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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

There are no completely fair electoral systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

The best counter-example I saw was to take a page from James T. Kirk: You change the rules of the game.

The word "fair" here is typically used to in the context of there being an unambiguous "winner". i.e. someone that everyone can agree won the most votes, or is most representative of the votes as cast.

You can change that definition slightly, to "a fair vote is where everyone can agree that the process used to choose the winner is unambiguous, and that there is a clear winner."

The method for this kind of "fair" vote is to to count all votes as cast. Then, pick one voter at random. That vote determines the winner. This is a "probability" method of picking winners, not a "counting" method.

This is arguably "fair" in that each candidate has a probability of winning in direct relation to the votes they received. Each voter has their vote counted identically to all other voters.

It has other benefits. There are no "safe" areas which can be ignored, because the candidate is assured of getting sufficient votes to win. Instead, every incremental vote is an incremental increase in the probability of the candidate getting elected.

The "counting votes" problem has similar issues to share splits in companies. If a company has 3 share holders (49%, 49%, and 2%), and requires 50%+1 votes for consensus, each share holder has an equal amount of power. This is arguably an imbalance with respect to the shares they purchased.

In the probability method of picking winners, each voter has exactly the same power, which is arguable the most "fair".

> The best counter-example I saw was to take a page from James T. Kirk

Kirk is a good pick for a "counter-example" to ... math. It's not real.

There are all kinds of systems that have positive and negative aspects, but none of them are perfect.

I think you saw "Kirk", and stopped. i.e. you missed the entire point of my comment.

I wasn't claiming that Kirk was a good example of math. I used it as an example of how changing the requirements can lead to a different solution.

Arrow's theorem only applies to ranked voting systems. Approval and Range voting pass its criteria:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

Except when there are only two alternatives which is the de facto situation in the US right now. It's also an irrelevant topic when it comes to the electoral college which solves exactly nothing in creating a fair election, it's just strictly worse than the alternatives.

> Except when there are only two alternatives which is the de facto situation in the US right now.

Well, two candidates have a possibility of winning. The nature of first-past-the-post elections means that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein can still affect the outcome if their votes change the result.

>Except when there are only two alternatives which is the de facto situation in the US right now.

Is it? At the start of the election there were approximately 20+ presidential candidates, with around half having a reasonable chance of being elected. Four major candidates (Sanders, Trump, Stein, Johnson) were essentially unaffiliated with the major parties, though two ran for the respective party nomination.

And even though two parties dominate Congress, members are much more undisciplined when it comes to voting along party lines than in PR-based systems. Hell, have the Republicans don't even support their nominee. American democracy is messy but vibrant.

At the point the electoral college becomes a factor all the primaries are already ran and there are only two candidates with a chance at the election. Perot came closer in the past, but there hasn't been any third party candidate since with a shot at the election. Having something like instant runoff would be nice to enable more third-party candidates to make a multi-election push at the presidency but just doing a single-turn popular vote simple majority would be a very big improvement on the current mess.

...but first-past-the-post block voting is one of the least fair.

It's undeniable that it has problems. See my other comment about Italy, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885052 - it made me rethink the US system some. It does have some advantages, like generally pushing politics towards whatever the 'center' of the US is, and some more stability than an Italian-style (IIRC, Israel uses a similar system) parliamentary system.

Does "stability" mean "constantly gridlocked"?

It means not getting a new government each year first and foremost. That was extremely common in Italian politics up until about the 90ies.

"Gridlock" can also be a feature for those who do not want to see one party have the power to do whatever they want. For instance, some Republicans are happy to see Obama get blocked at every turn just as some Democrats were happy to see GWB obstructed. It does seem like it's going farther and farther, with calls to block any supreme court nominations by Hillary, but gridlock in and of itself is something you occasionally get in a system with checks and balances.

We're beyond the point of "sometimes".

And I don't think anyone is advocating copying the Italien governmental system?

Some people are smitten with the idea of purely proportional representation, so that "all voices" are heard.

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