prime minister system as used in Britain, there’s other options. What do you think? Or is our electoral system not in need of any changes??.
I generally like the parliamentary system used in France, the downside is the more parties the greater the potential instability. Take a look at the final years of the Weimar Republic, for example. Of the many, many major German parties, the only ones with clout were the National Socialists and the Marxists, both of whom ideologically opposed Democracy and thus joined forces to essentially castrate the Reichstag.
I also have some qualms against forced voting. It seems to be a system used by totalitarian pseudo-democratic regimes in order to track people’s votes and remain in power.
What I think should be done is no corporate entity should be allowed to contribute to a political campaign. Corporations aren’t people and therefore should not be allowed to have a say in government. But watch as any attempt to do that is shot down by corporate lobbyists. . . .
Compulsory voting: bad idea. Look at Australia. People who wouldn’t bother with voting except that they don’t want to get fined turn up at the polls and vote for whoever is listed first, or whoever handed them a pamphlet at the door, or use some other equally dumbass method of choosing; or they donkey vote (deliberately ruin the ballot) and waste everyone’s time and money. Let those who can’t be bothered participating stay home and put up with whatever govt the rest of us elect.
The “no” vote: what would that achieve? Suppose “no” gets elected, then what? Suppose it gets 10%, or 30%, or whatever number you like — then what?
Limiting corporate contributions: I like the idea, but I can see a thousand loopholes being teased open by armies of lawyers and accountants. I’d rather see limits on what a candidate can spend, so that it doesn’t matter how much they can raise.
All IMO, YMMV, of course. You did ask for comments…
Good post. Something a lot similar and a lot more detailed went on at Blogging of the President, in a post by Stirling Newberry.
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000246.html#000246
It’s really good.
I did ask for comments. I didn’t say that you had to agree. ;)
As to forced voting… I see you concerns and agree with them. At the same time, it does bother me that people will take advantage of government programs, and complain about laws and the government and taxes, without actually participating in shaping that government. I hold out hope that, while people might donkey the elections in the short term, that in the long term people would make an effort to understand just what it was they were participating in. I’m also an optimist, I should point out.
The situation is more complex than that, though, because there are many reasons why fewer people are voting than in the past. The biggest part of this, I suspect, is a growing cynicism that there isn’t a real difference between the two parties and that politicians are all liars who won’t actually do what they said they’d do to win the election. I can’t say I entirely blame people for this perception. In the wake of Nixon, who could?
Also, I’ve noticed that the information about policies seems to be deliberately opaque, creating the impression that politics is too much for a person to understand. Consider, for instance, the way that, say, websites set up to support an issue are designed. The main page states the simplified catch phrase for the bill: “This will cut your taxes!” The link for more information takes one to a page that says something along the lines of, “Bill 0117a will create a tax decrease of 5% for all households in the state of Colorado by decreasing discretionary spending to some programs including some portions of the Downtowns Restoration Project, portions of the Uintah Shelters Project, and Kelly’s Bill.” Rather than saying, “This bill will decrease your taxes by cutting funds to homeless shelters around the state, a program to rebuild inner city areas, and a program that brings meals to the developmentally disabled.” Actually, the second example is a bit biased (showing my liberal tendencies) but it amazes me how often technical-sounding language is used by both parties to obfuscate an issue with the excuse that voters should “educate themselves” used as rationalization.
The “no” vote… It’s not my idea and I don’t support it, so I can’t really defend it. I can understand, though, the idea behind it. So long as we have a two party system, though, how can one protest the choices put forth by the parties? Not voting doesn’t seem to do much good because the system will assume that you don’t care.
Limiting candidate spending: I like the idea, but this opens itself up to all sorts of loopholes. For instance, can a corporation run an ad in support of a candidate? Does this count as money that the candidate is spending? Or are there caps on how much can be spent by anyone to support a candidate? Can a political party run an ad to support one point of view on a certain issue (abortion, say) while mentioning that a certain candidate does or doesn’t support that issue? Can a candidate raise money for another organization that spends money to support that candidate? What if its not clear if the candidate is raising money for that organization or is simply supportive of that organizations views?
Campaign finance is a weird little maze that I haven’t even begun to sort out.
Sennona’s post – ‘Compulsory voting: bad idea. Look at Australia.’ – is not quite correct in defining Australia’s system and the “donkey vote”.
The system combines compulsory voting and an automatic runoff system in one. Citizens must vote for the candidate of their choice in preferential sequence. If a voter’s ballot paper does not have a different number next to to each of the candidates then the ballot is ruled invalid and discarded. Candidates positions on the ballot paper are determined by lottery. The “donkey voter” is the person who simply votes 1,2,3,4 etc down the ballot without apparent consideration to the relative political positions of the candidates. Thus, the “donkey vote” is usually not considered as a deliberate attempt to ruin the ballot, but more a thoughtless and lazy response to a civic duty. (Apologies to donkeys.)
Australia refers to this system as the Preferential Voting System (as opposed to “First Past the Post.”) The reason for the sequencing is to determine – by distibuting the preferences of voters whose first choice candidate received minimal numbers of votes – which candidate is preferred by more than 50% of the voters.
Whether compulsory voting is a good idea or not is worthy of discussion.
It is oftem assumed that about 10% of votes are “donkey votes.” One theory is that since 90% of voters actually make a valid vote then then result is truly representative of the all of the people’s wishes.
In Democracies, regardless of which party is in power at any given moment, one often hears complaints of what “the Government” does to “us”. It’s easier to diffuse that criticism when everybody has voted: no excuses, the Goverment IS us.
I can think of three things that I’d like to see happen to our Federal Election System:
1)Get rid of the Electoral College. A great idea when we were a small, far-flung nation. Useless now.
2)Instant run-off voting/ranked voting. Pick your top two or three candidates, in order. Not horribly difficult to implement and may draw more voters in if they think that at least someone they like might get elected.
3) Election Day is a holiday. But not a holiday like all the others. Malls and movies and all non-essential services would be closed – more like xmas day. There should be patriotic/political rallies and education seminars and free transportation to the polls. Better I think than compulsory voting, while still drawing in more voters.
Just my two cents.
Rather than your conception of the ‘no’ vote, how about a ‘no’ vote against a candidate? Kindof like being able to cancel out a vote for candidate. That way, rather than saying “I don’t like any of the candidates” you can say “I don’t like this candidate the most”.
I guess it gets kindof wierd when you consider that some parties might start showing up wiht negative votes. (Like the right to life party or some other small 3rd party.)
I think, in general, people are informed enough about what they don’t like that they might be able to reject a candidate on an informed opinion. If the media and candidates are going to spend all of their time mudslinging then why not give us a chance to use that information.
yvelle-
Approval voting, where you vote for as many candidates as you want to, would essentially include the option of voting “no” against a particular candidate (or candidates). You just vote for the other candidates.
If you think candidates A and B are mudslinging, but candidates C and D seem okay, vote for the latter two. This cancels out a vote for A and a vote for B.
It seems one way to take care of “donkey voting” (just voting for the first candidate, or just voting down the list in a ranked system) is to have the candidates listed in different orders on different ballots. With a large sample you should expect the donkey votes to be evenly distributed across the different ballots and cancel each other out. Depending on the voting system in might be enough to just cyclically permute the candidates, in other systems you would need every possible listing.
I like the idea of the term limit, and six years seems reasonable to me. It HAS gotten to the point that the only time anything gets done is in the election year before the end of a president’s first term in office. And then, as you say, only if it’s an “election year issue.”
On the issue of the “none of the above” vote… I took advantage of that concept during the Reagan years… Hated Reagan and all he stood for, but didn’t like what the Democratic party was offering, either. So I “abstained” from my civic duty for two national elections. Now that I’ve spent an additional twenty years observing the democratic process, I can see that the choices are not as cut and dried as, “I like this guy, and I don’t like that one.” Sometimes one’s vote needs to be used to vote AGAINST the greater of two evils. And it’s just as important to use it as such, as it is to bestow it upon a candidate who lines up with one’s opinion on every issue. Do I think John Kerry or Howard Dean are outstanding presidential material? No, I do not…but I would vote for just about anyone in order to unseat the disaster we have occupying the White House right now. Obviously, a “none of the above” vote would not accomplish this.
Virginia has a single term limit for its govenors (although they can serve unlimited terms that aren’t in a row). And, in many ways, it doesn’t work. The last year is almost as wasted as an election year. And if you ever get a governor better than most (like Warner now), you know he’s going to be gone in four years. In terms of a six-year term to remove some overhead, I think six years is too long for a president to remain in office without a vote.
The Electoral College serves an important purpose and I don’t think eliminating it is the way to go. The problem isn’t the College, it’s the individual state rules for how they assign their delegates.
What I’d like to see is more states that apportion their Electoral College votes out by percentage, according to how the voters in that state cast their votes.
The “majority takes all” rules that so many states have is what creates the disproportionate influence some states have on the outcome of elections. (Imagine, for instance, if Florida’s Electoral College votes had been divided between candidates according to percentage of votes.)
I’ll just put my list in here:
1) Compulsory voting: I’m for it. Others have stated the reasons for better than I can. Vote or pay $50 seems fair to me.
2) Term Limits: I hate them. “Please, stop me before I vote for X again!” seems lame to me. Also, take a look at what term limits did to the Oregon State legislature. A bunch of people w/ no experience led to nearly all bills being written by lobbyists. And the agenda being almost entirely set by lobbyists. It’ll be years before this changes (term limits were thrown out by the courts recently).
3) Electoral College: Toss it. I like the idea about states apportioning their EC votes. But, if they do that, why have the EC at all?
4) The “NO” vote: Also known as “None of the Above”. Properly done, if NOTA gets the most votes, none of the candidates is elected and a new election takes place w/ none of the previous candidates on the ballot. The idea is really good. But it may not be practical.
5) Alternative forms of voting: IRV would be a good start. Certainly better than what we have now. Remember, no system is perfect but nearly all are better than largest plurality. Personally I like proportional representation the best.
But remember, I’m far out of the mainstream according to all the media. So you may want to ignore my views entirely. Like the media.
A single six year term is what the Confederacy used for their presidency. Never was tested, of course, since the Confederacy didn’t last 6 years.
I like an Australian-like system of redistributing the low ranking candidates’ votes amongst the survivors to get a majority – instant runoff, or what-have-you. I prefer the iterative approach – eliminate the worst, than next worst, etc. until you get to 50%, rather than eliminating all-but-two at once. Either way might be a little difficult in situations like the recent California gubernatorial election, though.
“No” vote – I think Nevada has this. What happens when “No” is elected, though? Combine this with instant runoff, and it is especially likely “no” will win. A revote seems silly, and many offices do need to be filled. “No” being county surveyor is one thing, “No” for governor is quite another.
I really disapprove of required voting. Attaching eligibility for programs to voting is also dangerous-either non-eligible to vote people can’t get programs, or they get an advantage in getting aid. (they have one fewer hurdles to jump) Neither is a good thing. Besides, today the only people who vote are the ones who care. If someone doesn’t care enough to vote, they won’t care enough to figure out who to vote for. The last thing we need is more uninformed voters -that way lies President Slim Shady or President Britney.
The Electoral college should die. President by popular vote with instant runoff, House and Senate by proportional representation and instant runoff respectively. Eliminates electoral college and gerrymandering, and strengthens third parties at a stroke.
The “donkey voter” is the person who simply votes 1,2,3,4 etc down the ballot
I’ve never heard that, but I lived in Queensland apart from a couple of years in Sydney so the usage you give could easily be the more common.
IIRC the order of the names is randomly chosen, and mixed up at different venues for elections larger than local govt, specifically to cancel out the effect of “1-2-3-4” voters.
that big bad beast we’re faced with this year
I totally read that as “that big bad breast we’re faced with this year”.
Guess I’ve been watching the news too much this last week.
I used to think these get out the vote programs were a good thing. Then I started thinking about all the people I have met and worked with over the years, and decided that voluntary voting is a very good thing. If you care you will vote, and if you don’t care, I don’t want you to vote, because you are very likely to vote for someone I can’t stand. When people truly care, or when they have a candidate who galvanizes them, the voting goes up. Jesse Ventura got a lot of people, especially young people, to vote for the first time. He was a mixed bag as a governor, but a very good example that your vote counts.
I’ve thought for years that compulsory voting is a good idea: you vote (or you just show up a the polls and take a blank ballot slip to the box, since no-one has a right to know what’s on your ballot) and then you get a voucher which you attach to your tax forms to get your refund. You get the day off to do this, of course.
The beauty of this is that it’s self-enforcing, unlike fines. Most people want their tax refunds and will go an extra mile to get them. And if you really believe that participatory democracy is the devil’s spawn, then you forget about your tax refund, which is a small sacrifice to make — if you really believe that Voting Is Evil.
And, of course, if you make it obligatory to vote then you have to have a ‘none of the above’ box: if ‘none of the above’ gets a true majority, 50% of the vote or more, then you HOLD THE BLOODY ELECTION AGAIN. Expensive? Hell yes, but probably worth it.
Mandatory voting, no thanks – if you don’t want to bother to vote, I’d much rather have my vote carry that little bit more weight. Ditto with “none-of-the-above”.
Term limits – we already have a problem with near-sighted policies; if someone’s doing a good job, I feel like they should be allowed to continue doing a good job and to pull off something that takes 10 or more years. Of course, I have to balance that against the nightmare scenario of 12 or more years of Reagan. (What happened in the 1992 Clinton-vs-Reagan election in that universe, by the way?) Maybe it’s best to keep the term limit.
Electoral College – eliminating it might reduce the polarization between the culture of the South and the culture of the rest of the US. Candidates would have to reach out to states they knew they wouldn’t dominate in to get those votes that were available. I think this would be a good thing. Lose the EC.
Great discussion.
I think a single, six-year term would be a major improvement for the effectiveness of the presidency.
I’d like to see SOME form of mandatory voting.
Electoral College: I’d like to see election by popular vote, BUT THIS WON’T HAPPEN !!! Unfortunately, it’s a result of the great compromise that — if it had not been reached — would almost certainly have prevented the authors from proposing a new government. THEY WERE DEAD-LOCKED.
Switching to a popular vote would be opposed by enough small-population states to prevent an amendment. I think that’s why it was never seriously considered after the 2000 fiasco.
However, allocation of a single state’s electoral votes might be the best you could do. And — if I’m not mistaken — that is a matter of state law. But the problem would then be which states would move first because until all states do so, one party or the other’s strength would be diluted.
We have 200 years experience with the devil we know, a system that works reasonably well most of the time. But you and your dad could probly find a better system in an off-hand chat. Uh-huh.
electionlawblog.com, votelaw.com/blog, ballots.blogspot.com are three election law blogs, one of them mine.
i think the system where you vote yes or no to each candidate is called polish voting. good system, never or rarely used.
mandatory voting suggests that the government owns the people, somewhat ofensive to americans.
those government “benefits” pdp refers to are not viewed as benefits by all of us.if they are benefits, you won’t mind if we have the option to opt out?
enacting any of these reforms would take effort, money,time. the question isn’t “is this a good idea” the question is, who is willing to spend the resources to enact them, and why?
on the other hand, if you come up with a genuinely good reform, a pilot project in some small town might be doable, see how it works in practice. one of my own preferences is voting rights for kids.
We have 200 years experience with the devil we know, a system that works reasonably well most of the time. But you and your dad could probly find a better system in an off-hand chat. Uh-huh.
Isn’t that the central conceit of blogs? That all of this idle chatter means something?
Aside from that, I think that it’s intuitively obvious that our system could stand to be improved. Because it’s been done for 200 years is no indication that it’s not without its flaws. My ideas were that: ideas, open to discussion. Thanks for contributing.
Mind you, Divine Right of Kings lasted a lot longer than 200 years. Anyway . . .
I think I may have been a hasty in my initial opposition to mandatory voting, now that I see people give examples of entirely sane systems of mandatory voting. I dunno, I hear “mandatory voting” and I think of that scene in Salvador where that kid with glasses gets shot in the head for not having a voting slip on election day. But then that’s not an entirely fair generalization is it.
Electoral College has to go. It was originated in order that elections would not get distorted by the whims of the country’s largely illiterate population. I think, besides being a nation where literacy can be taken for granted, we’re in general a lot smarter these days. Even though, ironically, we have the most idiotic president of all time. (By the way, Tom Tomorrow had a pretty good cartoon relating to this.)
Anyway, that’s all I got now. It’s late, I’ll think on it and see if I get some more thoughts in the morning.
One of my best friends is on her way to a PhD in electoral system design, if she doesn’t decide to be an Episcopal priest instead. Her feeling is that both the Electoral College and the first-past-the-post system are pretty stupid – the Electoral College because it seriously distorts the relative power of different population groups, and the first-past-the-post system because it effectively mandates a two-party system and both polarizes those parties and compresses the range of opinion that can be effectively represented in the legislature. In more parliamentary systems, the major parties have to pay attention to minor parties (e.g. Greens) because they need them to form coalitions. On the other hand, she’s not too optimistic about changing this any time soon.
Term limits: what a bad idea. If you don’t want to re-elect someone, don’t. Also, any election year is going to prevent a president from doing non-campaign work, whether for re-election or for the party’s new candidate.
Okay. The topic is “Election” Reforms. I have lived in the US for the past 20 years or so and the prior 30+ years in Australia, where I was born. The parliamentary system there is based on the “Westminster” system of course. While there is obviously a significant difference in that there is no equivalent to the third branch of government – that of a President – there are clearly many similarities. In both systems, citizens are elected to public office through an open (yet secret) ballot system, subject to scrutiny before the actual election. In Australia, there are only two bodies: the House of Representatives and the Senate. As in the US, the Senate is the States’ house.
To me, the most interesting aspect of the US system of elections is that the powerful Cabinet positions (the various Secretaries etc) are filled by individuals who have not “run the gauntlet” of full public scrutiny. They are not elected.
In the Westminster model, the Cabinet posts are filled by individuals who have been elected to represent their constituents through a General Election. Even these positions are elected from within the majority or governing party (or parties: if a coalition of minor parties can combine to form a Government.) Often, though not required by the system, the potential composition of some of the Cabinet posts is anticipated and promoted; a candidate with strong economic credentials may be projected to be Treasurer (= Treasury Secretary.) However, if that person doesn’t get elected at the local level, he/she cannot get that job.
This is not meant to promote the overall Australian system as being superior. My own sense of the US system is that it (usually) seems to be very responsive to the mood of the electorate. There were times in Australia (was it my youth?) that I felt that that the Government was very slow to respond to changes in popular sentiment. (Vietnam was a major event for Australia too!)
So, in a nutshell, why not elect the various Cabinet post members?
One last thought. I’m not a political scholar. Has a candidate for president ever lost an election solely because the voters did not want the vice-presidential candidate? Is a Vice-President really elected?
Term limits: though allowing presidents re-election does make for “wasted” time in their first term’s final year, there has been historically a marked decrase in the efficiency and power of a re-elected president, because everybody knows they can’t run again, and their clout over those who’d have to run on the same ticket is thereby diminished. This happened to Eisenhower, to Reagan, and to Clinton. It is one reason un-relectable governors, like those in Virginia, have little power. Members of Congress tend to announce their retirements as late as possible (consistent with giving potential successors a chance to line up support), as their clout disappears when they do.
I agree with the opinion that a 6-year term is too long for a president. In rapidly changing political circumstances, senators are often ludicrously obsolete by the end of their 6-year terms. It’d be even worse with a president.
Electoral College: It does have one advantage. Any fusses over vote counting (like Florida last time, remember?) are hermetically sealed into that state. With a nation-wide popular vote, we’d have to count that vote nationwide. Even though Gore clearly won that, it’d have been a hell of a mess to verify, and I wouldn’t put it past the Republicans to have tinkered with counts in a lot of states they controlled.
Required Voting: Absolutely a bad idea. Look at the way people resent jury duty. Incentives, sure: tax refunds, a piece of candy, whatever. But no threats to make people vote: it’d only reduce respect for the system further.
Before Australia came up with the idea of randomly mixing the order of candidates, the tendency of voters to just number the candidates from the top gave a strong premium to candidates whose names came near the start of the alphabet.
The “No” Vote: They have this in Nevada, but it has no function whatever. If “No” should win (it never has), the top-polling actual candidate would take office. This is a coward’s way out. I propose that if “No” wins a legislative seat, that seat just remain vacant for the term. If the voters hate the candidates that much, they should be willing to lose representation. That wouldn’t work for executive offices, as somebody has to hold those. So for those I’d propose that, if “No” wins, a new election is called, at which none of the previous election’s candidates are permitted to compete.
Instant run-off voting: A very good idea, except that people don’t understand how it works. What they can’t grasp is that their #2 vote doesn’t have any effect unless their #1 candidate has definitively lost. They fear that voting for a strong #2 will somehow undercut their #1 vote. I’ve come across this confusion a lot when working on private elections that use this system.
Prime-ministerial system: Would require a massive change in both the constitution and the political culture. Britain’s requirement that executive officers simultaneously occupy legislative posts is entirely alien to us; it wouldn’t work here because of our low tolerance for carpetbagging*; and the British prime minister is gradually turning into more of a presidential figure anyway.
*Carpetbagging, or sitting in the legislature for a district you’re not really from, is necessary in a British-style system to enable politicians to stay in Parliament should they lose their original seat, because a seat in Parliament is a pre-requisite to any other office. In the US, a president can nominate anyone to the cabinet, and if they hold a Congressional seat they give it up; but in Britain all cabinet members must be members of Parliament first, and it can get awkward if a desired person loses his seat.
As an Australian I can certify that we are not a ‘totalitarian pseudo-democratic regimes’. Compulsory voting does not work in quite the way it’s been described here. The act of voting is not itself compulsory. You get fined 20 bucks if you don’t attend a polling both. You can turn in a blank ballot although interestingly the practice is almost unknown.
The standard definition of the Donkey Votes is numbering 1, 2, 3 and son straight down the ballot. The state of Tasmania and the Australian Capital territory eliminate its effect by rotating the order in which names appear on the ballot paper.
Compulsory voting is the law in many more countries than Australia. The main reason I think it’s profoundly democratic is that it eliminates any temptation for parties to try and exclude electors from voting by measures like ballot challenges or misrepresentation. It also mean that any political appeal has to be directed to everyone, not just a particular racial or social group that is expected to vote in higher numbers.
Preferential voting reinforces that because an election strategy of demonising another candidate will not work if you are looking for that candidates second preferences. Preferential voting also eliminates the spoiler candidate.
also, arbitrary aardvark: the US was one of the very first democracies to write its constitution. the British Parliament is older, but it came into its powers so gradually that it’s not a sensible comparison. the last two hundred years have seen many, many advances in statistical theory, and many new ideas about what it means to be well-represented politically. I’d say the age of our system is more of a liability than a strength.
Okay…
1. IRV – terrible idea. Reasons: a) tabulating the vote is a nightmare, with each ballot having to be listed separately, creating huge data files (the CA recall would’ve required a single 4 GB file, I reckon); b) voting against a candidate in certain circumstances can help him win; c) there’s *still* considerable strategy options.
2. For single-winner elections, the electoral system should be either Approval or Condorcet. Each has its strengths: for instance, Approval is pretty simple, and has the advantage that no candidate can change the election by running or by not running unless he or she is the winner; Condorcet gives somewhat more accurate results and lets people rank candidates instead of just voting yes/no on each candidate.
3. Kill the Electoral College. Even making it proportional will be problematic, because Wyomingites will still have more representation per capita than Californians, and because some states will still be safe, in a way; for instance, Wyoming will always go 2-1 for the GOP (some states will be swing states, e.g. Idaho, which can swing from 3-1 GOP to 2-2).
4. Proportional representation in the House of Representatives, with a very low threshold required to enter the House (2-3%); it won’t do anything like the horrors of Weimar Germany, because the USA has a presidential system, which is more resistant to instability in the legislature, and because the USA’s politics is nowhere near as fragmented as Weimar’s Germany.
5. Make the 50 Senate districts based on population, so for example Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Washington can comfortably share two Senators. Oh yeah, and let the proportionally-elected House do the drawing of the districts, preferably with a 2/3s majority.
Tabulating Instant Runoff is not a nightmare. It is in fact extremely easy.
I’ve counted large IRV and Condorcet elections. Condorcet has a different definition for every advocate and involves mathematics that are orders of magnitude more complex than IRV, so if mathematical complexity knocks out IRV it follows that mathematical complexity must exterminate Condorcet.
The damage to higher candidates in IRV is a myth. In IRV a second or lower preference only gets counted once the higher preference is eliminated. The state of Queensland just completed a hand count last Saturday for 89 parliamentary seats using IRV. The results in most seats were known within 2 hours of the close of voting.
The Center for Voting and Democracy identifies a number of problems with approval voting.
You know, all this voting stuff is hard work. I think we should abandon it and adopt a universal monarchy. Under whom, you ask? Why, me of course. King Raznor, the Lionhearted. I mean think of it, could I possibly fuck things up worse than Bush? Eh? Eh?
Or if not, I think we should use an electronic voting system with no paper records that’s easy to hack into and the codes of which are extreme partisans who declare that they’ll do anything they can to ensure the encumbent wins. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Bitter tonight, Raznor? Lay off the City of God, man…
Take the CA recall: 135 candidates, 10 million votes. Every ballot must be tabulated, so in effect you get 10 million lines of 135 bytes each; this gives you 1.35 GB worth of info (turns out I was wrong about the 4 GB – still, this is more memory than almost all computers can handle).
Now, the objections against Approval:
1. Spoiler effect – bullshit; Approval satisfies a condition called Freedom from Irrelevant Candidates that neither IRV nor Condorcet satisfies. If people want to vote for just one candidate, it’s their choice, just like it’s their choice to vote just for first place in a ranked system.
2. Equally weighted vote – well, you can of course replace Approval with Cardinal vote (you give each candidate a number of points, say from 0 to 10), but strategically it doesn’t make sense to use any number of points but the lowest and the highest.
3. Majority rule – who said it was so important to have a majority? And besides, in Russia they use this system with a second round whenever no one gets a majority approval.
Note that no argument for IRV is truly mathematical. The arguments for IRV are based on political assumptions, most of which just don’t hold water, or are completely subjective. Even in practice IRV doesn’t work: Australia is still locked in a two-party system. Russia, however, isn’t, although it’s not necessarily the result of the voting system (countries with weak democratic rule and tradition tend to have multiparty systems no matter what, e.g. the Philippines’ 12 candidates in a plurality election in 1998).
The problem with IRV is not “mathematical complexity.” The problem is that the time it takes to count it is proportional to the number of voters whereas in all other systems it’s proportional to the log of the number of voters, and with 100 million votes, this makes a big difference.
Now, the “myth” is not a myth at all, stated the right way. Consider the following IRV election:
45 A-B-C
35 C-B-A
10 B-C-A
10 B-A-C
B is the Condorcet candidate. In Approval, C won’t win because he’s the last choice of 55% of the electorate, and hence B will win as C’s supporters join B’s supporters in approving B but not A. In IRV, A will win.
Now, let’s review strategy options:
C’s supporters can all transfer their votes to B, so that C drops rather than B and thus B will beat A.
If this is done, then some of A’s supporters can vote for C in order to make B drop and A win.
The problem is that C’s voters can’t register their preference for B over A before B is eliminated.
The spoiler effect is quenched only if smaller parties are bound to lose, which in a way defeats the purpose of multipartism.
Also, the argument that Approval encoruages indecisiveness is completely unsupported by reality. In Russia it does nothing like that, and in fact an argument could be made that candidates who seem weak and lacking in boldness and leadership will lose elections due to character or due to voters not voting for something they don’t know.
As for Queensland: how many candidates and how many voters were there?
Redeye, I haven’t finished reading your post, but just wondering about this:
Take the CA recall: 135 candidates, 10 million votes. Every ballot must be tabulated, so in effect you get 10 million lines of 135 bytes each; this gives you 1.35 GB worth of info (turns out I was wrong about the 4 GB – still, this is more memory than almost all computers can handle).
Wait, what? I have a year old Dell laptop that has 48 gigs of memory. Standard desktops these days come with 500 GB of memory. So what’s this about computers being unable to handle 1.35 GB of memory? I admit, I’m no Computer Science person, so maybe I’m missing something here, but please explain.
PDP: yeah, City of God plus discussing politics earlier today leaves me in quite a bitter mood, in regards to the state of our political machine. But even so, the Raznarchy seems pretty appealing, no?
Raznor,
I’m pretty sure Redeye means RAM. 4 GB is more RAM than a 32 bit computer can handle, and it is the maximum that a 64 bit machine can handle. However, 1.35 GB is well within the maximum limit (2 GB) of a 32 bit machine, and 64 bit machines should not be a serious problem price-wise for the California state government. The mid-sized research group that I work for owns more than a dozen 64 bit machines, and we routinely handle 4 GB data files.
Redeye,
From previous discussions of these systems, I thought that I remembered that ALL voting systems were capable of being gamed to produce unjust results under some circumstances. Is it just that the circumstances under which IRV can be gamed are easier to produce than the circumstances that allow concordet or approval to be gamed? Or that most circumstances in which concordet or approval could be gamed, IRV could also be gamed?
Why is B the Condorcet candidate? Why deny B’s voters the right to prefer A to C? If B is excluded (the IRV result) then the final count is:
A 55
C 45
The numbers for the Queensland election are given in the page I referenced. I think IRV (STV for once candidate) superior to first past the post. I do not think it superior to STV within multimember districts. The Australian senate has 12 senators from each state but they are elected by STV. Neither of the two major parties has had a majority in the Senate since 1955.
What would you calculate as the memory load for a Condorcet election were every pair of candidates must be counted and every ballot must be tabulated as many times as such pairs exist?
I’d also like to defend Australia’s voting system: you do get fined if you don’t vote, but as someone else wrote, it’s not a big deal, so I’d argue that it works rather as a carrot than a stick. We’re not talking about jail terms here people! We have good voter turnout and people do, generally, vote for who they want to represent them. I’ve never met anyone who has admitted to deliberately screwing up a vote or doing a donkey vote; this is only anecdotal evidence so not worth a thing, but even if 20 percent of the votes are lazy, ‘we don’t care’ votes, isn’t that better than only having 50 percent of your population bother?
Um, Redeye, are you arguing that just because something is difficult it shouldn’t be done? Cause I’m not big on all the techhie stuff, but it seems to me that a fair electoral system is more important than something being a pain in the ass. Can’t the information be broken down into smaller parts or something?
The thing about memory (by which I do mean RAM, as distinguished from disk space) is not my main concern – just one of them. While the California state government can handle 1.35 GB without much of a problem, most other people and bodies can’t, and that’s a big problem. With plurality, what the state can handle, the people can handle. Same with Approval. Condorcet’s a bit more complicated because the memory required is proportional to the square of the number of candidates and because the state may be interested in recording additional information (e.g. how many nth place votes every candidate got; the memory here is proportional to the square, again), even if it has no bearing on who actually wins. But IRV is not square; IRV is exponential if you consider the fact that all other systems produce results that are proportional in their size to the log of the number of voters rather than to the number of voters.
But this isn’t even my main problem. My main problem is that it’s not going to help third-parties win and that Condorcet beats or equals it in every criterion, with Approval beating or equaling it in every criterion except perhaps for one. The criteria that Condorcet fails are favorite betrayal (lowering your first choice’s rank won’t get you a better result) and freedom from irrelevant candidates (no candidate can change the outcome of the election by running or not running except the winner), both of which Condorcet only questionably fails; IRV falls flat on its face in the second and passes the first only if there is absolutely no chance of any candidate but two winning; Condorcet also fails participation (adding a ballot on which a>b doesn’t change the winner from a to b), but only if there is no single Condorcet winner, and anyway IRV is much worse in this respect.
Approval fails a few more, but you can argue that they don’t apply because approval doesn’t let you rank the candidates (which is the only thing in which IRV is better than Approval); it’s better than IRV in Freedom from Irrelevant Candidates, favorite betrayal, monotonicity (ranking X higher won’t make him lose), reverse symmetry (reversing the ranking will produce a different winner as long as the number of candidates > 1), participation, and pareto (if a>=b on all ballots and a>b on at least one than b should not be elected).
Now, Kate, the info can’t be broken down. Well, it can, but it’s no use then. It is possible to display some statistics, e.g. how many votes each candidate gets for each place; the size here is proportional to the square of the number of candidates.
As for voter turnout, you’re forgetting that Americans as a culture vote less than others. In Germany voting is completely optional and yet voter turnout is in the low 80s, and the difference between the two main parties is only slightly more than in the USA. What compulsory voting does do is ensure that smaller parties either don’t win or win fewer seats in proportional representation, because non-voters who don’t make donkey votes vote for a major, mainstream party; this in other words underrepresents smaller parties from the point of view of strength of opinion * vote (where strength of opinion is either 1, i.e. voter, or 0, i.e. non-voter).
Alan: with Condorcet, the number of pairs is n(n-1)^2, with n being the number of candidates, and the time it takes to compute the result is O(n^3), with O(x) meaning “proportional to x” – in practice, all of these also get multipled by the log of the number of voters, which in the USA is 8 and if every human being voted would be 9.8.
The worst case results for the California recall (10 million voters, 135 candidates) are below:
Plurality – 10,000,000 = 24 bit, 24 bit * 135 candidates = 405 bytes of information.
Borda – number of points ranges from 0 to 1,340,000,000 = 31 bit, 31 bit * 135 candidates = 523.125 bytes.
Approval – maximum number of votes = 10,000,000 = 24 bit –> 405 bytes.
Condorcet – 135*67 = 9045 pairs, *2 for computation = 18090, each cell ranges from 0 to 10,000,000 = 24 bits ==> 24*18090 = 54270 bytes = 53 KB.
Cardinal vote – maximum number of points = 100,000,000 = 27 bits with a maximum of 10 points, 1,000,000,000 = 30 bits with a maximum of 100 points, yielding 455.625 and 506.25 bytes respectively.
IRV – 10,000,000 ballots * 135 candidates * 8 bits per candidate = 10,000,000 ballots * 135 bytes per ballot = 1,350,000,000 bytes = 1.26 GB.
B in my example is the Condorcet candidate because 55 out of 100 prefer him to A and 65 out of 100 prefer him to C. A candidate who is preferred to every other candidate is called the Condorcet candidate. Absent a Condorcet candidate, there is often a set of 3 or more candidates called the Smith set, every member of which is preferred to every candidate outside it (the Smith Set is defined as the smallest such possible set, considering that there are often many sets satisfying this condition, each of which is a subset of the larger such sets).
Charles: See, with Approval it’s really hard to produce gaming scenarios, because it’s not a ranked system – what is possible is to get rankings, assume that polls published just before the election show the results, and then devise strategies for various kinds of voters that will translate the ranked preferences into approval vote. Condorcet does have its scenarios, but as I was explained once, the voters for the “sincere” winner always have a way of getting their candidate elected. Besides, IRV is much, much easier to game than Condorcet, and unlike Plurality, these gamings can’t be reduced to sound bytes such as “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.”
Redeye,
I’m not going to argue over which is the best system of voting. We all have our favorites & all of them are imperfect. If I can find the article (which I did send to Amp) last year, I’ll post the link. But there is no question that first past the post is the worst of them all.
***WARNING: Technical Computer Speak Ahead***
Speaking as a programmer:
As to computer/memory/storage limits. Pardon my English, but that’s a total misunderstanding of the way in which computers & their programs work. See, just because you wind up with a 10 GB file doesn’t mean that you need 10GB of RAM (or memory). Because you don’t need to load the whole file, all at once, into memory to process it. Basically, you need your program to count. (Count votes for each candidate). For that you need only access records in the file in some order (sequentially will work fine) and keep track of the number of votes for each candidate. If this takes more than a couple meg I’d be surprised. So, you wind up with counts of 1st place votes for each candidate. If none has 50% +1, your program eliminates the candidate w/ the least votes, starts reading the file again, going to choice 2 for the eliminated candidate. And so on. RAM is never going to be an issue.
Your other arguments may be valid, but the “computer memory problem” thing is not.
Pingback: Galois