links:
- https://www.fairvote.ca/open-list-proportional-representation/
- https://www.fairvote.ca/stv/
- https://www.fairvote.ca/mixed-member-proportional/
- Regional Proportional Representation
STV with multi-member constituencies.
- No ranked list of party members that parties can put their best buds at the top of. All candidates are equal, party affiliated or not.
- Ranked voting system, so people can express their preference with no need for tactical voting.
- All takes place with a single vote.
- Members of the public will have a choice of representative when raising concerns with them. Better chance of talking to someone who simpathises with your issue.
- It’s still representation on a local scale.
- Whilst it’s still an approximation to full PR the margin of error compared to FPTP is massively reduced.
I think it gets discarded because “it’s still not PR” but I think the advantages outweigh this.
I remain a huge fan of sortition. You randomly pick a bunch of people who are willing (and/or able) to do the job, let guardrails veto some of them, train them and let them cook. An unordered list of things to love:
- It’s substantially faster than elections,
- scales to any size polity,
- is definitionally fair,
- no foreign influence in elections,
- parties really do not matter,
- there’s no good way to bribe future would-be politicians because that’s everybody,
- you can enact change by persuading folks one at a time, and every supporter improves your outcomes,
- decision makers can become experts in one thing instead of being vaguely ignorant of everything,
- incentivizes everyone governed to make others healthy, happy, well adjusted, and connected with reality,
- how Athens did it,
- by multiverse theory, there is some branch where all your friends got to make any given decision.
We already do this for the life-or-death task of juries. We have the technology.
(Second choice is RCV w\ MMP; fairvote does good work.)
I like the sound of it, but I worry that instead of producing the Cincinnatus-types, we’ll produce an electorate that is mostly comprised of political hacks who are too entrenched in their views to be able to effectively compromise, because all of the apathetic and apolitical people wouldn’t have the will or the desire to take such a role on. It would require a massive cultural shift to encourage people to participate in the system willingly - “Doing your civic duty” is often said about voting, but so few people actually follow through with it because there is friction involved.
Also, special interests might not be able to bribe future politicians, but there’s nothing stopping one who takes the job from also getting handed a bunch of “favors” and “gifts” to influence their thinking when voting. Not to defend plutocracies, but I feel like it’s a lot harder to bribe a rich politician than it is to bribe one who is working or middle class - if anything, someone who is poor would be more susceptible to corruption, because even a “small” kickback from some corporation looking to get a politician on their side could be a life-changing one for them, one that they could not afford to say “no” to.
But man, wouldn’t it be cool to see what society would look like when any one of us could be called up to make decisions for the entire nation? With some effective guardrails and a strong constitution, I could see it being one of the best forms of representation.
There are indeed ways to design it poorly; I’ll just point again to juries to say that we know how to do it competently. I’ll rephrase the objections in terms of juries (but please note the quotes are from a hyperbolic strawman, and not literally what you said. I hope my replies to the strawman are still useful).
“People who don’t care about the particular law/case will refuse to join a jury and they’ll all get stuck in endless deliberation” - being on the jury is not always optional! While there are strategies to avoid being a juror, the large majority of folks don’t use them. People get real nervous about perjury. Also, we have several levers of control here. Congress salaries+benefits aren’t bad, getting an important position might be akin to winning a lottery. Many folks skip voting day because they feel uninformed or are required to work, but we educate jurists and require companies to give time off for their service. Finally, if a jury is stuck we call a new one; by random draw we’ll eventually get a lot of all people from one side or the other. Gridlock is only ever stochastic.
“People could bribe the juries for the outcomes they want!” - extremely risky, the state knows who is on the jury at the same time as everyone else, predicting it ahead of time is impossible, and we strongly regulate the interactions of juries + invested parties once they’re chosen. Note that we can assign political decision bodies to fairly narrow issues, so managing this at scale isn’t so difficult.
Virtually every poll shows that around 1/4 to 1/3 of the population are Nazis, so it’s only a matter of time before one of them gets picked
You and me both, there have to be at least dozens of us.
Which, under a sortition vote, would mean we would have a chance!
Any popularity based voting system is going to be corrupted. It really is a dumb concept used for obvious control.
I think we haven’t tested democracy variations quite far enough. I agree that the first-past-the-post model in capitalism has proven extremely vulnerable to mis/disinformation, and made it possible to benefit from the idiocy of your peers. But I don’t think we’ve seen, say, RCV and proportional representation + robust finance laws prove nearly so bad.
Also, I think this take is disingenuous to the roots of democracy. It is a social technology used for legitimacy in tons of situations by many groups, for a variety of reasons. Often it is neither dumb nor a method of obvious control.
Popularity is a bad concept for representation. We don’t need to waste any more time figuring it out.
Natural leaders and the dynamics of unanimous rule cannot to be confused with large scaling elections that don’t find or promote these leaders. The system produces obvious garbage once scaled beyond a small group.
Hypothetically if you could have a population perfectly informed without bias they could make a good rationale choice. This is beyond unrealistic as you scale elections though because the information required to make a good decision increases beyond what most humans are capable of.
Much like capitalism, democracy seems only acceptable on a very small and well regulated scale which invariably grows into the monstrosity we deal with today.
Eh - sounds like arguments against centralization of power to me.
Show me a Democratic model practiced on a large scale that has not descended into an oligarchy of corruption.
How do you determine who is able to do the job
You can do it several ways. Athens had anyone who wanted to from the city meet and interview the randomly chosen folks; if the group disliked them, they were removed from the pot and you drew again. Seems like a good fit when the job is comprehensible, and/or needs community backing. Similar in flavor to senate confirmation of appointees.
In juries, we have professionally licensed advocates and referee’s who interview the randomly chosen, and they can reject folks for almost any reason they want. This seems like a good fit when we already have a big body of bureaucrats and managers who will need to work with these folks. Let them do the filtering.
For perpetually rolling positions, give the outgoing folks a small number of vetos on the next draw. They know what the job requires, and limiting the number of objections ensures against corruption.
There’s also levers you can pull if we don’t have a good way to judge competence. My favorites are to increase the number of people on the panel/jury/group, and provide larger budgets and opportunities for the group to get training. Just as congress (and courts) can pull in industry leaders, expert scientists, and decision makers, these decision making bodies should be able to do the same.
Single-transferable vote with multi-member districts is not really a proportional system. Due to the necessarily small number of seats per district, it favours the larger parties, though not by as much as first-past-the-post or STV with single-member districts.
If you consider the political dynamics of systems with open-list PR, closed-list PR and MMR, the difference actually isn’t all that significant. The average person doesn’t have the time to investigate the merits of each candidate, so in these systems most people vote according to party preference, perhaps also considering the charisma of its leader. Of these systems, MMR is probably the least effective, since it requires an electoral threshold (5% is chosen in both Germany and New Zealand) to keep the system workable. This electoral threshold again favours the larger parties, and skews the system away from proportionality.
The top of the global quality-of-life rankings is dominated by countries using open and semi-closed PR.
Direct proportional representation, like we have in the Netherlands, preferably with minimal seat threshold for a party to get into parliament.
It doesn’t have regional representation or voting districts, but I don’t think that that really matters much on the national level. Instead you get an as close to accurate as possible representation of which parties the people voted for.
The low seat threshold also allows people to vote for small parties that may be closer to their political views. And it allows people to feel confident punishing a big party by voting for a close alternative, if they fail to listen to their voters.
The voting for small parties problem could also be address with multiple ranked choice voting.
That way, candidates who don’t win, can have their voters submit second and third choices, that are count when or if their primary choices don’t win.
That way, people can vote for their actual favorite, while without taking their vote away from a second favorite with better chances at winning a seat.
This is especially important for positions like president, where only one candidate CAN win (some countries achieve the same with multiple rounds of voting, but you can theoretically achieve the same representation in one round).
Ranked choice voting is more relevant for elections where one winner must take all (for instance presidential elections or voting districts with only one representative) which will always suffer from not being able to represent everyone
Direct proportional representation gets around that problem by avoiding situations where one person has to “win” an election
As for the president problem, you can get around that by simply not having a president with any meaningful power. The prime minister can be appointed by the cabinet, and the head of state (be it king or president) can be a purely ceremonial role.
Ranked choice voting.
Along with eliminating anyone with less than ~2%
Why eliminate below a percent. Just eliminate the lowest rank candidate and redistribute. Keep going until you have your winner.
That’s first past the post.
And that leads to strategic voting, and winner takes all.
Which concentrates way too much power
No, it’s not, it’s a single transferable vote. See Ireland.
Is there only one winner in this system?
That’s a separate question.
STV with a single winner is like holding multiple elections where the biggest loser gets eliminated each round. You can vote for your favourite uncle first, because you’d really like him to win, but because you’ve put other people at 2, 3 and 4 you still get a say who wins even though your uncle only got 7 votes. Your Single Vote gets Transferred to your next preference when he’s eliminated.
STV with multiple winners is the same but you stop eliminating people when you’re down to however many you need.
No, basically every riding has, say, three representatives, and there’s a threshold that each party needs to pass to get elected, here’s an explanation that’s better than what I could come up with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
Ends up very proportional while conserving local representatives, although personally I prefer MMP
Prop rep isn’t ranked-choice, though. This question essentially asked “what is your favourite colour of blue dodge caravan?”
For people without a math degree, ranked-choice is the easy sale.
Ok fair, I didn’t read all the details, and too lazy to go through all those links to understand them and pick my favourite.
Which ever one doesn’t lead to stratigic voting and concentration of power.
In Germany they eliminate anyone with less than 4% and it was disastrous for Brandenburg. It basically meant that the right wing parties had no opposition.
Ranked choice should solve this.
If you vote for 5 left wing parties, with the last one being one you know isn’t going to get eliminated, then your vote still goes to the left
The image in the post is from this video about STV by CGP Grey
MMP for me. Produces results which are broadly regarded as fair and easily to understand, but does not result in an excessively long ballot paper or confuse voters.
My city recently implemented single transferrable vote for local council elections. It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.
Many people gave up and just marked a single candidate or got confused and didn’t bother voting at all. This was for an election where each ward returned three councillors. CGP Grey actually criticised implementations if STV where each constituency returns only three representatives, insisting it should be five, or more. In a world of short attention spans, we have to accept that asking people to research potentially 20 candidates and even just pick their top five will result in a large number of people getting frustrated and giving up.
It’s all well and good to have a system which is mathematically optimal in your view, but the problem is that elections also have to retain the confidence of the voters to be effective, and if voters cannot understand a highly-complex system then they will not have confidence in its fairness and will be easily tricked by people with ulterior motives who tell them it’s actually rigged against them.
It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.
I doubt that was really the public speaking. It’ll be politically active people who fear the change. People just need it explained to them a couple of times.
Ranking 12 people is well within most people’s grasp when parties are also involved. Most know their preference of paries, so that gives you gross blocking and then if you have particular knowledge of individuals you can apply it. The main thing is to make it clear they are voting for N winners.
You need to have randomised ballot order though. If somebody is just voting along party lines they will write 1-2-3 down the page for that party. If everyone does this it skews things.
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have different “houses” to represent different dimensions of the country ( by-population, by-area, nature-&-future-generations, economy-as-a-whole )
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limit each level’s “house” to 144-ish representatives, to suppress auto-factionalism ( which begins around 150-people )
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people vote on approval-basis only: these are OK, the not-checked are not, & then use simple approved-by-most-people to choose the winners.
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prevent DarkTriad/DarkTetrad types { narcissism, machiavellianism, sociopathy-psychopathy, sadism } from being eligible for any election.
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Judiciary, AND JOURNALISM, are required to be standards-based, objective, correct-reasoning, not-for-profit, & holding-to-actuality. Without honest accountability, we’ve got “civilization”-feudalism, NOT Civilization.
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Issue-diagram forums, NO LOBBYING/bribery. NONE. ISSUES decide everything. That means that ALL debates happen in asynchronous issue-diagrams, NOT in most-alpha-personality-“wins”, TV-debates bullshit.
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All draft-legislation needs to be done in issue-diagrams, letting anyone in the world ( real-person, or useful-insight, not mere astroturfing-by-ideologies or corporate “persons” ) help us get the points right: draft-for-1/4-year before being elegible for signing-into-law, with few exceptions ( emergencies actually do happen )
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no enemy-agent can have citizenship, no incompetent-in-the-issue can vote in that issue ( same as you don’t allow passengers to decide the flying of the airliner: only the pilots are permitted that, same with ecologies, same with regulation, etc: if you aren’t domain-competent, you may participate in the discussions if you’re doing-so responsibly, but only domain-competent people VOTE in the domain ), & we actively devlop/provide automatic education to get as many people as completely domain-competent in all areas as possible.
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critical-reasoning is required for full voting citizenship, & education-systems which won’t produce it are fraud, & have to be treated as such. Yes, it’s true, that high-lead regions may have enough IQ-deficit as to have a lower critical-reasoning capacity for that reason, but CORRECT THE PROBLEM, & unbreak as many lives as you can! The “education” which pushes imprint->reacting, or abdication-to-LLM, MUST be put in its place, disempowered, while putting proper development-of-human-intelligence as free as possible, as pervasively-available as possible, & as central as possible, for our civilization to remain viable, especially in ClimatePunctuation which is still in its accelerating-stage.
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Enforcing-disinformation is criminalized. Troll-farms, for-profit-propaganda, ideological-propaganda, institutional-dishonesty, ALL of it. Accuracy, objectivity, testability, correct-reasoning, etc, are the strength-of-the-“beam” on-which civilization sits: we allow that to fail, & we don’t deserve to live through The Great Filter. Spine/uprightness is required in the individual, & it is required in the civilization, too.
Item 2 requires that the levels-of-government change as appropriate to the total-population, so extra-levels may have to be inserted, if the population expands enough, & the chain-of-representation was getting too deformed.
I don’t yet know how many each representative would have to be limited-to, to make it still properly responsible.
This is just a top-of-my-head sketch, not a fully-worked-to-correctness rendition, so it’s probably missing a few key things, & it’s probably sloppily-worded.
But it communicates the gist of it, which is good-enough for considering.
Responsibility-archy is the point.
Nothing else is strategically-viable: we’re deadmeat unless we enact/enforce responsibilityarchy for enough of humankind. At the whole-species level: gone.
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Oh, gratitude to that yt video which identified the different voting-systems, & the flaws with each, eventually concluding that the only one which mathematically could work right was the approval-voting system.
I’d never have clued-in to that, on my own.
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I’m a fan of approval voting
I disapprove.
This leads to strategic voting…
Like… if you really want Bernie to be president but also really hates the far right candidate…, do you appove of… um… Biden or no?
Okay say you got 55 Democrats and 45 Republican
Assuming all republicans are all behind one candidate
You have 30 dems in favor of Biden; 25 in favor of Bernie
Election day:
Bernie: 53 approvals, 28 approvals from Biden voters
Biden: 52 approvals, 22 approvals from bernie voters
GOP Candidate: 45 approvalsSomewhere two Biden voter who approved Bernie is gonna be like “man, if we just disapproved Bernie, Biden would’ve won!”
so then next election
Bernie: 51 approval
Biden: 52 approvalThis cycle continues till eventually GOP Candidate gets elected…
So its a matter of if the Left Progressive or the Corporate Dems chicken out first, and meanwhile the GOP Candidate is gonna win while you fight each other…
But we’re talking here not about single-occioant positions like president or premier or prime minister, but about proportional representation, which only makes sense in the context of multi-seat positions like city council or legislatures.
nvm my brain is scrambled from depression and brain.exe has crashed
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strategic voting is impossible to avoid, so it doesn’t really matter and shouldn’t be a consideration.
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This cycle continues till eventually GOP Candidate gets elected
This is a big leap from just saying that some strategic voting will occur. I don’t think you’ve demonstrated this in your example.
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This example also still assumes 2 parties. Part of election reform would be to destroy the barriers preventing 3rd parties from running and gaining seats through proportional representation
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Ultimately, I want the political apparatus to be destroyed and replaced by an anarchist society. This is the best of the worst in my eyes.
I was a big proponent of approval voting for over a decade, and I still would prefer it over most systems. But I really like STAR voting now as well, and have actually used it in the home to pick what to watch on movie nights. STV seems pretty decent too.
STAR has the same problem, if you like an underdog candidate its mathematically best to rank only them so your other choices don’t end up overtaking your prefered choice. That doesn’t happen in RCV until your preferred choice has alrrady lost. Both STAR and Approval are far far more gameable than STV
I guess. I think with any single winner system you’ll encounter gamesmanship, and enough proportional representation can smooth a lot of that over anyway
Definitely true that proportional representation helps a whole lot, and that no system is perfect or free from errors.
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Personally like MMP, it is already shown that it can work in the real world (used in NZ and other places) and generally produces fairer results than other systems, as well as giving minor parties more power and influence than in other systems. I would also suggest using preferential instead of first past the post voting for the constituencies to reduce strategic voting.
Random selection, voluntary, minimal education level, about an year.
The one that actually gets implemented.
1 vote for the person you want.
That is not a proportional system of representation.
No system that creates a large amount of election “losers” can ever be fully democratic. If you vote for the second most popular party, or the third most popular, et cetera, you should still be given representation.
If you don’t meet the minimum support threshold you do not get representation.
How do you get the Christmas present you want? Simply tell Santa.
