For a perfect example of this, see the presidential election in 2000. The vote totals in Florida were within the margin of error, making the election a coin flip with the pretense of counting [1]. Politicians behaved exactly as you describe.
[1] At the time I was in college, and had just learned stats. I advocated just flipping a coin in full view on TV and moving on. Everyone thought I was crazy.
Unfortunately, whatever candidate was ahead a any point in time would say "it's time to just move on".
I'm afraid that too many people don't get the concept of "margin of error" and will insist on getting a count that 100% accurate (instead of merely 99% or something).
Further, if you truly believe in democracy, then a candidate with 49.9999% of the vote is probably nearly as good as one with 50.0001%, right? So the cost of an error is low as well.
I'm uneasy with the random approach suggested by the article for fear that a truly crazy candidate might win the lottery, but I'd be good with having all the candidates above some large baseline (say, 30% of the vote) get a proportional shot at the win. I think I'd probably want it to be proportional to the counted share even if there is a margin of error, though.
[1] Technically margin_of_error(votes_cast).
If the vote with that number was actually cast, that is the vote that is actually used. If not, try the next one until one actually was cast. Pretty repeatable, and recounting is easier.
[1] Note that "all candidates" may not be sufficient, since it allows the candidates to collectively choose the outcome by picking their numbers such that one of their own/friends' ballots is chosen. This could be used to elect a popular Labour politician in a remote district where only the major two parties are running, in exchange for electing two unknown Tories.
[2] If you're not into crypto, put tickets containing every possible ballot number in a big barrel. Have a trusted/blindfolded guy pick tickets until he finds one that corresponds to a vote that was actually cast. There are lots of solutions, of varying degrees of cleverness.
[EDITs: added two footnotes]
I feel like for a complete idiot for not spotting that up front.
How would you feel if you got 80% of the votes in your district, but the lottery (even if repeatable) picked your opponent? How would those feel who gave you your vote? I'd certainly felt cheated.
However, I'm not sure how much of a (perceived) advantage over proportional representation this gives you.
If you're looking for possible alternatives, I find Germany's model not too bad: two votes, one for per-district representatives and one for parties which is evaluated proportionally. Not perfect, but works out in practise.
I'd like one mode change though: instead of giving one vote per list, I'd like to allocate an arbitrary number of votes per list, but you can give at most one vote per candidate or party. That way you can vote for blocks of parties/candidates, or even vote against somebody by voting for everybody execpt that one party/candidate.
This would remove a lot of tactical debate if you're vasting your vote on candidates/parties who don't have huge chances for success.
That happens with annoying regularity. I have a system for dealing with that too, but that's a different blog post. ;-)
> I picked up the "perfect" from the headline and came up with a counter-example.
Well there's a reason "perfect" is in scare quotes. If I really thought the system were perfect I'd actually be advocating it instead of going "Hey guys, here's a neat idea. I'm not really sure if I'm actually for it or not".
The meaning of perfect here was intended to be that it has a lot of the properties which many people claim are impossible to coexist and summarise under the heading "there is no perfect voting system" (it overcomes the impossibilities by being non-deterministic), whilst remaining very similar to the existing and familiar system
> This would remove a lot of tactical debate if you're vasting your vote on candidates/parties who don't have huge chances for success.
which doesn't work if you give each party 1/#number_of_parties_voted_for votes (voting for CoolGuy gives your vote on EstablishedAndNotTooBad less weight, after all.)
Not only would this rob the legislature of experience, it would also mean politicians towards the end of each term would be focused on securing their next job, rather than performing their current one.
- Oxford PPE
- Policy researcher
- Safe seat
- Minister
- Non-exec chairman/director
(Edited for ghastly sentence construction, sorry)
(A bit like the one time I voted for the Scottish Socialist Party - I only did so for their entertainment value, not because they would have any likely control over policies).
I'm not sure it does, or at least not drastically: It robs the legislature of individual experience, but on average there's no reason you'd expect each politician to be in for the first time. They could even rerun later.
> it would also mean politicians towards the end of each term would be focused on securing their next job, rather than performing their current one.
This is a really easy problem to solve: You give a recently ousted MP a paid vacation after their term is up.
(This works better of course if you stagger elections rather than electing everyone at once, but it's fine without)
Then do the random step. The drawback is that there may be a month or two between casting votes and having the results, but I don't see why this is a big deal.
* Step 1. A thousand votes are selected randomly. And counted and the counts are made public
* Step 2. The winner vote is selected at random in public procedure.
"Recounts" are nonsense, but I can imagine that an audit might help against the above scenario.
The result clearly wouldn't be fair in our normal sense of fairness and that would indeed be a huge roadblock.
The only appeal would come if a given system looks both unfair, unprincipled and corrupt. Then "just unfair" might be better.
Suppose that a court rules that one district must be re-counted, and based on the result there will be a new, random candidate.
This creates incentives for going after re-countings if your political opponent has won the lottery, not because the result will be much different, but simply because you get a second chance in the lottery.
It boils down to the thought that repeatability is import for fairness. Somebody claims that your DNA is identical to the one collected from the crime scene? You can make a second test and verify the first one. You think you have been treated unfair in court? You can repeated the trial at a higher court. All the doping tests in sports are verified by repetition.
The list is nearly endless. Even if a random experiment does treat you fair, you can't known.
The second point is that randomness only creates the appearance of fairness on the large scale, single individual still get treated unfair.