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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is reasonable.

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Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better" than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to not split the vote.

It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America’s uneducated population: something like this wouldn’t get through because most of the population is too stupid to grok it. We’re foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions because idiots won’t or can’t tough through understanding them.

This is true, this is an inherently more complex system. Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a balance between complexity and proportionality -- America sorta has this with primaries, although them being months in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell doesn't help.

The French two-round system is wildy unproportional to the point that it is just very marginally less undemocratic than first past the post.

The good thing is — you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice

> you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice

Sure. And I don’t anymore. But the casualty of that choice is social empathy.

And yet we push the idiots to vote.

The United States has one of the best education systems in the world, as proxied by the PISA test. US Asians have better results than anywhere but Singapore, Macau and Taiwan. US whites have better results than every majority white country besides Estonia and Switzerland. US Hispanics do better than every Hispanic country bar Spain. US Blacks outscore Jamaica, the only majority Black Country in the OECD and many European and South American countries.

I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the people who do it though.

Interesting that they do so good as young and end up mediocre (or below) as adults https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&prim...

That’s for the entire US population. If you look at the US population without even attempting to correct for demographic factors the US looks unimpressive at all ages.

Hong Kong used to have a proportional voting system. The pro-China camp is often very efficient, sometimes winning a seat with half the votes compared to another candidate

You absolutely don't. The formula they give for calculating seats from votes is very simple and only uses a few letters from the standard alphabet.

The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.

> The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.

What? It's for all voting systems. It just defines a set of criteria that are desirable; it doesn't describe any system.

The axioms just state what criteria the Swiss system (but not the Icelandic) obeys. You don't need to know them in order to vote in Iceland any more than you need to know that first past the post fails the Condorcet criterion in order to vote in the US.

I have voted my entire adult life in a similar system but never knew how the sausage was made. I have complete confidence in it despite not knowing exactly how it works.

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