Voting system and reform thread
Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2017 1:14 pm
A general thread about discussing democratic electoral systems, hypothetical or not.
I wrote:I'm making yet another system(s) to vote for the President of the United States. What would be a disqualifying percentage of voters selecting the "Don't know enough about the candidate" option on the ballot if such an option existed?
I was thinking of making it somewhere 15-40%. (Yes that's a broad range.)Frislander wrote:Certainly no higher than 50% imho, and I'd be tempted to make it 40%.mèþru wrote:I'm making yet another system(s) to vote for the President of the United States. What would be a disqualifying percentage of voters selecting the "Don't know enough about the candidate" option on the ballot if such an option existed?
1. This is obviousmèþru wrote:The criteria, ranked by importance:The criteria don't necessarily have to be filled, but I want to at least address them.
- People who don't want the office shouldn't be considered in the voting process.
- The winning candidate should be the one most people are okay with.
- Get rid of the whole ballot access system and let people vote for whomever they want.
- There should be a consensus among states (possibly plus the territories), in which any candidate vehemently rejected by one area should not be elected.
I'm trying to eliminate candidates with the "Don't know enough about the candidate". It will be a system based off of my favourite system for single-winner elections, majority judgement.
I was mainly thinking of this when writing it. But, yeah. If Donald Trump fulfills 1, 2, and 4, while Hillary Clinton fulfills only 1 and 2, he wins. If Hillary Clinton fulfills only 1 and 2 while Donald Trump fulfills 1 and 4, then I guess that Donald Trump shouldn't win. I need to make some changes.I wrote:The criteria don't necessarily have to be filled, but I want to at least address them.
Your example actually doesn't work. Majority judgement doesn't take the average of values in the case of an even number of votes. It takes the lower one. If the voter votes, the median is 6. If they don't, it's a 4. Also, trying to make only fanatics vote makes it more likely that an extremist party would win, so I think all non-extremist parties will encourage their voters to vote.Salmoneus wrote:*participation is particularly an issue under Majority Judgement, of course, because MJ actively discourages participation. Voters will often be better served by staying at home, and candidates will very often be better served by most voters staying home. So political ads will be "just stay home this year, we'll sort it out for you!" - hardly democratic. [consider: Candidate A gets ratings of (just taking a 10-point scale for sake of argument and not worrying about words) a 4, a 4, a 6, a 10 and a 10, giving a median of 6.8. But if they can persuade the 6 voter, theoretically a supporter, to instead stay at home, then their median rating actually improves, to 7! Similarly, if your voters are giving your rival anything less than a damning rating, it's more important to persuade them to stay at home than it is to persuade them to come out and support you. Parties will endeavour to ensure that only their most fanatical voters actually turn out to vote.]
This is a feature, not a bug. Let's say the voters of A hate B and vice versa. Let's say that a large minority of A voters like C, and a much smaller minority like D. Let's say that a large minority of B voters like D, and a much smaller minority like A. The voters of C and D hate A and B, but a majority of the entire electorate doesn't like C and D. Barely anyone likes E, but E has few haters. E wins, because it is the compromise candidate everyone can at least accept.Salmoneus wrote:This is incompatible with having winning candidates most people are OK with! Indeed, MJ even fails the condorcet loser criterion. That is, consider: you have candidates A, B, C, D, and E. Most people prefer A to E. Most people prefer B to E. Most people prefer C to E. Most people prefer D to E. Most people, in other words, would prefer any other candidate to E. But under Majority Judgement, E will sometimes win the election!
You have to think about these things like a petty-minded QA analyst determined to break the system. So: if you allow people to pick their own scale, some people will immediately go to a scale of 1 to 1,000,000,000.mèþru wrote:Since writing the above post, I got an idea for an alternative idea to majority judgement. You give each candidate an integer value. The highest absolute value is set as a denominator for all the values.
I meant in each individual's ballot. Not for everyone's ballot. This is the key thing that prevents people from breaking the system.I wrote:The highest absolute value is set as a denominator for all the values
With respect, that's no clearer than before. What does "not accepting" a President mean? So far, America has never had a President that the nation has not accepted, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln. So on the one hand, if Lincoln is the only President you're aiming to prevent, are you really solving a real problem? Every other election has been fine, after all. But on the other hand, do you really want a system that prevents the election of Lincoln?mèþru wrote:Clarification:
2. I mean that the winner should be someone that as many people in the nation can accept (not bad, not necessarily good) as president as possible. Even if that person doesn't have a majority.
What is gained by this, other than disenfranchising poorer (and disproportionately non-White) voters, who are the ones who a) are more likely to fail to correctly remember and spell their candidate's name, and b) are more likely to be put off voting by the introduction of such a punitively difficult voting method? Except, I suppose, that it would also benefit the two major parties (because you're putting more burden on name-recognition - you wouldn't be able to, say, turn up and vote for the Constitutional Party, you'd have to have learnt who their candidate was first), and would also benefit advertising executives (because drilling the names (and spellings) in would be more important that debating policy).3. I am not sure how I will actually do this, but I am already aware of the problem of too many candidates. I'm trying to cut down on that. One method I made shortly before posting made all candidates write-in, with all states having at least four spaces to write in candidates. States that currently have more than four registered parties must have as many spaces as registered parties to write-in candidates. States may also pass legislation to increase or decrease the amount of spaces, as long as four spaces remain.
Sorry, I was thinking of means, not medians. However, although the specific numbers don't work out, the underlying point remains: MJ fails the participation criterion (voters are generally better off not voting (unless they vote hyper-tactically)). And parties are better off having some people not vote for them.Your example actually doesn't work. Majority judgement doesn't take the average of values in the case of an even number of votes. It takes the lower one. If the voter votes, the median is 6. If they don't, it's a 4. Also, trying to make only fanatics vote makes it more likely that an extremist party would win, so I think all non-extremist parties will encourage their voters to vote.
Oh, but you have to. No seriously, you really do (well, it doesn't need to be on the ballot - in your write-in system people just wouldn't write them in). It's a terrible idea, but it's better than the alternative, where five drunk guys in Spokane are the only people who have heard of Joe Wobblewazzard, are the only people who write his name in, and manage to give Mr Wobblewazzard (whose entire platform is the reintroduction of slavery and the prohibition of asparagus) a perfect median 10 score, comfortably beating all the other candidates.So I guess the don't knows are a bad idea.
And then there are riots in the streets. Because when you go and tell people "so, the majority of voters prefered Clinton over Trump. So we're making Trump the President,", they will not be happy. They weren't very happy this time, and they'll be even less happy when this is advertises as a "feature" not a "bug".This is a feature, not a bug. Let's say the voters of A hate B and vice versa. Let's say that a large minority of A voters like C, and a much smaller minority like D. Let's say that a large minority of B voters like D, and a much smaller minority like A. The voters of C and D hate A and B, but a majority of the entire electorate doesn't like C and D. Barely anyone likes E, but E has few haters. E wins, because it is the compromise candidate everyone can at least accept.Salmoneus wrote:This is incompatible with having winning candidates most people are OK with! Indeed, MJ even fails the condorcet loser criterion. That is, consider: you have candidates A, B, C, D, and E. Most people prefer A to E. Most people prefer B to E. Most people prefer C to E. Most people prefer D to E. Most people, in other words, would prefer any other candidate to E. But under Majority Judgement, E will sometimes win the election!
Oh, sorry. Simple Plurality. It's the system that you currently use.What is SP? This is why I'm avoiding abbreviations.
Why is that a good thing?[/quote] I suspect, that under such a system, most voters will.Majority judgement is better than ranked systems because you can put multiple candidates on the same ranking and can jump between rankings to express the distance of support. In short, in expresses the level of support a voter has for each candidate.
Again, why is that a bad thing? That's just a fact about the voting process, not an assessment of its effects.They may, but if they do they'll throw away the election.Cumulative voting restricts how many candidates you can vote for (which I guess my system does as well, but on a lesser scale).
Acceptable means that they are definitely not bad, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they are good. In the recent election, an unusually large amount of people found one or more candidates to be unacceptable.Salmoneus wrote:With respect, that's no clearer than before. What does "not accepting" a President mean?
Yes. I'm not pro-slavery, but I would be against any candidate that is so unacceptable to a part of the country that they secede violently (I'm all for peaceful secession if the majority of people in the seceding territory are in favour).Salmoneus wrote:But on the other hand, do you really want a system that prevents the election of Lincoln?
Nor is it mine. I didn't really even think of it until you mentioned it.Salmoneus wrote:I know there's unhappiness with the US system, but I don't think "our system is terrible, because it elected Lincoln!" is really the first objection most people have...
The qualification I want is "I recognise their name and policies, and whether I like them or not, they are acceptable." Also, I imagine that the winner of the first election under this system will either be a Green or Libertarian, but eventually it will shift to a system of mainly big party winners with occasional smaller party winners. It will also feature political parties unofficially fielding more than one final candidate while pretending to be united. The more candidates your party has, the more likely one will win. I view all of this stuff except for Green or Libertarian winning the first election as desirable.Salmoneus wrote:More broadly, "the one most people are OK with" suggests that what you really want is President Transformers: a candidate that pleases nobody and does nothing well. I don't think it's particularly obvious that "I recognise his name but have no clear opinion about him, so I guess I don't hate him!" is the qualification people really want in a President!
Good point. I'm keeping it though unless if you have a better alternative that addresses my goals.Salmoneus wrote:What is gained by this, other than disenfranchising poorer (and disproportionately non-White) voters, who are the ones who a) are more likely to fail to correctly remember and spell their candidate's name, and b) are more likely to be put off voting by the introduction of such a punitively difficult voting method? Except, I suppose, that it would also benefit the two major parties (because you're putting more burden on name-recognition - you wouldn't be able to, say, turn up and vote for the Constitutional Party, you'd have to have learnt who their candidate was first), and would also benefit advertising executives (because drilling the names (and spellings) in would be more important that debating policy).
I already made a system before starting the thread using a method of exclusion not on the ballot. Look at the post above.Salmoneus wrote:(well, it doesn't need to be on the ballot - in your write-in system people just wouldn't write them in)
The chance of something like this happening with millions of votes are unlikely, but I see your point. I'll add some additional rules to address this. I'm going to use the fraction system I mentioned earlier instead of majority judgement.Salmoneous wrote:Oh, and that example also illustrates how MJ is incompatible with the "winner most people are OK with" criterion. Because in that example, only 3 out of 14 voters even gave Trump a higher-than-50% approval, and he still won. Whereas 7 out of 14 gave clinton at least 50% approval, and she lost
I think people should be free to vote for whomever they want. Ballot access laws give unfair advantages by allowing the top parties to restrict minor and independent candidates. People psychologically seek out names which are already written. When there are none, they are freed. Cumulative vote forces people to think about tactical voting to block out others' tactical voting. With majority judgement, if most people don't vote strategically, those who do will have little impact on the vote (in a vote on the scale of the presidential election, not in a 20 voters election).Salmoneus wrote:Again, why is that a bad thing? That's just a fact about the voting process, not an assessment of its effects.
Here are a couple of points from basic voting theory.mèþru wrote:Not much, but I'm hoping to learn.
this can be solved trivially through having a write-in only ballot: fair enough, there's a problem to be solved regarding what you do when juan soto gets 40% of the vote, 30% goes to pedro kuzcinsky and 25% to pedro kuchinski, but this can be solved in a variety of ways.3. This is grotesquely undemocratic. You would be asking people to meaningfully cast ballots on a paper a hundred pages thick -
It's extremely unlikely, but what happens in the event of a tie?Torco wrote:whoever gets the least nopes wins.
This is absurd; no one except George Washington has ever won all states. If this was your criterion, no one can ever be elected president. The only people who are "acceptable" to all voters are, basically, the people who aren't running. The very process of running turns on the polarization process and eliminates the general favorability. Or if you could magically find some person no one hates— Will Smith? Betty White?— the moment they entered office they would become A Politician and their acceptability would plummet.mèþru wrote:[*]Eliminate all candidates with an overall negative rating in at least one state. If no one succeeds, raise it by one state until one person succeeds. If only one person succeeds, they become president.
same thing as happens in any other voting system where enough people vote that ties don't happen... i guess parliament decides or something?KathTheDragon wrote:It's extremely unlikely, but what happens in the event of a tie?Torco wrote:whoever gets the least nopes wins.
ya, i would imagine it makes magnicidio a much more attractive notion.alynnidalar wrote:Having a president and vice president from different parties does not sound like a great idea. There's a reason the US stopped voting separately for those two positions.