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To Build a Better Ballot

ncase.me.

307 pointsbpierre168 comments

I suspect Gary Johnson getting chosen by a Borda count isn't as weird/surprising as the number of question marks implies. Caveat: I didn't see a raw distribution of preference orders on the Vox survey; if it's linked somewhere, I missed it. But I think Johnson is effectively acting as a compromise candidate: a lot of Clinton voters really hate Trump and a lot of Trump voters really hate Clinton, enough that they'd both prefer Johnson over the other candidate, even if they don't actually know much about him, or even mildly dislike him. Borda count tends to choose compromise candidates, so that's what you end up with. Now, Johnson's policies are fairly fringe and weird, and so are the other third party candidate's (Stein), but that's because serious candidates don't run on third party tickets that have no chance of winning. If the election was actually conducted using a Borda count, you'd probably see a number of relatively boring centrists running, and one of them would win instead of Johnson - which is a perfectly reasonable result. Well, except that that would also fundamentally change the coverage of the race, so there's no reason to expect the election would go anywhere near the same way overall (it would probably be less polarized), but the point is that to the limited extent the survey results reflect this hypothetical world, they don't cast it in a bad light.

Edit: Also, I like Clinton, but her being the Concordet winner doesn't mean much in terms of that world either. When almost all of the ballots give the top rank to one of two candidates, whichever of the two gets more votes is the Concordet winner. But that's only the case because of first-past-the-post, both because there aren't any good third-party candidates (neither centrist nor extremist), and because the structure of the race strongly encourages voters to sign up for one bandwagon or the other .

  But I think Johnson is effectively acting as a compromise 
  candidate: a lot of Clinton voters really hate Trump and a 
  lot of Trump voters really hate Clinton, enough that they'd 
  both prefer Johnson over the other candidate, even if they 
  don't actually know much about him, or even mildly dislike 
  him.

That, and a lot of people were voting less for the man and more for an independent ticket. And not even with the expectation that it would pay off in this election, but that it would encourage more (and more mainstream) third-party candidates to run in the future.

The greater the number of votes a third party gets, the more the mainstream candidates will move towards the third party positions.

That means that voting for a third party is not a throwaway vote, even if the third party has zero chance of winning.

I may be reading into this too much, but I'm picking up a little bit of mild dislike for Johnson. I voted for him, and while that was easy when I looked at the other choices of Trump and Clinton (I don't dislike Stein, and I would have voted for Bernie had Clinton's team had not rigged the DNC and allowed him through), I also do strongly support him.

I realize I'm a bit biased because I like the libertarian principles: prioritizing individual civil liberties, stopping human rights abuses and unnecessary wars, and streamlining government.

I'm curious though because outside of disagreement with those, there's only one thing that I understand people disagree with: TPP (Johnson claims it isn't a crony capitalist deal and it does foster free trade).

I guess I don't really understand why people have a mild dislike for him, especially when I see how some people adore Clinton or Trump -- it doesn't make sense to me.

He doesn't come with the plutocratic baggage of Trump and Clinton (https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/trump-makes-america-gold...), which in itself is a great thing to like about him.

Most people don't agree with libertarianism. That's basically it.

That seems like a broad stroke. Libertarianism is just a collection of different ideals, the same way socialism and capitalism are, around a few central values.

The primary tenants are the importance of civil liberties and autonomy (as opposed to authoritarianism).

Beyond that, you could be a libertarian and promote laissez faire capitalism, or you could be a libertarian and promote socialism. Saying you broadly disagree with libertarianism just confuses me: you don't agree with civil liberties and you want authoritarian government? (it's a rhetorical question)

Libertarian socialism aka anarchism isn't really related to propertarianism. And again, most people agree with neither.

any form of libertarianism != anarchism!

propertarianism is a libertarian philosophy

> I realize I'm a bit biased because I like the libertarian principles: prioritizing individual civil liberties, stopping human rights abuses and unnecessary wars, and streamlining government.

I think those are completely reasonable things to like in his policies. And as a caveat, I don't personally dislike Gary Johnson (the man) himself. I just haven't heard a compelling argument for what he'd do to address corporate overreach, which I (personally) find the biggest problem average Americans face today, whether it is O&G companies destroying our environment or financial institutions causing global financial crises. I'm not saying (by any means!) Trump or Clinton would do any better, but I don't see how rolling back oversight on the private sector really solves the problem. I wish solving our problems was as simple as dismantling our governments but I don't see how that would help us, as it's our only (very flawed) leverage. I think doing so would decrease the little leverage we have. So to answer your concern, I think the reason people don't like Johnson is because he was running for a political office where they believe he would act against their own best interest.

> I wish solving our problems was as simple as dismantling our governments

I can understand that. It's certainly a topic for debate, not one where one side has proven to be right or wrong.

Johnson wasn't really in favor of dismantling government oversight on everything. He has stated he's in favor of agencies which protect environment, health, water, etc. He wants market-based solutions like a carbon tax where they will work better than heavy handed regulation.

> He has stated he's in favor of agencies which protect environment, health, water, etc. He wants market-based solutions like a carbon tax where they will work better than heavy handed regulation.

I could theoretically get behind some of that. However it doesn't look like Gary Johnson actually supports a carbon tax:

http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/26/gary-johnson-no-to-carbon-...

Perhaps the hard political position libertarians put themselves in is between the "no taxes, no regulation, ever!" conservatives and people who aspire to only have regulatory institutions where it makes sense (perhaps such as yourself). Moreover, at a certain point, it seems like market-based solutions and heavy handed regulations become essentially the same. Imagining an extreme scenario: what if you had a carbon tax of $1M per cubic meter of CO2 burned? It would certainly seem a lot like a regulation at that point.

> However it doesn't look like Gary Johnson actually supports a carbon tax:

> what if you had a carbon tax of $1M per cubic meter of CO2 burned? It would certainly seem a lot like a regulation at that point.

Wow, good point. I swear I heard him say he was in favor of it, and so I looked at the article and it mentioned he had said he was, but he changed his mind. Hmm. I remember him talking a lot about market-based solutions to environmental problems, but I guess he wasn't as committed to that idea as I thought it sounded like.

So 1 million per cubic meter of C02 = a regulation? You mean, because it would be of great burden to business with a high tax?

The thing about a tax is that it is extraordinarily more efficient than heavy-handed regulation. In-between concepts like cap-and-trade actually have actually rewarded polluters by subsidizing them, which also isn't right.

People should be rewarded for doing good things, and given disincentives for doing bad things. That's a powerful concept and I think the world would be a better place if people would get behind it in politics.

> People should be rewarded for doing good things, and given disincentives for doing bad things. That's a powerful concept and I think the world would be a better place if people would get behind it in politics.

I remember seeing a clip from Bernie criticizing Trump after the news broke about him "saving" (there's obviously a lot to be discuss about what actually happened) the Carrier jobs, basically saying, American companies should want to keep their jobs in America because it is the right thing to do. After hearing that, I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah, you know, sure. You're right Bernie. Companies should want to do that because it's the American thing to do, but why is it such a bad idea to give companies incentive to stay?" And for the most part, I believe that's what Trump has been talking about with regards to keeping jobs in the US. It sounds to me that he is just trying to make it more expensive for companies to move their jobs overseas than to keep them here by the way of this import tariff he keeps touting. Now, of course, I have no idea how any of this plays out and turns into actual law, but the basic idea makes sense to me.

> So 1 million per cubic meter of C02 = a regulation? You mean, because it would be of great burden to business with a high tax?

I guess what I'm saying is that a tax becomes a regulation at the point where you can't afford it anymore. Also you have to realize that a carbon tax is usually on everyone -- not just corporations. In most cases that affects the lowest people on the totem pole more than the higher ups. You have to realize that for certain people, what you say is "disincentivising" is actually materially affecting their ability to live. If you were to try to distribute that disincentivizing evenly across the totem pole, I'd be on board with it.

Ya for that reason most pro-carbon tax economists already are saying it should come with a rebate to lower income groups. That solves that problem (it is well-known).

Gary has quite a bit of collectivist ideals, to the point he's basically a democrat in the books of many, including myself. It is perhaps this "betrayal" of the party ideals that makes him unfavorable. It's true also that he as a candidate sits well between the R/D camps. IMO true (truer) libertarians such as A Petersen or Rand Paul would have been great.

This is the exact reason why I think it might be even better to vote for 'Where should our resources go to?'.

For example rank the following subjects:

  * Health care
  * Security
  * Climate

Because now you might agree with Trump except for his climate policy. With the current system it's very hard to express this.

I've suggested something similar numerous times. Along the lines of what the Humble Indie Bundle does. That way, people can decide what has priority over what, and how much to allocate to it.

Unfortunately, this'll open up a can of worms for the state and its proponents. It does not sit well with them that people can "via taxes" influence what gets funded or defunded. E.g. Rich people could reduce their "welfare group" contribution to 0.1% of their taxes, and bump up say infrastructure to 99.9%.

> Rich people could reduce their "welfare group" contribution to 0.1% of their taxes, and bump up say infrastructure to 99.9%

If it happened, we would quickly see "infrastructure" legally redefined in the loosest possible way (e.g. hospitals would become infrastructure, homeless shelters would become infrastructure, tax-processing offices would become "infrastructure'... and these things need people to work so their salaries would also be classed as "infrastructure", etc etc).

You can't effectively implement technical solutions to political problems. Elites will do what elites want to do, unless they are politically pressured every day not to do it. Technicalities won't stop them.

Because this is not what our system of government is meant to express.

We are not a democracy: we are a democratic republic. Many people forget this. The intended way for us to make our voices heard is to democratically select somebody to represent our wants and needs accurately.

However, with the current state of lobbying, career politicians, and how much the world has changed since this system was put into place, whether this is still a valid idea is up in the air...

Nothing has changed, that was the way it was when the system was implemented. I would even say if you break things down to people's wants and needs, the world hasn't even changed that much.

When talking about the effect of voting systems on elections, something I think is overlooked is the game-theoretic implications on the candidates.

Take the second diagram in the article and move the candidates around. What's the optimal strategy? To move as close to your opponent as possible, while staying closer to the centre.

Now take the diagram with three candidates, and move them around. What's the optimal strategy? To move as far away from both opponents.

This works even if you consider an n-dimensional space for every conceivable issue. Two-party system encourages both parties to move towards the centre. Three- (or more) party system encourages them to spread out.

3 parties would take up position around some population center, with some differentiation, but not too much. Probably they each move to the center of mass of the third of the population they represent, except that there's some incentive to be a little centrist of that to try and poach marginal voters from the other two parties. If a party moves too far out from center, centrist voters on their margins defect to the other two parties. I'm not sure what the penalty for being 'too centrist' is.

> Two-party system encourages both parties to move towards the centre.

Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US, both major parties are moving towards the right and moving towards authoritarian positions.

This is usually explained by the idea that the 'Center' moves about over time. Perhaps in this instance the center was just further right than the parties expected.

  Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or 
  this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US, 
  both major parties are moving towards the right and moving 
  towards authoritarian positions.

Which seems to be a result of FPTP, which fosters the limited choice between RED/BLUE.

Many countries which do not use FPTP nonetheless end up with stable long-lived de facto two-party systems. The hypothetical ideal of a many-party coalition state is rare regardless of voting system and apportionment.

> Many countries which do not use FPTP nonetheless end up with stable long-lived de facto two-party systems

No, they don't. Heck, even many systems that do use FPTP (e.g., the UK) support more parties with representation in the main national legislative body than the US.

A two-party system isn't one where merely there are two stronger parties that tend to form governments or executive administrations.

So as long as there are some seats going to other parties, you don't care if there's an uninterrupted streak of two dominant major parties such that one of them always forms and leads the government?

Because that is the case in many countries, even countries which don't do FPTP, even countries which do things that people argue are good electorally, and that does not seem like a categorical improvement over what happens in, say, the US.

> Because that is the case in many countries, even countries which don't do FPTP,

No, it's emphatically not, especially if you mean exclusively forms the government (not in a coalition.) And, if you don't mean that, it's pretty substantially weaker than the duopoly in the US.

Heck, even FPTP systems that aren't also Presidential systems (another structural factor that reduces competitive parties) generally don't do what you describe, at least in the form of exclusively non-coalition governments.

> and that does not seem like a categorical improvement over what happens in, say, the US.

Whether the difference is merely a substantial quantitative improvement with some creatively-defined common category or a categorical improvement is ultimately immaterial.

I don't think a multi-party system is quite the right goal to aim for. In the current system in the US, people with preferences underserved by both D and R don't just lack a respected party, they face a giant barrier to even making the lack visible. Green-leaning? Fuck 'em, what'll they do -- vote Republican? To make your preference unambiguous by an actual vote, under our system, you have to be seriously into the fringe. This creates a kind of activation-energy barrier to coordinating on a change: very many people can feel that, say, smoking pot is OK, without their preference mattering -- without it even affecting their vote. This fraction could even exceed 50%, unless it's common knowledge that it's over 50%: you don't "throw away" your vote when you expect everyone else to also vote strategically according to preferences which aren't common knowledge.

So a voting system with less of a strategy problem could make common knowledge of real voter preferences easier to arrive at -- the preferences people would honestly vote by, given the chance. You could still have just two major parties, but disciplined by a real option of serious competition if they don't address these no-longer-deniable preferences.

Caveats: 1. AFAIK we still need a clearer understanding of how much strategy people exercise in approval or score voting in practice, once they've gotten used to the new system. And 2. these are just my thoughts as a random citizen trying to see to a way to less large-scale insanity. I'm not a political scientist and I haven't seen one say anything like this about common knowledge and voting systems.

Having a third party candidate be a real possibility in a non-FPTP voting system would ensure that there was an escape valve if a party moved too far from the center, right? So it would be strongly motivated not to?

I feel like the parties split some axis of what people want, but are both pulled well off center of the population by MONEY.

The U.S. reaping these benefits from their two party system is confounded by the primaries. The "centre" of each primary is with respect to the party platform, not the general population.

Presidential candidates' optimal strategy is to be centre of the party base in primaries, then centre of the entire country in the general election. (And they have to do this while avoiding accusations of flip flopping.)

(And there are other confounders that apply regardless of voting system. Nobody involved is working with perfect information and nobody is a perfectly rational actor.)

It's affected by personalities. A lot of people probably voted for Trump the person, rather than Trump's policies. If that's true, his position on the diagram isn't all that important.

I guess this is what you meant by "non-rational actors" - people voting for policies they don't like because they like the person saying them.

Primary voters' optimal strategy, if voting within their preferred party, should also be to pick a centre candidate, so they will win.

Could get complex if people vote in the opposing party's primary though.

> both major parties are moving towards the right

Not on social issues. Trump is a moderate on abortion and gay marriage. Bill Clinton passed DADT, DOMA, welfare work requirements, and his crime bill, and called for a crackdown on illegal immigration. He wouldn't be able to win the Democratic nomination nowadays.

> moving towards authoritarian positions

Unfortunately.

I think the public is moving leftward on social issues (with the exception of abortion [0]), but I'm not sure the Republican party has been recently. I mean, the Log Cabin Republicans called the most recent platform the "most anti-LGBT in history" [1]. My sense is that Trump won the nomination by downplaying his personal views on abortion and gay marriage and pledging to nominate conservative justices.

[0]: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-...

[1]: http://www.logcabin.org/pressrelease/a-message-on-the-gop-pl...

Trump's positions on abortion don't seem particular thought-through, but he did say that he would nominate SCOTUS justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. I don't think that's a moderate position at all.

And while Trump might be less of an extremist on these issues than his fellow Republicans, the party's elected officials (including his running mate) haven't moved an inch towards the center on abortion rights. Mike Pence governed Indiana, a state with some of the tightest (and most ridiculous, honestly) restrictions on abortion in the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Donald_...

> Trump's positions on abortion don't seem particular thought-through, but he did say that he would nominate SCOTUS justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. I don't think that's a moderate position at all.

'Allowing the states to determine what is allowed' seems more moderate than 'no state may meaningfully restrict something,' no?

Progressivism is tricky -- the definition of the word is for continual change. So, no progressive agenda of Year X would be progressive in Year X+20. A successfu progressive in Year X would be pushing progress the margin choices of the day. In Year X+20, a different set of choices are at the margin. No effective progressive in Year X would have the same agenda in Year X+20.

I really think progressivism is just warmed over Marxism and has been for a really long time. Progressives near the turn of the last century pursued alcohol prohibition. Granted, they also pushed for womens' suffrage. A lot of damage was done by Prohibition, though. A lot.

This is incoherent. The Marxists ended alcohol prohibition in Soviet Russia.

> Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or this statement isn't backed by reality.

Both statements are true (shifts in the center, including long term trends in a single direction) happen, but are orthogonal to the idea that a two-party systems results in both parties driving for the middle seize the median voter (it would just make that a moving target.)

OTOH, all of the examples from experience show that two-party systems don't actually have that effect, and we have good ideas why:

1. Engagement falls off as a party's position gets further from a citizens, and

2. Political views are rarely unimodally distributed to start with, and two-party systems tend to promote more of a bimodal distribution on the main axis of variation.

So, a big part of what parties position for is keeping their base engaged, not appeal to the center.

"authoritarian" isn't a left/right issue. Mao and Stalin were leftist authoritarians.

Your claim that authoritarianism is non-centrist is not obvious, I don't even agree it's true.

> Your claim that authoritarianism is non-centrist is not obvious, I don't even agree it's true.

I made no such claim. My sentence has an "and" in it.

> Two-party system encourages both parties to move towards the centre.

If you assume things (unimodal distribution of preferences and/or participation [propensity to vote, in simple models that ignore campaigning] that is constant across the spectrum and insensitive to distance between the voters preference and the nearest party position) that turn out not to be true in practice, sure.

In the real world, two-party systems don't usually encourage centrism, they encourage polarization.

The median voter theorem is a solid mathematical result given the very simple parameters it applies to, but has less practical application to the real world than many people like to think.

So, the biggest complaint about Instant-runoff voting seems to be that it can lead to a counter-intuitive scenario, where a candidate becomes more popular, but loses the election.

From what I've seen of constructed scenarios that have this situation, they have 'left', 'compromise', and 'right' candidates, with the majority of voters tending to prefer left>compromise>right, or right>compromise>left.

If 'compromise' is the weakest candidate, either left or right ends up winning. But if left or right become popular enough, and make left/right the weakest candidate, than compromise wins out over both extremes.

Frankly, this actually doesn't seem like that much of a problem to me. If we end up with everyone's second-favorite choice, everyone is at least second-most happy.

For example, in the USA - Without commenting on Gary Johnson's politics or experience, I think the USA would have been happier had he been chosen. Half the population is pulling their hair out over Trump. Had Clinton won, the other half would likely feel the same way. Most of the population would be less-excited to see Johnson in office than their preferred candidate, but relieved that at least opposing candidate didn't get in.

>So, the biggest complaint about Instant-runoff voting seems to be that it can lead to a counter-intuitive scenario, where a candidate becomes more popular, but loses the election.

This sentence doesn't make sense the original article failed to mention if you poll 50% of the first preference vote you get elected. So if you are at least 50% "popular" you can't lose.

If you poll below 50% it comes down to preferences as it rightly should in my opinion. there is nothing counter intuitive about this. It happens here (in Australia) quite often.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/guide/mpor/

Here the Right (Liberal party) candidate polled 40% and lost because the two Left parties (Labor + Greens) also polled about 40% combined.

Is it good that sometimes voting A > B > C would cause A to lose, while voting C > B > A would cause A to win?

Does this actually happen in practice? What would it take to trigger this behavior?

Yes, here's an account of a real election http://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html. The relevant bit:

> If 753 of the W-voters (specifically, all 495 of the W>K>M voters plus 258 of the 1289 W-only voters) had instead decided to vote for K, then W would have been eliminated (not M) and then M would have beaten K in the final IRV round by 4067 to 3755. In other words, Kiss won, but if 753 Wright-voters had switched their vote to Kiss, that would have made Kiss lose!

this actually happened in Burlington VT in 2009; then they repealed IRV http://bolson.org/~bolson/2009/20090303_burlington_vt_mayor....

Why do these voting comparisons always only discuss electing single winner? A big part of the change needed is to introduce more proportional representation. Asides from moving strictly to an MMP style system, one way is to enlarge the districts so that each district elects (e.g.) five representatives using STV. Don't get me wrong, IRV is 10x better than what we have today, but only makes sense for the president or senate where there can be only one winner each election.

It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems.

http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html

> It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems.

Yes, it is. Proportionality in the legislature is a key determinant of public satisfaction with government amongodern democracies. See Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

Being way more immune to gerrymandering should be reason enough in my opinion. And besides, most of the things on the "con" list are only problems in some kinds of proportional representation I doubt we would ever use in the US (party list system).

In this context, it's interesting to note that the US Vice President was originally not a running mate to the President, but the runner-up (2nd most electoral college votes).

This theoretically allows more proportional representation by, essentially, preventing 1 group from electing their representatives of choice to (in this case) 2 positions (ignoring an overwhelming majority & certainty of it)

I'd be interested to see how effective a "runner-up-selection" methodology would be if applied in a more general case.

Look at what is happening in Brazil right now. They use this system. The minority party was able to impeach Dilma Rousseff and take over the presidency. I would expect lots of these attempts if the US used this system as well

I know what you mean. I live in a jurisdiction with optional preferential voting electing 5 candidates using STV. It's fantastic and does tend to elect a house which is broadly representative of what people actually wanted.

Turkey ballot. Always add a 'none of the above' choice. This is the turkey.

This also makes the ballot less ambiguous.

In the election, if a candidate gets 50% + 1 vote, they win. If not, anyone getting less than the turkey is tossed and cannot run in the runoff. No candidates win? Enroll a new slate.

I guess you can think of 'none of the above' as a placebo candidate.

To make that work, I think you'd also have to make the initial campaign shorter to account for runoffs and the possibility of having to start over with a new slate.

And here you see the problem in the US having a fixed inauguration date.

In parliamentary countries, where the government can vote to dissolve itself, they tend to call for elections whenever the governing coalition is unstable, and elections can take as long as needed, and be re-held as needed.

True, although my main concern is that making elections take even longer will cause fewer people to pay attention and ultimately vote.

So, if no candidate wins in your House district is the seat vacant until you get a non-turkey, or does the incumbent's term get extended?

In addition to the great overview of voting systems and the policy commentary, the interactive parts -- which they call 'Explorable Explanations [1]' -- are fantastic! The code for this one is on Github [2].

[1] http://explorableexplanations.com/ [2] https://github.com/ncase/ballot

Could someone explain what `index.js`[1] is doing? It looks like code to figure out whether someone is actually reading the article or not but I'm curious why the various timeouts and scroll listeners, and what they're doing exactly.

[1] https://github.com/ncase/ballot/blob/gh-pages/js/index.js

That's exactly what it's doing -- it's trying to figure out if your viewport is looking at the content 'above the fold', so that it can show the "splash iframe" [1] while you're looking at it, and stop JS-animating it when you're not.

[1] http://ncase.me/ballot/splash/splash.html

I think the discussion is severely lacking a proper consideration of how strategic voting affects the systems it likes best. For example, score voting encourages people to exaggerate their preferences, and approval voting makes it non-trivial to figure out who you should approve.

That does deserve deeper consideration, but the page is already long for an intro for a mass audience, who need to hear about this if it's to make a difference. Also it seems very unlikely for strategic voting to become a worse problem for approval voting or score voting than it is for the systems we're stuck with right now. Perhaps they'd end up making no difference, though I doubt it. If you feel like writing up your thoughts on this, or pointing to a good writeup, I'd be interested.

This format of interactive article is really excellent. It's a good example of taking advantage of the medium of the web.

Kudos to the interactive diagrams, but this seems misinformed about spoiler history.

The most famous "spoiler" was Perot, not Nader. Bush v. Gore was an extremely tight election, but there were third parties that drew more votes from Bush than Gore, and wer within the margin of error, possibly counterbalancing Nader's effect. Whereas with Perot, he received 19% of the popular vote, most of which were clearly drawn from George Bush, ensuring a Clinton win.

Yes, the Nader thing was just Democratic propaganda to ensure future left-wing parties are discredited by people and the media right from the start, just like they tried and failed to do this time with Jill Stein. Call it "fake news" if you will, not that Google or Facebook would ever ban a media entity like MSNBC [1] over it...

How can you blame Stein for a few thousand lost votes when millions of other voters who voted Democratic in the last election stayed home because they didn't like your candidate? Do you really think those thousands of people that didn't stay home because they didn't like your candidate, but went to vote, and voted for Stein, would've voted your candidate instead? No, best case scenario, they would've stayed home just like the others, otherwise.

Also, in some states tens of thousands (more than those that voted for Stein) actually did go to vote, voted on local elections, and didn't vote for president. Either way, blaming Stein is just laughable.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xK5NaH0oy4

That's a little overstated. If you go by national exit polls, both Stein voters and Johnson voters "would have voted" for Clinton over Trump (in a two-person election) about 25-15. The rest wouldn't have.

If that margin is applied to each state (which isn't quite right but whatever), that's roughly enough to flip Michigan but probably not any other states.

So, true that you can't pin the blame on Stein, but she did have an effect, partly measured by the vote, and partly unmeasurable in terms of enthusiasm dampening, etc.

Same sort of thing with Nader - you can't quite draw a mathematical line that he flipped Florida, but all his Gush/Bore stuff - who knows what affect that had in terms of people not voting.

Wikipedia[1], at least, seems to disagree:

"While many disaffected conservatives may have voted for Ross Perot to protest Bush's tax increase, further examination of the Perot vote in the Election Night exit polls not only showed that Perot siphoned votes nearly equally among Bush and Clinton, but roughly two-thirds of those voters who cited Bush's broken 'No New Taxes' pledge as 'very important' (25%) voted for Bill Clinton."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

I am no expert on this, but Wikipedia cites four sources for the claim that "further examination of the Perot vote in the Election Night exit polls ... showed that Perot siphoned votes nearly equally among Bush and Clinton" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot_presidential_campai...). FiveThirtyEight put together a little doc making the same claim: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ross-perot-myth/

Recounting my comment from a previous article[1], comparing all these voting systems is not really the right way to think about it. First, you need to separate the mechanism used to express voter preference (i.e the ballot design), from the method used to choose the winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems.

In terms of ballot designs, they are basically all just restricted subsets of the "score" voting ballot. That is, any voter preference that can be expressed in an "approval", "ranked choice", "ranked choice with ties", or traditional "single choice" ballot, can also be expressed with a "score" ballot.

That means every voting system is a "score ballot" system with some restrictions applied to the ballot. This means that, for example, you could have an election where you allow the voter to choose whichever ballot they are most comfortable with. Then you just interpret the ballot as a score ballot.

There are multiple ways to choose a winner from a set of score ballots. But debating between them is counterproductive to getting better voting systems adopted. Just start off with one that's easy to understand (i.e. "sum of ratings", or "only the first choice counts"), and worry about improving it later.

The important thing is to give the voter the option to use a more expressive ballot. Whichever one they feel most comfortable with. You could even make it so that initially, all ballots are converted to traditional "single choice" ballots for tallying, but let voters know how the vote would have turned out under other evaluation methods (like "sum of ratings" and Schulze). I think voters would quickly realize the value of counting all of their expressed preferences.

...

But that is a very cool site. Probably the kind of site the web was intended for, don't you think?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566#score_12952384

The issue with that is any change, especially how a winner is chosen from a ballot, is a long and politically fraught process so whatever is changed to shouldn't just be 'eh it's not great but we'll change it in a few years' because that's really unlikely to actually happen.

So first of all, I think that only three evaluation methods should be considered - ballot conversion/reduction to traditional "single choice", "sum of ratings", and Schulze. You might need to start off with conversion to traditional "single choice", because it's hard to argue against adopting it. That is, you're not actually changing the election system at all. You're just allowing people to optionally express extra information about their preferences in a way that does not affect the election. But it will give each voter a chance to, if they want, try out more expressive ballots (which will presumably be appealing to most people once they get the hang of it), and the public will be told how the election would have resulted under the other two evaluation systems. Presumably, a more "centrist" candidate would generally have won. And after a few election cycles, people will be able to form an opinion on which evaluation system they think produces the best results.

I think the reason why electoral system change has so often been met with public resistance is that most people don't have a feel for how the results would change, and nobody is offering them a chance to get familiar with a different election system without an up-front commitment to the change.

If you can get people to accept the "sum of ratings" evaluation method, then I say be happy with that. The fact that "sum of ratings" is arguably not as good as Schulze is a very high class problem to have. (Btw I'm using Schulze as a stand-in for any "good but complex" evaluation system.) Anyway, I'm not sure the improvement in evaluation is worth having an evaluation system that most people wouldn't understand.

So just to sum up, I think what I'm proposing is different and more acceptable in that:

i) It allows people to use whichever ballot they feel most comfortable with, knowing that no matter which ballot they choose, their vote will count as much as any other voter.

ii) It allows voters, if they so choose, to get familiar with the more expressive ballots and different evaluation methods without committing to any change in the election system.

I love the topic of voting systems, but... we can't even get rid of the fucking penny over here. The odds of the U.S. changing its voting methodology are so infinitesimal, I'm having trouble conceptualizing it.

Voting methods are mostly set state by state, as I understand it. (I'm pretty ignorant about politics.) Some states, like California, allow powerful ballot propositions. Thus you could get a change like this on the ballot, starting in a few states, without going through the major parties. In California it doesn't even seem that wild to hope the parties would support the change: in recent years it changed to "open primaries", and I think it'd be rational for the D's and R's to want approval voting in the primary. You get experience with it and it starts to become thinkable elsewhere.

Or start using it in nongovernmental orgs, and likewise gain experience and familiarity.

STV type systems seem to be gradually catching on. Oregon's Benton County recently passed a rancked choice voting thing. I think it's a 'bottom up' type of reform.

>The odds of the U.S. changing its voting methodology are so infinitesimal, I'm having trouble conceptualizing it.

You mean how Maine just passed Rank-Choice (Instant Runoff) voting as law? [1]

"On November 8 [2016], Maine voters passed Question 5 and became the first state in the nation to adopt Ranked Choice Voting for state and federal elections. The Yes On 5 campaign was led by the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, a grassroots, Maine-based organization founded by former independent state senator Dick Woodbury of Yarmouth, and led by Kyle Bailey of Gorham." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

[2] http://www.fairvote.org/maine_voters_adopt_ranked_choice_vot...

Not to mention, the current people in power benefit greatly from the current system, so our odds are even worsened.

Any suggestions? Based on your comment should I throw up my hands and accept it? Call my representatives? Donate to or volunteer for verifiedvoting.org? Are the odds so bad that we should consider emigration? Revolution?

I upvoted you because you're right, now if ever is the time to stand up and fight for the cause you believe in. If anything, realizing what you are up against forces you to put up a much strong stance given you are aware of the forces you must fight against.

I hope you do, too! Other than the last two. I don't think it's come to the point where we need the last, and we need people who are passionate and want to change to stick around :)

I'm actually very interested in the mathematical implication of score voting. Because in Indian elections - the world's largest elections - IRV is fairly impractical. We have constituencies with more than 10-15 candidates and the "recalculations" will kill the system. We also have very frequent recounts.

I'm still thinking of how to explain score voting to an illiterate voter. It requires a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude more involved than a simple checkbox next to a candidate.

I'm still thinking of how to explain score voting to an illiterate voter. It requires a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude more involved than a simple checkbox next to a candidate.

You've made a very important point. In tech we often talk about UX with apps and sometimes with consumer products, but not enough in my opinion in areas such as voting and paperwork.

I think explaining score voting is pretty easy you just have only 3 categories labeled ️(1) (2) (3) for each candidate and they put a mark on what they think for each one. As an aside I susspect that having more than 3 or 4 catagoreis isn't a good idea and creates false precision that complicates things.

is it 1,2,3 or 3,2,1?

you underestimate interface design for a billion people in 20 different languages and in symbols that can be understood by illiterate citizens.

fyi, election symbols (like lotus, bicycle, broom) are mandatory in Indian elections for people who cannot read.

The American concept of voter registration is fairly puzzling.

http://scorevoting.net/Complexity

You want a zero based scale to avoid confusion, preferably with an even number of scores. 0-5 or 0-9 is good.

In 2006 I did a Score Voting exit poll on unsuspecting voters in _Beaumont, Texas_, and not a single one was confused.

http://scorevoting.net/Beaumont

Thanks for the link! Now I have more to read :)

this is for people who cant read or write. they dont know numbers.

In India, such people identify the candidate using a mandatory election symbol (like a lotus, bicycle, etc) and put a checkbox next to them.

Maybe you can think of score voting as expressing differences between candidates. I think X is this many better than Y, but only this many better than Z. But yeah I like approval for the reason that I think score is complicated to think through the implications of.

that is condercet right? then you are asking people to do pairwise voting... which again breaks down in places with 10 candidates.

As I explained in my other comment, that doesn't have to be a problem. Just let everyone vote with a traditional "single choice" ballot. But you also allow the voter to optionally enhance/refine their preference with a score ballot. If a voter chooses not fill out a score ballot, their "single choice" ballot will be automatically converted into the corresponding score ballot. Their vote won't count any less. It will just be a (likely) less complete representation of their actual preferences.

In Australia we have the option of voting for someone as our first preference, and letting them direct your lower preferences for after they get eliminated (according to their previously published preference list). If you made that the only option, you'd just need to count the votes for each candidate, then any further calculations could be based on these totals.

Needs to add the new best-compromise best-of-both-worlds proposal: SCORE RUNOFF per http://www.equal.vote/

That's most of the benefits of score voting (which is acknowledged as superior in the study here) with a runoff stage to address strategic voting.

"Score voting" is very bad for public elections in a way most analyses ignore; and that is that u like some ordered ranking, numerical scores have no clearly articulable, unambiguous meaning and their assignment is demonstrably variable even with similar actual preferences (notably, it has a strong cultural component.)

Approval has a somewhat similar problem.

Both are, for related reasons, problematic for simulations like this, as well: while these simulations already tend to assume all axes have equal weighting for all voters (though it's easy enough to vary that, but graphical depictions get harder) which is something of a distorting simplification, you have to also assume a mapping function from preference distance to score to make score voting work in a simulation (or a distance cutoff for approval), either of which is a much bigger distortion of how those things work in the real world.

What's wrong with happy face, neutral face, frowny face?

The meaning of a score is relative to the candidate pool in actual practice. This is not an issue in score runoff at all.

0 means "as bad as any candidate in this pool gets" and 9 means "as great as any candidate in the pool gets".

There's NO need AT ALL for there to be some broader meaning.

There is actually "One Weird Trick" to fix democracy, and it's the voting system not mentioned in the article: Direct and Party Representative (DPR) voting.

At least for parliamentary / congressional elections it is both more proportional than FPTP and simpler to count than all the alternatives mentioned. You simply provide the voters with two ballot papers: one to select a local representative (counted and decided in the same way as a traditional FPTP election), and a second ballot paper where the voter can choose which party they want to have more power at the parliamentary / congressional level.

The trick is that these second votes are totalled across the whole nation and used to calculate the ratio of support for each party nationally, then those ratios are used to normalise the voting power of the representatives in the legislature. So if 10% of MPs elected are from the Triangle Party, with 20% of the national vote, then each MP gets effectively a double vote on bills, relative to a nominal MP with a proportionally correct amount of national support.

This still sounds like it's based on a polarized two party system. In practice (outside the US) few people fully agree with one political party. In Germany I find most people I talk to don't fully support any party but partly agree with one or more parties on various issues.

A scoring or approval system makes more sense in this situation because it would allow voters to express their tendencies towards each party individually rather than having to pick one compromise directly. It's also one of the few systems that allows voters to accurately represent ambivalence or apathy.

DPR still sounds like it suffers from all the problems of FPTP with regard to strategic voting and spoilers.

In practice (outside the US) few people fully agree with one political party.

I don't think people in the US fully agree with one political party, either. Unfortunately that tends to be forgotten when things get heated, especially around elections. The polarization is artificial.

I don't see why DPR would require or support a polarized two party system. The idea is that the secondary (party) ballot allows you to be completely honest and vote for the party you really prefer, even if that party would be considered a "spoiler" under FPTP. Because the secondary ballots are totalled nationally, there is no danger that your support of a smaller party ends up as a wasted vote.

Of course, there are a few extra details to deal with, such as how to include independent candidates (with no party behind them) and whether to introduce a minimum threshold of support for a party to appear on the secondary ballot. These are relatively straightforward questions, though, and are covered by this website about the voting system:

http://www.dprvoting.org/

What we need is a system that let's everybody have representation, both in the legislative and executive branches. Proportional representation is much better at this then winner-take-all elections.

Why do we need to place all this power in the hands of a single person anyway? Switzerland has an executive branch with 7 members from 5 different parties and a presidency that rotates annually.

PR also makes it much harder for lobbyists to influence lawmakers. Candidates don't need to convince everybody in order to represent those who identify with their party. And a candidate that represents one of many parties has to do a good job representing that party in order to keep that job.

We could move the House of Representatives to PR and keep the Senate as is.

Switzerland style rule is nice because it allows for some rogue candidates to be elected safely. Trump wouldn't be so scary if he had 6 other people holding a leash. But the probe would still get to signal dissatisfaction and the other parties would have a better warning that they aren't in a great position and need to update their stances on the issues.

This article leaves out proportional representation and single transferable vote. PR is widely used in many democracies and should be considered for the U.S. Senate. Specifically, mixed member proportional which allows each district (in our case State) to elect one member to the legislature and then the rest of the 50 seats would be filled to create the closet proportion to popular support each party has. Single transferable vote, which is actually used in some democracies, would fit the House of Representatives quite well.

Duverger's law tells us that we will not see electoral diversity in the U.S. until we change the way we vote.

STV is a PR system, just one that retains candidate-focussed preference ballots and doesn't resort to party lists for who gets elected (MMP uses candidate-centered ballots, but also uses party lists to fill the additional seats.)

The IRV 'fault' is not a fault, but a feature. When the loser drops out, the people who put them at #1 still get a say in the remaining candidates. That's why more voters prefer candidate Hexagon in the example - it's actually a truer result of all the electorate, not [all electorate minus Square voters].

Just because your #1 candidate is knocked out doesn't mean you should lose your say in how you're governed. Similarly, the example paints Triangle as getting more popular, but ignores that Hexagon is also getting more popular.

The 'fault' also requires that none of the candidates are particularly representative - look at the example, look at where the locus of voters are, and look at where the candidates are. In order for Triangle to not win any more, all three candidates have to be pretty bad representatives; it's less of a disaster if "not the right candidate" won in this situation (even though that's not what's happening).

These sorts of explanations are very neat and educational, I think, but to me they aren't that effective in actually bringing us closer to using a new voting system. All the discussion here is an example of what tends to happen, which is people arguing over what the very best voting system is. But it's so easy to construct argument for or against any particular system.

I think a better tactic to actually use a new system is to share a vision to the general population of what voting under a new system would actually be like. Once the public at large is in favor of the general idea of moving to a new system, actually picking the best system should be more of an implementation detail.

In other words, walk the voter through a simulated ballot casting and show them what the results of the election might be under such a system.

I gave an effort to do this here: http://asivitz.com/voting/ I'm not sure how well I succeeded though.

Voting system isn't broken, Democracy is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

To aggravate: many elections lately are win by tiny margins and with not all citizens casting a vote. Hence, the majority per se is not really setting the course of nations.

On a side note, I wonder why close results happen. I do not think it is an accident (some that I can remember now that are almost split in half: the popular vote in 2016 US elections, the yes/no vote for the Peace Treaty with FARC in Colombia, the 2016 presidential elections in Peru). Maybe there is no pattern either, but it seems odd that when facing an important decision, voters split in half. (my own conspiracy theory is that given the lack of grey area options - a raking effect as proposed by the OP - voters MUST pick a side and they are manipulated to veer in one direction by smart and sophisticated communications)

There's a lot of mechanisms that lead to close races/results. In particular in the US the 2 party defacto system kind of guarantees a close-ish result because our parties (at least in the past hard to tell where things are heading now) can't really be extremely ideologically left or right of center because (baring this bizarre recent result) because if they did they'd likely lose a lot of ground to an opposition willing to be more flexible. So you get 2 parties that are roughly vying for a base + enough of the centrists to get elected.

Which still results in a system where a massive percentage of the people end up unhappy.

I think you can do a lot better by giving more power to smaller parts of the government. For example, let's assume that 50% of the most controversial laws were turned over to the states. Suddenly California can be more "blue" in practice and not feel nearly so upset when "red" wins both houses and the presidency.

A lot of controversial laws only really work below a national level. You can't turn things like the EPA over to the states because of how closely related many state resources are, an environmentally friendly state down river from a lax state can't do much. Federal taxes and how to spend them is fundamentally a federal issue.

There's also the larger question of what kind of nation we'd wind up with, for example take that same approach at any point in history and you wind up with a country that's much less inclusive to any sort of minorities.

Finally there's the problem that it's kind of hard for people to move between states below a certain income and education level so you get people stuck in a state that may not be interested in protecting or listening to them at all because they're not required for the political majority.

edit: On the issue of federal taxes it actually extends a lot deeper into the fundamental role of the (federal) government. In a totally hand wavey glossing over many different factions into 2 categories: Democrats see it as including a social safety net that redistributes the gains of the better off to ensure a base level of support for everyone. (I'm probably being very unfair to their internal view of things as an outsider but...) Republicans see that a unfair to those who've worked hard to get what they have and that if business were just left alone to use as the market demands things will balance out and everyone will wind up well off. If that decision were left to the states poorer states like South Carolina would have a fundamentally worse safety net (if any at all) further disadvantaging the poor there, so the only moral thing to do is have the federal government step in and redistribute things between the states.

Good piece but seems remiss to have this discussion without also acknowledging the ways in which our electoral system + a complete lack of transparency are also undermining confidence in the system. It's 2017 yet somehow people are waiting 10 hours in line to vote? And then there's no way to verify that your vote counted?

Actually one method is not really debunked: Approval Voting

Can anyone say anything negative about it that FPTP doesn't already have?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

How do you know which candidates to approve? Given a candidate I like, a candidate I really don't like, and a candidate I can tolerate, which ones do I approve?

The ones you like and tolerate - obviously!

It's not obvious, though. It's not clear whether you should mark approval for [anyone you think would do the job well] or for [anyone who you don't think would do the job badly]. Different people will read it differently, which muddies the question of whether it's accurate.

So, given Trump and Clinton who I both despise, I should not approve either and thus forfeit any say on which is better?

You can be strategic about where you draw the line. Unlike FPTP, you never have to say you're giving more support to a candidate you like less.

First of all it is strictly better than having the option to vote for only one. So you can'5 indicate your preference among the rest either.

And secondly if you start ranking then how do you combine the rankings? Do you have instant runoff? Then you have spoiler effects which THIS SYSTEM DOESNT HAVE

My point is that voting is harder under approval voting. Plurality voting is broken, but people easily understand the strategy of voting for the lesser of two evils. Under approval voting, there is no obvious strategy for deciding who should approve.

I would suggest voting for the lesser of two evils if you'd do that in a plurality voting system, plus whoever else you like better. Though there might be three equally likely winners you hate, in which case I dunno.

Vote for the person you would with Plurality, plus everyone you like better. That's an easy approximation.

A formal statement is here.

https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/threshold

Using that strategy, it is clearly harder to vote in approval voting then in plurality. You first have to figure out how you'd vote in plurality and then do something more.

The question I was answering was: is there any way in which plurality is better then approval? Yes, it is easier to vote in plurality.

Yeah, this is what makes approval not really good for normal public elections (for, say, social groups where a clear line of "approval means I commit to participating I the group activity if the chosen activity is one I approved" can be drawn, it's great.)

Basically, approval is a ranked preference ballot method that allows ties and has only two ranks. For public elections, fully-ranked ballot methods (whether allowing ties or forced-preference) are a lot more sensible; they both allow more detail in what is expressed and have more consistency in meaning across ballots in the same election.

> Justin Trudeau, Canada's Cutie-In-Chief, ...

sigh.

> ...will be moving his nation towards a better voting system in 2017.

well, you know, maybe. If the people want it in their fancy questionnaire. They might not though, since clearly FPTP is the most effective now that it resulting in a liberal majority.

Yeah, that survey was incredibly lackluster. Also felt some of the questions were pretty leading.

Questions like implying online voting would lead to higher electoral costs or that a more mixed representation in the house would immediately slow down government. While some of those effects may occur, it seems disingenuous to pick out one random negative effect to single out in a questionnaire like that.

See also: Median voter theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem

> The most famous real-world example of this was in 2000, when Ralph Nader "stole" votes from Al Gore, letting George Bush win.

Is Nader's 'theft' really more famous than Perot's? I think that Perot really made a much bigger difference than did Nader: in 1992 there were a lot of Perot supporters who would have voted for Bush over Clinton, but for some reason they really did think that their candidate had a chance.

Are n-dimensional spectrum positions really the right way to model voting? I'm not sure 2016's voter behavior can even be modeled dimensionally.

A skilled persuader can convince a voter that he/she (persuader) is "close" to their "positions" even when they're not. (Or that the opponent is not a voter's ally even if they are.)

The cutsie graphs make the incorrect presumption that people's political views are evenly distributed around the political spectrum.

Sandbox mode has support for two or three "centers" of political views. And yes, this is just a model. Better to make a decision based on a model than a "gut feeling".

This is also why the author recommends experimentation at the local level and not sweeping national changes.

The biggest mistake is assuming people vote for the candidate whose policies are closest to theirs. That almost never happens.

Another approach: an ordered subset specifying fall-through candidates you would want your vote to go to if the current one has not path to victory. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1E-bZdxnzc_eTJvLWtsSGE3Y3c...

You've more or less described IRV.

How about we just have two presidents? It seems absurd that moving the vote result by 0.00001% changes the outcome drastically.

Let there be two heads of state, and let them work it out.

Um, no. I think there are a lot of good reasons why two executives wouldn't work--for example, when emergency decisions need to be made such as in war time. Plus, I'm just glad the Clintons are nowhere near the seat of power. The last Clinton Presidency was such an awful trainwreck. People forget--all they remember was the bubble stock market and the fallacy about Clinton reducing the national debt (hint: it was a projection, it was never reality).

No more Bushes, no more Clintons. Not ever.

> How about we just have two presidents?

What, like Roman consuls?

Really, if you want to lower the stakes of small changes in the electorate, get a parliamentary system with basically proportional representation (STV in small multimember districts works, you don't need party list methods), and dial back the policy powers of the head of state (who can continue to.be separately elected.)

>As you could see, every voting system except First Past The Post is immune to the spoiler effect.

That's not correct. IRV is also susceptible to spoilers. Lets start with two candidates A (slighty left) and B (farther right)

|-------A---B----|

1. A gets 61 vote, B gets 39. 2. A wins.

Now lets introduce a farther left candidate C, that is really close to A.

|-----C-A---B----|

Voting goes as follow.

1. C gets 31 vote, A gets 30, B gets 39. 2. A gets eliminated, his/her votes split between B and C. 3. Because C and B are close, most of the votes for B go to A who now wins the election.

... how does A win the election in step 3 if A was knocked out in step 2?

I'm also not following how you meant to write that (apparently a typo) - why would B get more votes than C when A is eliminated? Why would A's voters split evenly down the middle if C is closer to them?

I've messed A and B at some point.

Should be: A gets split, B wins. Introduction of another left candidate caused right one to win.

Sortition, closely followed by direct democracy.

1) is also proven for selecting juries?

Why use a 2d map instead of 1 dimensional, seems more practical.

Because the political spectrum really is a 2d (if not 3d or 4d) field. Progressive <-> Conservative and Liberal <-> Authoritarian. If it were really just two candidates then perhaps there would be just once metric to track.

It's not just the political spectrum. You need at least 2 spatial dimensions to demonstrate the possibility of non-transitive group preferences (i.e. the community prefers candidate A > B > C > A), which is one fundamental reason Arrow's impossibility theorem is true. If candidates are just on a number line, then the group's preferences would always be transitive and there would always be a Condorcet winner (or a tie).

2 dimensions is required for the examples with a third candidate.

But we aren't a democracy.

Small point of feedback: the header of this site is extremely distracting.

-redacted-

Saying "it can't be done" and "nothing will change" for decades is why we've built up a massive backlog of absolutely necessary changes.

I don't understand who's actually against all the common sense changes? Are people really that conservative? Is congress and state legislators more conservative than the electorate?

Surely the average US voter has to see the obvious benefits of a ranked/runoff system over the current one? If they do - how can the laws not be passed (even constitutional changes should be within reach).

I don't think "conservative" is the correct word in this case. Our current legislators, by definition, got into power under the current system, so for (almost) all of them the current is preferable to an alternative system where their victory is less certain.

Additionally, they are almost all part of one of the two major political parties; both of which benefit greatly from our current system.

Ultimately, the problem is that it is very difficult to change the rules of the game when the winners are in charge of making the rules.

> so for (almost) all of them the current is preferable to an alternative system where their victory is less certain.

But publicly holding a position in office that a majority of your constituents disagree with, in a high profile question should be a much worse disadvantage than voting to change the system?

> Additionally, they are almost all part of one of the two major political parties; both of which benefit greatly from our current system.

At least for primaries, it would be beneficial for the parties themselves (if perhaps not for the candidates) to have both runoff votes and some kind of approval.

> Ultimately, the problem is that it is very difficult to change the rules of the game when the winners are in charge of making the rules.

This is what I don't understand though as a non american. I don't consider politicians to have much different goals and opinions to my own. If they did, they'd be replaced.

Nah. Here in the US they just pass laws to suppress voters and rejigger districts until they're guaranteed wins. Much less work for them.

> I don't think "conservative" is the correct word in this case.

I meant in the "I don't want things to change" way, not inthe abortion/guns/small state (US) political meaning of the word.

>Is congress and state legislators more conservative than the electorate?

In both the small-c and large-C senses of "conservative", yes, they largely are. The USA currently has an economically progressive, socially moderate majority (when you do non-party-branded, issue-by-issue polling), but a government that largely consists of economic and social conservatives, rather extreme ones actually.

" In 2011, almost a full quarter of young Americans said democracy was a "bad" or "very bad" way to run a country. And today, one in six Americans say it'd be "good" or "very good" to be under actual military rule."

Really, our problem here seems to be one of education, then. People who prefer a military dictatorship have ZERO experience with military dictatorships!

I find it truly inspiring how many people suddenly care about democracy, even though "this isn't about the 2016 election". /s

Some might say that any support for a better system is good, despite the motivations, but I disagree. All this support will vanish as soon as our current system chooses the "right" (well, the left) candidate.

I think the fact that twice now in a generation we've watched the current system pick a candidate who's lost the popular vote while at the same time having to live through an increasingly polarized political climate shouldn't be overlooked. Considering people have been interested in alternative voting schemes for decades, I think your conclusion is likely off the mark.

> "twice ... pick a candidate who's lost the popular vote"

interestingly, those two elections were massively different. Gore won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote both by tiny margins. The election was statistically speaking basically a tie, and settled by something only slightly stronger than a coin flip. The largest margin in terms of raw votes in any single state was 1.7 million (Gore, NY). Two states were closer than 0.1% (NM and Florida).

Clinton won the popular vote by a much bigger margin, and lost the electoral vote by a much bigger margin. She won California by over 4.2 million votes (blowing Obama's 3.2 million vote edge out of the water; he won that election by a total of 10 million votes.) She had stronger-than-expected showings in areas where she was already strong, and weaker-than-expected showings in areas where she was weak. It was a much more polarized election, with fewer close results (no states under 0.1% margin) and more blowouts.

the end result is that any system electing a leader over many different groups cannot rely on simply majority votes as it tips the power to coastal city areas which tend to be major population centers simply because of commerce.

now where voting like that proposed in the article is a good idea is state and local governments where the effect is not so out sized.

people always want change when they don't get their way and worse when some get their way they ignore the fact that nothing they supposedly supported happens, they are just merely happy they won. oddly or worse there are those just happy the other person lost and could care less who they themselves vote for

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this over the past eight years, I've seen numerous videos and discussions about it. The main proponents are the people that are sick of the two party system in general This result will surely cause some upset Democrats to care more about it, but there's a good chance Trump's presidency will also cause Republicans to care more as well.

The system is broken, each example will bring more people to the group that wants reform. Yes the losing side will run faster, but both parties have a large contingent of members that would like more options.

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