To Build a Better Ballot (2016)

by anchpop • 6 years ago

36 20 6 years ago

dwd4• 6 years ago

But what about the best alternative of all - the single transferable vote? Call me biased as an Australian but it's served us well for giving small groups a chance in the Senate and electing 3rd party candidates such as Adam Bandt.

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

paulgb• 6 years ago

For what it's worth, STV is kinda included here. STV is a generalization of the IRV method in the post to multiple winners.

dwd4• 6 years ago

It's worth noting that with the process of eliminating the last candidate, their votes are redistributed by preference and not simply discarded - so in the end your vote goes to one of the last two candidates unless there was a runaway winner and no need for a redistribution. That's not really explained in the OP.

cyphar2• 6 years ago

The reason why our Senate has third parties is because states act as multi-mumber electorates (it's not winner-takes-all as it is for the House of Representatives). This means that a uniform 20% vote for party X in a given state (either first-preference or after runoffs) will result in about 20% of seats being held by party X. The same is not true for winner-takes-all systems -- 150 electorates with 20% of people uniformly voting for party X will yield 0 seats for party X. That's why we only have 4 seats in the House of Representatives being held by third parties, compared with 14 Senate seats (though still not as many as you might like).

To take Adam Bandt as an example, he got 49% of first-preference votes in his electorate[1] -- most third parties aren't going to get that many votes in a single electorate (the centre of Melbourne is probably the only place you could see the Greens getting that many votes but they do have a consistent 10% first preference rate in polls).

Don't get me wrong, I do think our voting system is pretty good and better than most, but it does suffer from some of the issues described we could definitely improve it.

[1] https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/HouseDivisionPage-2...

dwd4• 6 years ago

In the US context who would get voted in using the Australian Senate model is an interesting thought.

GOP and Dems would obviously pick up the majority, but I could imagine a fishing/hunting coalition (with possible NRA support) picking up a few seats, a few religious groups similar to Family First doing the same, and a whole lot of others. The scary thought would be a QAnon supported candidate gaining enough votes for a seat.

The point with Bandt and for other 3rd party candidates is that these models give them a chance as it removes the issue of split/spoiler votes and people are free to vote how they want but fall back on who they would prefer from a major party.

ClayShentrup4• 6 years ago

Single transferable vote is actually quite archaic. Here are a variety of modern PR methods.

https://www.rangevoting.org/CanadaOverview

Proportional representation is of questionable value. https://www.rangevoting.org/PropRep

STV is especially bad in single winner elections though. STAR voting and approval voting are simpler and much better than IRV ("RCV").

https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-irv

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyBm_Hcu4DI&t=487

Taikonerd2• 6 years ago

For Americans who are interested in alternative voting systems, I recommend The Fulcrum: https://thefulcrum.us/ They cover good-government type reforms, including voting reforms.

For example, the city of Fargo just switched to approval voting -- coverage here: https://thefulcrum.us/voting/approval-voting-2646444809

tfehring• 6 years ago

I'll also plug https://www.electionscience.org, an awesome and underfunded nonprofit that helped get Fargo's approval voting initiative passed. (I've donated to them but have no other affiliation.)

specialist2• 6 years ago

Approval voting has best balance between fairness and simplicity. Election integrity wise, less complex is better.

RCV is a smidge more fair than Approval Voting and three smidges more complex. Both are much better than FPTP, by both criteria.

I support my local RCV effort. If I truly wanted Approval Voting, I should have put in the hard work.

Source: Worked as poll inspector, was an election integrity activist for about 10 years.

schwartzworld2• 6 years ago

Really interesting.

I'm all about Approval voting, just vote for everybody who you would want as president, and whoever gets the most votes win. Want to vote for everybody? Go ahead!

Besides the spoiler effects listed in the article, voting has been made deliberately difficult in America. There is a deliberate effort to disenfranchise voters to keep things from changing. Anything that makes voting EASIER will create fairer elections, which neither party really wants unfortunately. Approval voting is the hardest for the voter to mess up, and therefore will likely be the fairest. You can screw up Ranked Choice. The Borda / Condorcet methods involve more complex math which can be screwed up. Approval voting is just simpler, which means your vote is more likely to be counted the way you meant for it to be.

This could, of course, be coupled with other measures that make voting easier. Instead of a single day, make it a month so that people can go around their work schedule and lines will be shorter.

In fact, in person voting is easier to scam than mail-in voting, so the fairest option would be to make mail-in voting very very easy. Print off your ballot online or pick one up at the post office or whatever, and send it in. When you vote in person, mistakes/hacking/etc are simpler because you can target a district that seems like it will skew a certain way. Mailed in votes should be scanned and counted and the anonymized scans should be made publicly available so the populace/press can verify the results themselves.

It won't happen because both parties have a vested interest in preventing it from happening. Fairer elections don't produce candidates like Trump and Biden.

ClayShentrup4• 6 years ago

Well, Fargo adopted approval voting by a 64% majority, and a ballot measure to bring it to St Louis this November is polling at 72% support.

schwartzworld2• 6 years ago

I meant on a national scale.

Taikonerd2• 6 years ago

This is an exciting time for ranked-choice voting in the US. In addition to the big victory in Maine, there have been several ballot measures to start using it in other cities and states: https://www.fairvote.org/ranked_choice_voting_wins_in_2020

ClayShentrup4• 6 years ago

STAR voting and approval voting are simpler and much better than IRV ("RCV").

https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-irv

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyBm_Hcu4DI&t=487

To Build a Better Ballot (2016)

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