Politics is bad because we use an 18th century voting system

A quick scan of the transcript didn&#x27;t let me find what makes his plan &quot;viable&quot;. The system is so bad that almost any plan is a massive improvement, but such efforts often end in squabbling over which system is the best.<p>Here in Canada one of Trudeau&#x27;s platforms was to get rid of first-past-the-post. But he nixed it when he found out the committee was going to recommend mixed-member-proportional (which would probably hurt his parties chances) rather than ranked ballots (which would definitely help his party).

Every time I discuss voting with Americans, or when I read articles like this, they only focus on how to make a better system for single-winner elections. I think that is missing the main point.<p>I think the main problem is the single-winner election system itself, and even the best voting mathematics can do only very little to help that. They all will still lead to a two-party system.<p>Only the presidential elections need to be single-winner. But for all other political bodies, a proportional system where at least 5 to 10 representatives are chosen from each voting district, would be better. Choosing e.g. 10 winners from a single voting district with a proportional voting system would set the election threshold to 10%, so any party with at least 10% support would get at least one representative. This is how almost every European country runs their elections. (Only UK and France still use single-winner systems.)<p>This is the only way to bring diversity and options to the political landscape. And by having more than 2 viable parties, you would have more diverse political discussions, too.<p>And even for the single-winner presidential elections, more than 2 parties would have the existing organization and funding structures to plausible run campaigns and candidates, so as a byproduct you would get diversity and options for the presidential elections, too.<p>I do recognize that it is problematic to organize proportional voting for (a) the Senate and (b) for those states that have less than 5 House representatives. For example, you&#x27;d need to pool Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, N Dakota and S Dakota into one voting district. But even if you went with proportional voting only for the House, you&#x27;d still have more than 2 viable parties in each state, who each could make serious attempts to run for the 2 senators. So you would still get more than 2 parties represented in the Senate, too.

One part of the 18th century that we left behind that maybe we shouldn&#x27;t have was the level of representation in the house. Back then, each US rep had about 10,000 constituents, but today each has close to 1,000,000.<p>Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.

Personally, I think we should go back to first principles to understand the meaning of a representative democracy. The aim is to get a representation of the population. Currently, we get the representation of the people who vote - but this is not the objective. The aim should be to get a representation regardless of vote.<p>There are different ways to get representation. One way is to force everyone to vote like Brazil or Australia but this might not be practical in a country like India where elections go on for 1.5 months. But, there are other ways - where you draw a representation of the entire population and make them vote aka Sortition [0]. We already use this concept in juries and other aspects of life. It would be worthwhile to give this a serious try for alternative voting systems.<p>We could perform alternate experiment systems in parallel and then compare their outcomes to current systems - we don&#x27;t need to adopt them. But, this has to start somewhere. We could have a debate on &quot;HOW&quot; to draw this representative sample but we should acknowledge that the current system rarely achieves the objective of representation.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition</a>

Sounds like an interesting idea. In the end the US needs a system where if a party gets a certain percentage of votes it gets some level of representation in Congress. For example in the 90s Ross Perot got 18% of votes but these voters got 0 percent representation anywhere. This is just extremely unhealthy. The extreme partisanship would get reduced quickly if there were some people in Congress who would vote with one of the big parties one and then with the other another time.

In France we have two rounds. Each voter chooses one candidate during the first round and then only two candidates are selected for the second one.<p>Having to choose amongst one candidate only is terribly bad because some candidates may have lot of similar ideas. However they may diverge on some points, such as they decide to make two parties. The votes get then divided between these two candidates, and they may not reach the second round, even though their idea may be more popular...<p>The winning parties has never wanted to change the system since that makes them win I guess.<p>Any other system would be a better idea than that one.

Approval voting seems like a great way to make sure we only ever elect bland, inoffensive candidates with carefully focus-group calibrated opinions and policies, whom once in office, should they care for reelection, will steer clear of touching any even mildly controversial subjects.

If you want to fix politics in the US, bring back earmarks.<p>It sounds like I&#x27;m advocating corruption, and I kind of am. But at the same time, earmarks served the purpose of providing a good reason for parties to work together, across the aisle. If a little bit of corruption accomplishes that higher purpose, I&#x27;m glad to have it.

First thing to know is that the system was _designed_ 200 years ago to have many of the &quot;bugs&quot; that we notice today. That is : this isn&#x27;t so much a case of a system that was fine 200 years ago not suiting the modern world but rather a system designed deliberately to have deficiencies; for the benefit of a subset of people, from the beginning. Knowing this should make it more clear why the bugs haven&#x27;t been fixed yet.

Single member districts is another reason. Even with good voting system single member district is bad for politics.<p>Proportional representation should be the minimum requirement. Adding additional voting system goodness on top of it is great.

I&#x27;ve been thinking this for almost all my life: the voting systems used in almost every country are plain ridiculous. The only country I know that uses a system that sounds reasonable is Australia.

Broke: 18th century voting systems<p>Woke: 13th century voting systems <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hpl.hp.com&#x2F;techreports&#x2F;2007&#x2F;HPL-2007-28R1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hpl.hp.com&#x2F;techreports&#x2F;2007&#x2F;HPL-2007-28R1.pdf</a>

Santa Clara (in Silicon Valley) has a measure proposing Ranked Choice Voting.<p>For: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.betterelectionsforsantaclara.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.betterelectionsforsantaclara.com</a> Against: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noasantaclara.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noasantaclara.com&#x2F;</a>

Approval Voting is the (most) correct answer for assemblies, councils, houses.<p>Easy to explain, tabulate, verify (audit).<p>Consolidates primaries &amp; general into single event.<p>More robust in presence of (inevitable) errors.<p>Greatly reduces negative campaigning (everyone wants to be your second choice).<p>Per Durverger’s Law, breaks political duopoly.

Terrible, like the &quot;jungle primaries&quot; used in California.<p>These systems are ostensibly biased towards moderate candidates, but when there are no moderates as in these days of wildly antagonistic partisanship, the result is disenfranchisement.<p>Instant runoff is vastly superior in terms of allowing people to express their voting preferences.

&gt; He advocates an alternative voting method called approval voting, in which you can vote for as many candidates as you want, not just one. That means that you can always support your honest favorite candidate, even when an election seems like a choice between the lesser of two evils.<p>&gt; While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics. Approval voting is adored by voting researchers, who regard it as the best simple voting system available.

Actually it&#x27;s bad because we don&#x27;t.<p>Get rid of the popular election of senators and go back to having them be appointed by their state legislatures. That returns the proper focus on balancing the federal and state government powers.

The problem with any voting system is that politicians lie, so IMO we are actually voting on who is the best liar, ie, the most believable liar.<p>To me, it would be better if we could have continuous voting: everyone can re-vote once a day, for any candidate they are elibigle to vote for. Then a politician can be voted out of office at any time, with a new candidate taking their place.<p>We are still voting for the best liar, but at least when someone in office proves that they are a liar, we can get rid of them.

If after listening to the podcast you feel that there were parts that you wanted to hear in more depth, you may find them detailed in the most recent The Center for Election Science blog post. It includes links to full articles about subtopics. I hope that helps folks! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electology.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;80000-hours-interviews-ces-executive-director" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electology.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;80000-hours-interviews-ces-execu...</a>

I&#x27;m glad to see the Center for Election Science getting some funding and attention. They seem to be the loudest voice in favor of approval voting or range voting, but they tend to get drowned out by the IRV bandwagon being promoted mainly by fairvote.org.<p>As far as I know, fairvote.org has good intentions, but IRV (also variously referred to as alternative vote or ranked choice voting) has problems that are kind of hard to explain succinctly but which are likely to cause real problems. Basically, IRV tends to eliminate compromise candidates early and it also fails the monotonicity criterion, which means that there are cases where a candidate could win if some group of voters mark that candidate as their N&#x27;th choice, but the candidate loses if those same people mark the candidate as their N-1&#x27;th choice.<p>That&#x27;s a problem that even first-past-the-post doesn&#x27;t share. In FPTP, you can&#x27;t cause a candidate to lose by voting for them.<p>I worry that voting reform will be perpetually stalled because IRV sounds good, but then the people in a position of power to enact real legislation do some research and talk to some experts and find out it&#x27;s not as great as they thought. I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s what happened in Canada with Trudeau, but it I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised.

Approval voting doesn&#x27;t have the failed track record in the US because it hasn&#x27;t been used. But necessarily, it is flawed.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s better, but to say &quot;this will solve all our problems&quot; is wrong. Provably wrong. With math and everything: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...</a>

By the way. I have recently thought about the elections in Russia and came to the conclusion the whole presidential system is flawed: a classic president has too much power and a single person elections are too easy to manipulate.<p>Every time there are presidential elections in Russia everybody knows the outcome in advance, absolutely no viable competition takes place ever. But despite the corrupt system some states&#x2F;counties&#x2F;cities in Russia manage to elect reasonable candidates that are in opposition to the president occasionally when it&#x27;s about parliamentary elections, especially about local parliaments.<p>This makes me conclude the parliamentary republic system is better than the presidential system.

I don&#x27;t think first past the post is as bad as the article paints it. Every voting system is suboptimal in some sense due to Arrow&#x27;s impossibility theorem. With FPTP you&#x27;re likely to end up with two candidates who have positions right next to the median, which is actually quite reasonable.<p>The main advantage of this system is that it gives incentive to the candidates to pick a position on the political spectrum close to the median voter. From individual voter&#x27;s perspective this may look like you&#x27;re given a choice between two equally bad candidates, but that&#x27;s just an illusion.

Approval voting seems like a good choice from the &quot;wake up tomorrow and not much changes exept that we have a better voting system&quot; perspective. It is a good choice if &quot;not much changes&quot; is attractive to you. To me it seems like it would be similar to Fusion nominations in effect, maybe a slightly larger effect.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fusion_voting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fusion_voting</a><p>But IMO it sidesteps the most important issues, which are related to what happens after the election. Currently, only people who vote for a winning candidate are really represented. The system assumes that differences in opinion are largely regional but we actually have strong differences of opinion within each region. It seems to me that there are two basic ways to improve this (that I can think of, I&#x27;m sure there are more).<p>1) Change how elected representatives vote. Instead of each representative getting one vote yes or no, a representative might vote X% yes and Y% no. In this system the representatives would ideally be nonpartisan, with systems outside the government used for collective influence.<p>2) Look at voting in terms of how each individual picks the representative that best represents them personally with some limitations such as fitting within a particular number of total representatives (&quot;subscribing&quot; to a representative as excalibur puts it). Voting for each individual would then be expected to be between fairly similar candidates, but possibly a completely separate set of candidates than someone you live with who has a significantly different perspective. Lots of complicated possibilities here. One notable suboption would be a two layer system where the person you vote for is not the final representative, but someone who closely monitors politics on behalf of a small number of people and votes for the representatives who make the detailed decisions. This person could be nonpartisan and local as in #1, leaving a combined system where a large number of local nonpartisan representatives are primarily responsible for setting up a partisan government with a composition that accurately reflects constituents (I&#x27;m not sure this would be the best option, just one possible option).

In any system where you select multiple candidates (including approval voting) you&#x27;ll get horse-trading between parties before the election. Basically, the minor parties say &quot;if you adopt this policy, we&#x27;ll direct our preferences &#x2F; recommend voters approve you in our campaign leaflets&quot;. And then controversies over &quot;you&#x27;re doing a deal with <i>them</i>?&quot;<p>It&#x27;s really quite hard to create an electoral system with no distortion, because whatever you put up gets gamed.

The first step of a vote should be to randomly select 11 people who will be given responsibility for selecting the best choice and given time and resources to take it seriously. By &quot;seriously&quot; I mean like for a US presidential election a paid year of studying.<p>It terms of feasibility it should be popular because everyone wins either an hour of their life back or wins a chance to really make a difference.<p>(Starting out a vote by randomly selecting a smaller set of participants is called &quot;sortition&quot;)

I&#x27;m a bit disappointed by the proposed alternative, which is approval voting.<p>Every alternative voting method I&#x27;ve seen proposed by voting geeks has flaws that are as serious as the current system.<p>There are two main problems with approval voting (and other similar systems like condorcet). The first is that approval voting assumes that every preference has the same weight. Either yes, I approve, or no I don&#x27;t approve.<p>If we imagine three candidates, A, B, and C, with 10 voters giving a score of 0 to 100. If 9 people give A a score of 100, B a score of 1, and C a score of 0, while one other person gives C a score of 100, B a score of 1, and A a score of 0, then B will win the election in the earlier methods, despite being 99% unpalatable to the majority of everyone.<p>The second problem is non-voters. Our current system ensures that the will of the non-voter is never accounted for. Now, that seams obvious, because they haven&#x27;t voted, but it&#x27;s possible to build a system that accounts for everyone&#x27;s vote.<p>In the world of single-winner systems, I think the only voting solution that truly represents the will of the people is repeat-stable voting. With repeat-stable voting, you keep repeating the election until the results are stable. An example of this would be voting every day on the exact same election until the results of two subsequent votes produce the same winner.<p>That way there is no such thing as the surprise upset. If the will of the people is not captured in the first vote, they have the chance to mobilize for the second, or the third. In this way, you capture the will of the abstainer, as well, because the abstainer is guaranteed to know the result of their choice to not-vote, which means they have the opportunity to change their vote and haven&#x27;t done so.<p>To move beyond single winner, however, I think the next big leap forward in voting enabled by technology would be hierarchical vote delegation. Instead of electing a leader, you delegate your vote to a leader. (This holds for any role) An elected representative is not making decisions, but wielding their collection of delegated votes. On any single issue, a person is free to manually control that issue, overriding their chosen delegate, and this ensures that the actions of government are truly those decided by the electorate.

For those of you in the UK, I wrote the following post a year ago (June 2017) about the UK&#x27;s antiquated, undemocratic method of voting:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@dontvoteconservativeuk&#x2F;uk-general-election-2017-why-we-need-to-change-our-method-of-voting-74ac31789910" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@dontvoteconservativeuk&#x2F;uk-general-electi...</a>

Politics is not bad because of the voting system. It&#x27;s bad because we no longer have limited government, so the stakes are much higher than they should be. Presidents and Congresses no longer are circumscribed by the Constitutionally enumerated federal powers, but feel free to act on anything they want to.<p>That, and lack of term limits.

Why have scheduled elections? Maybe a way to ensure direct representation is to give each voter the right to pick her representative, and anybody who currently has at least N votes gets into parliament and stays there as long as they maintain N voters, who can switch at any time.

As ever the article starts at the end of the process not the beginning.<p>The job of politics is to bring about consensus. If you don&#x27;t get consensus prior to a vote, then <i>all</i> of the candidates that could have done a deal <i>ahead</i> of the election suffer.<p>Under a first past the post system, the job of the candidates is to horse trade so that there are only two candidates at the election.<p>First past the post works because it is simple, understandable and it forces politicians to do the deals <i>ahead</i> of the election - or suffer the consequences of being ignored entirely.<p>Politicians and researchers hate it, because they want to trade for their favourite hobby horses after an election when they no longer have to suffer the scrutiny of the electorate and can use minority positions to drive forward change that would never get anywhere in a consensus system.<p>About the only improvement to a FPTP system you need is a &#x27;none of the above&#x27; option, so that everybody on the list can be rejected.

Nicky Case has a really good interactive article explaining why &quot;better voting&quot; systems aren&#x27;t as simple as that: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ncase.me&#x2F;ballot&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ncase.me&#x2F;ballot&#x2F;</a>

Plurality voting sucks hard<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electology.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bloombergs-decision-not-run-democracys-dead-canary" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electology.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bloombergs-decision-not-run-demo...</a>

There are people trying to create solutions. Here is one I am excited about: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;united.vote&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;united.vote&#x2F;</a>

I prefer net approval voting over straight approval voting. I also think House districts should seat the top two candidates rather than the top one.

This seems like it&#x27;d be worth trying out. I wonder what the barriers would be to try it in state elections?

I would like to see stricter qualifications for candidates. For instance, you have to be elected to city council before you can run for state assembly. You have to be elected to state assembly before you can run for governor. You have to be elected for governor before you can run for Congress. Something along those lines. That would prevent a random reality TV star from becoming President. Also term limits.

Isn’t this system equivalent to vote your disapprovals only, the person with the least disapprovals wins?

Politics is bad because it runs on people. We are shitty hardware for being nice to one another.

Politics is bad because of the choices on the ballots, not because of how they are counted.

Just because you lost doesn’t mean that “politics is bad”.<p>This country is in a fugue state or something.<p>Cheers :)

Score Voting, Approval Voting, and STAR Voting are basically the future.

Politics is bad because the very object of voting is wrong. We are supposed to vote for people who will invent new laws. What if we simply do not want new laws?

“Wisdom of the Crowd” needs to die. We have network theory. We know direct democracy doesn’t work. Repeal the 17th ammendment and reinstall other safeguards we used to have against the herd.

Easy answers like this are always oversimplifications. There&#x27;s problems with our voting system but there&#x27;s no serious reason to believe simply switching to a different style of voting system alone would fix anything.<p>We also have terrible gerrymandering that ensures seats are hard to change.<p>Effectively no limits on political contributions thanks to Citizens United (not that things were great before that but they&#x27;ve gotten much worse) means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it&#x27;s a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.<p>People pushing easy answers like this aren&#x27;t doing anyone any favors. Even if somehow their favored solution got adopted, when it fails to be the panacea they&#x27;ve promised people will reject it and call it a failure even if it might have helped the situation.

One time I was in an approval voting election with 100-odd candidates.<p>I decided to be a smart-ass and check off most of the names.

The problem isn&#x27;t with the voting algorithm - it&#x27;s with the voter pool. Voters must have skin-in-the-game (ie be responsible for their vote) in order to have responsible government. This means that votes should be weighted according to taxes paid. People who pay no tax shouldn&#x27;t be excluded, but the fact that they are not personally responsible for funding the government should be taken into account in their vote.

This proposal seems really naive. How does the approval voting system make the American South vote more liberal candidates or California vote more conservative ones? How does it create better leadership in either major US political party?<p>A far better solution would be for one or the other party in the US to come up with a program that more than a fraction of the country believes in.

Why is democracy such a popular system for establishing governments?<p>When a member of our family becomes sick, we don&#x27;t ask everyone to vote on possible treatments? We go to doctors who are trained to diagnose the cause of sickness and offer appropriate treatment.<p>When a scientist publishes a new study, we don&#x27;t ask everyone what they think about the study? We ask other accomplished scientists to do a peer-review and offer their opinion on the study.<p>No matter what field we look at, we do not rely on laymen to decide the outcome but we rely on qualified experts and professionals.<p>But in case of establishing a government, which can have a long term impact on millions of livelihood, we ask just about anyone to offer their opinion in the form a vote. Why is this a reasonable system?