I was with you until this part.
States gave us a path to gay marriage, and allow people to move to different areas that hold different values than the whole nation.
I'd suggest trying instant runoff voting before moving to something as drastic as abolishing states. I think IRV would allow people to express their votes and opinions more clearly than the system we have today.
Do you think IRV alone helps? What exactly do you propose?
Aside: in Australia, which has IRV, gay marriage is still not legal. Yay democracy. /s
How long has Australia had IRV? I don't think it's a magic solution on its own. But I do think it allows voters to more clearly express their wishes without playing as many games wondering what the rest of the voter base will do. That's not democracy.
Anyway, IRV does not guarantee your favorite will win and it only gives different results in certain situations, such as close elections. Maybe Australia hasn't had the right circumstances come up yet. There are still a lot of barriers to becoming a presidential candidate, and many good people just don't want that job, like Biden. I'm sure that's true at other levels of government too. I know I would not like to be in a room arguing for gay marriage against some Christians. Or discussing budget for things I don't understand. Or any other number of boring things. And at the end of your term, if you aren't reelected, there's a good chance many people don't like you. Public office isn't glorious while you're there. It's only glorious after you're long dead, and even then you probably had to do something hugely important to be praised.
> Do you think IRV alone helps? What exactly do you propose?
A good government is made up of active voters. I propose making good use of your voice through the internet, in person, and on the phone and in letters to your representatives. Inspire others to do so, keeping the focus on supporting issues you care about, and less so much about people or particular candidates. Share facts. Don't try to brainwash your fellow citizen by convincing them to vote in your man. Discuss and debate with mutual respect for everyone you meet, because we are all equals, you, me, the president, and those natives in Brazil who don't want to meet anyone from outside their jungle village. The more you can discuss without disrespecting someone's right to their own opinion, the more trustful and open our society will become, and we will advance to use technologies you can't imagine today. I know this because we're living in that future that people from the 1950s couldn't fathom. Use your vote and your voice, or risk losing it. It's your choice.
IRV has nothing to do with reducing the strength of two main parties. It just reduces the weirdness in the case of moderately close races.
EDIT: Just read a bit about approval voting and score voting. I guess I'll suggest those next time instead of mentioning IRV.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_se...
http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://ScoreVoting.net/PropDiatribe.html
Another thing Australia has, besides IRV, is compulsory voting.
> The state governments are hotbeds of corruption, ruled by minority interests because state elections have low voter turnout, and add an enormous administrative tax to pretty much every economic or legal transaction that happens in the U.S.
Maybe that needs to happen once in awhile for us to wake up and start exercising our rights again.
I don't think the world has gotten any easier to administrate. If anything it's gotten tougher. I like the idea of allowing smaller areas to administrate themselves outside the national constitution. The world is changing more quickly every day, states have worked well for 240 years at preventing dissolution, and if we consolidate more power we risk creating a majority who is unhappy enough to revolt, in my opinion.
Our goal is not to become all powerful and ignore citizens who aren't making use of their right to vote. Our goal is to be balanced, and in doing so we find strength as a byproduct. When you seek power as a goal, you have already started down the path to failure when someone inevitably usurps your authority. Sustainability is our goal, and balance is the way.
Surely, the Confederate secession qualifies as a dissolution.
I am of the opinion that the U.S. would fare better with more states, rather than fewer. If Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Diego all became city-states, the usual civic corruption would have less impact on the statewide governments of the donor states.
But I don't expect that change anytime soon. It was after all the states who gave up some of their sovereign powers to form a federal system after breaking free of British rule.
If YOU can't make up your mind, then just don't vote. Seriously. You can get Approval Voting and just not even show up and vote. You'll still get massively better election outcomes because of all the people who do show up to vote are using an objectively better decision-making algorithm. Yes, objectively better.
An honest vote in first-past-the-post, say for your awesome friend Bob for President, would give you approximately 0% return compared to the proper strategy of voting for the lesser evil of Clinton.
Suppose Approval Voting gives you a utility ("happiness") of 10 if you're tactical, or 9 if you're honest.
Now suppose Voting System X, in which a sincere and tactical vote are obviously identical (ignore the fact that this requires the system to use randomness), gives you a utility of 7.
Now do you _really_ want to take the latter system because there's no disparity in your happiness based on whether you knew the best strategy? Or would you rather take the system that gives you a better result?
More details here. www.electology.org/topic/tactical-voting
Obviously, if the honest approval ballot give me 9 utility points, and the strategy approval ballot gives me 10 utility points that's better then the system that always give me 7 utility points.
However, it seems to me that the situation is much more along the lines that an honest approval vote gives me 2 utility points, and a strategic one gives me a utility of 9.
See, I hold to political positions that almost always put me in the minority. If I only approved those candidates that that I actually liked, I'd only approve candidates with effectively zero chance of winning. This would let my least favorite candidate win, thus granting me very little utility.
Hence, I'll probably take System X, even if approval voting might, in theory, do better if everyone applied the strategy correctly.
No, it's not. I agree with you. (But perhaps didn't express that right.)
If you want your site to be usable for drive-by-quoting in an Internet discussion, perhaps you want to make two copies of that text, one specifically for Approval Voting and one for score voting in general?
PS Overall nice website, I am reading more.
This was the original site from years ago: https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/approval-votin...
I wonder what the right strategy would be? I guess start small and introduce sensible and simple voting everywhere you can:
- Shareholder votes in a company - Where to go for dinner - Vote for mayor in a small town - ...
Most people don't even know that there are different voting systems, yet alone that some of them are vastly better than others. (It's like watching people play Monopoly, when they are much better games around these days.)
Britain also had some changes (with labour replacing liberal at the beginning of the 20th century).
I hail from Germany, which traditionally has a more proportional system. (It's a weird mix that seems to do reasonably well in practice. They could replace the first-past-the-post of the `Erststimme' with a score voting system, but the Erststimme isn't that important anyway.) They never had less than three parties in the federal parliament after WWII, even with a 5% threshold needed to move in.
The UK had three somewhat relevant parties in the 20th century (though only two relevant parties per county). Why haven't they changed electoral system? (And when they had a referendum about it, why did they suggest the dreadful IRV?..)
Certainly there are places like the UK, or my homeland, Canada, that have had three relevant parties for a while without changing the system. Although both UK and Canada have forces pushing for reform. The recently elected government of Canada gave an election promise to change the system, but, well, I'm not holding my breath.
But I'm not saying at all that any country with multiple parties will enact voting reform, but statistically, it seems that voting reform is often brought about that way.
I suspect IRV was brought to vote in the UK, because that was deal that could be reached between the Conservatives who didn't want change, and the Liberal Democrats who did. However, I will note that IRV isn't so bad when selecting members of a legislature. Approval/Condorcet elect compromise candidates, but we don't want to simply have a legislature of compromise candidates, but rather representative of how people voted. But some from of proportional system is probably better.
Explained here with a simple graphic to visualize it. www.electology.org/topic/tactical-voting
The optimal strategy on who to vote for depends not only on preferences, but also on what you know about the other voters. Polls help here.
The nice thing about approval voting is that, even though their might not be one single, clear and obvious way to translate your preference into your vote; but there is a clear and obvious family of ways to do so. And they have nice properties.
In-first-past-the-post, people often elect to give their vote to the lesser evil, instead of their preferred (third-party) candidate.
In approval voting, you will never have to give a compromise candidate more `vote' than any other candidate you prefer.
Ie all families of sensible voting strategies for approval voting look like this:
- sort candidates in order of preference - figure out a cutoff - approve anyone above the cutoff
The optimal cutoff depends on the peculiarities of the election (polls etc).
In practice, people manage this quite well intuitively. (I have run approval votings for small things, like which restaurant to take the team to.)
This works out well, tending to elect Condorcet winners. http://ScoreVoting.net/AppCW.html
So you do vote above the cutoff. But the optimal cutoff is really simple to find from the polls.
Your strategic consideration only consists in choosing a cutoff.
You must be joking? Almost no one ever votes their true preference in first-past-the-post. People usually vote for the lesser evil of the top two candidates, because any other strategy (like voting for who you'd actually like to win the election) just wastes your vote.
In any case, check out eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting for other people's thoughts on the system. There's much more online about all aspects and pros and cons that we don't need to rehash.
Borda Count really invites the gaming, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Potential_for_tact...
What about cloning candidates? The simulation only looks at strategic voting.
Compliance with "independence of clones" is in this property chart. http://scorevoting.net/CompChart.html
Consider the example with A, B, and C at the end. It claims that approval voting would probably elect C, but why? If the voters apply perfect strategy, B supporters won't approve C, and B will win. The same is true of range voting, where B supporters will give C a rating of zero.
It does not seem escapable that a majority voter block can dictate their wishes on the whole population by exaggerating their stated preferences.
I haven't convinced myself when multiple people can get elected.
Bayesian Regret calculations show IRV is actually THE WORST of the five commonly discussed alternative voting systems.
The best is Score Voting, but it's not as simple as Approval Voting. http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Clay Shentrup Co-founder of The Center for Election Science
The site you linked looks like it was built in 1998
You're overlooking the fact that people and politicians need time to grow and hone their skills. Without states, without giving them some ability to be corrupt, there is no testing ground. Politicians at the national level would not be experienced negotiators because the first step in being a politician would be joining the federal government. And I don't think forcing gay marriage on the US would've been a good idea any sooner even if we'd had a sufficiently progressive president and congress. I have deep sympathy for all the people who had to wait so long for society to officially accept them, but I think even they can respect that we might not be as strong of a unified society if gay marriage had become legal in, say, the 80s, rather than today. A unilateral decision by a president and majority congress could have set the issue back even further.
It seems to me that minority interests have a disproportional influence on policy decisions and that a single issue may not have a high enough priority to get elected representatives to change policy on that issue.
For example, if you look at the the NMSL (National Maximum Speed Limit) that was in effect from 1974 through 1995, it was quite obvious, based on traffic speed measurements, that almost no one was complying with the law on interstate highways, yet it took 13 years before it was modified to allow for 65 mph speed limits and another 8 years before it was repealed entirely.
So, it's entirely possible that the electorate was not in favor of that particular law long before 1995, but that single issue wasn't important enough for congress to vote on for around a decade.
Moreover, we have no way of knowing whether Bush or Gore "won" Florida. Voting is a mechanism for measuring something. Like any method of measurement, it has a margin of error. The margin between Bush and Gore was so close that it was almost certainly smaller than the error in the voting mechanism itself. The scientifically right answer would have been to exclude Florida (and, in fact, several other states decided by very small margins) from the sampling process.
> A majority of Americans is dissatisfied with the Patriot Act [1] yet it keeps getting renewed.
First, what polls say is not the same as what the electorate believes. Actual voters skew older and more conservative that the general public. Second, your poll doesn't show that Americans are dissatisfied with the Patriot Act. 63% of those polled think it requires no or only minor changes. 62% think it's about right or doesn't go far enough.
Those polls also have some very interesting statistics. 30% of those polled think that the government should take all steps necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks, even if that means violating basic civil liberties. 65% think otherwise, but 55% of those polled do not think the government's programs violate civil liberties. 55% of those polled in 2006 were okay with the Bush administration's wiretaps. 53% of those polled in 2006 thought that the Bush administration was about right or did not go far enough in restricting peoples' civil liberties to fight terrorism.
> A majority of Americans thinks political spending is corrupt [2] and that the political system is rigged, yet we get Citizens United to pour even more corporate cash into the machine.
In a 2010 poll, 68% of those polled thought the government should be able to prevent the sale of violent video games to minors: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1588/children-violence.aspx. Yet in 2011, the Supreme Court struck down a California law doing precisely that (Brown v. EMA). I think few people on HN would say that was wrongly decided. Given that the Supreme Court reviews laws that have been passed by elected legislatures, it is almost guaranteed that when it strikes down a law, it will be going against popular opinion.
> A majority of Americans voted for the Democrat in 2000, but the Republican was installed instead [3].
Frankly, I think we should not only abolish the electoral college, but the states as well. But in the meantime, who the "majority of Americans voted for" is not how we decide the election of the President.