I’m not very well-versed on all this but it seems
Edit: I don’t think this is the best, its just all I’m generally familiar with
First Past The Post
Benefits the two parties in a two-party duopoly system like that of the US. Boom or bust, black or white. When the party in power pisses you off you vote their competitor even if holding your nose.
Seems like there must be a better way, maybe just not as good for those who prefer shooting fish in a barrel
Ranked choice. If no one has a majority, you eliminate the lowest vote getter and take the second choice of people who voted for that candidate. Repeat until there’s a majority.
Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.
It’s still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.
That’s not a bug. It’s the entire aim of an electoral system.
The people who aren’t the extreme ends of two poles and actually have policies the majority are in favor of are the people who are supposed to be in office. I shouldn’t be choosing between “arrest people for using birth control” and “eat the rich and disband the police”.
You also don’t get progress in any direction when both parties are spending half their time unraveling everything the last group did.
I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.
This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.
Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.
If the Canadian Liberals thought it’d win them more elections, they would’ve done an election reform years ago.
…like they’d initially promised.
The center should be the people representing the country. There’s a lot of room in there for a diverse, varied set of perspectives. The fact that 1/3 of the country hates the two extremes and is OK with the middle is exactly why the people in the middle are the ones who are supposed to be elected.
The middle will move over time as the electorate’s value change. That’s where progress happens. The 10% who are Neo Nazis should absolutely not have anyone make it into office. That’s not what functional government is.
There are good arguments for ranked choice and proportional representation IMO. The latter tends to favour more “fringe” parties getting representation, which usually isn’t a bad thing.
The problem with proportional representation is that it assumes candidates are fungible.
It’s bad enough that people vote for a party over an individual, and inherently limits the element of trusting the human being that should be the deciding factor in how people vote. Systematically assigning vote to a party rather than a person is much worse.
I see your point, but the reality is most people do vote for parties rather than people.
I imagine you would see more smaller parties in a PR system anyway, rather than the current big neoliberal tent parties.
You can’t prevent that.
But any system that actively enforces party lines should be automatically disqualified as a legitimate electoral system. It strengthens the power of the dumbest, least informed voters at the expense of rational voters willing to actually understand who candidates are.
I like Condorcet methods.
This is a ranked method that’s different from instant runoff, with its defining characteristic being that the winner would beat every other candidate in a two-way race. The biggest downside is that determining the result is more mathematically complex than other methods, which makes it harder to explain and might lead people to mistrust the result.
Condorcet methods benefit candidates few voters hate, which is the inverse of the current and past two US presidential elections. Given a situation where two dominant parties run widely unpopular candidates, a Condorcet method would create a very strong probability that any palatable third-party candidate wins, though over the long term a system using such a method probably wouldn’t have two dominant parties.
Seems like an amazing system when you’re voting between a small number of parties, but the Dutch House elections had hundreds of individuals, with 20 districts with imperfect overlap off individuals. It would be completely incomprehensible for humans to check things.
The Dutch system is open list proportional representation, with the twist that lists may overlap between districts.
I think Condorcet methods are better suited to voting for individual candidates. It’s certainly possible to have multi-member districts (and I think that’s a good idea), but probably doesn’t pair well with proportional representation.
Some useful simulations for understanding many proposed voting styles, and the potential drawbacks of each.
CGP Grey did a video on this subject a little over a decade ago.
Texagons are the bestagons.Gimme checkboxes
Slightly late, but I currently rewatch the lecture I talked about in my other comment. The interesting part starts roughly here:
https://youtu.be/T3-VlQu3iRM?feature=shared&t=2550
But really, the entire lecture series is quite worth a watch.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/americas-hidden-duopoly-2/
Listen to this then tell me what your choice is.
Whatever people choose, but with second turn. Too many times a fragmented vote makes it seem like a certain candidate has larger support when it is not the case
Watch this lecture series:
https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=BDqvzFY72mg
Iit’s really insightful on many topics, and he also makes a point why the American two-party system is not as bad as it sometimes feels like (although of course not perfect either). I forgot which lecture exactly was about the voting systems, let me know if you watch it and find out.
