
A “perfect” voting system - cavedave
http://www.drmaciver.com/2011/04/a-perfect-voting-system/
======
perlgeek
Random numbers in election systems are an absolute no-go.

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.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
As stated elsewhere in the comments, you can make a number of people (e.g.
anyone who asks[1]) commit to some number[2] (e.g. by giving out
SHA1(their_number)). Then calculate a random number from that (conceptually,
addition modulo number of voters; actual implementation left as an exercise to
the reader).

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]

~~~
perlgeek
This does account for the repeatability, but the point still remains that it
treats individuals unfair, and that the unfairness only averages out over many
districts.

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.

~~~
DRMacIver
How do those who currently get 40% of the vote and 10% of the seats feel? I'm
guessing pretty cheated.

~~~
sorbus
Replacing a broken system with an even more broken system is not an
improvement.

~~~
DRMacIver
I agree completely, but you've not argued convincingly for this one being a
more broken system. The current one is guaranteed unfair, this one is
expected-fair even if the unfairness may be geographically concentrated.

~~~
perlgeek
It seems we've argued over different things. I picked up the "perfect" from
the headline and came up with a counter-example. Comparing it with an
obviously broken system doesn't make it any more perfect.

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.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Can you explain why that wouldn't lead to the introduction of parties like
Tories2, Tories3, ..., Tories100? One could allocate 1/#votes "points" to each
party voted for, but that gets you back to strategic voting.

~~~
leot
Every voter only gets one vote. Extra parties would change nothing.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
That was my first idea, but the comment I'm replying to included

> 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.)

------
lmkg
Some background on the problem this is trying to solve:

There are a handful of mathematical theorems that basically say "there is no
perfect voting system." More rigorously, they enumerate a list of desirable
properties that you would like voting systems to have, and show that _NO_
voting system can have all of these properties, because they are actually
contradictory.

Some of these properties are things that are "obvious" ones that any practical
voting system should satisfy: voting matters, there is no dictator, candidates
can win, determinism. Two of them are non-trivial: absence of tactical voting,
and irrelevance of independent alternatives (IIA). Tactical voting basically
means you have a game-theoretic incentive to vote in a way that differs from
your true desires. IIA basically means that if Gore would win a 2-man election
against Bush, adding Nader to the race should not make Bush the winner. These
properties are related, but not the same.

All of these properties are desirable, and a "perfect" voting system would
have all of them, but you _can't_ have all of them. You have to pick at least
one to give up. Tactical voting in particular is extremely hard to remove,
even if you give up IIA, while systems that satisfy IIA are somewhat
complicated. The article suggests that it is very easy to satisfy all of the
other criteria, if we let go of one of the "obvious" criteria: determinism.

So it's basically a question of picking your poison. You can have determinism,
or you can get rid of tactical voting, but you can't do both. The author is
contending that determinism is the best property to give up.

Further reading: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_theorem> is one of the
mentioned theorems, dealing with ranked-preference voting systems (vote-for-
one-candidate is a special case). There are a few others for different classes
of voting systems.

~~~
DRMacIver
As a side note, this does not directly address the problem proposed by Arrow's
theorem, although it could easily be made to do so, but the post isn't so
interesting in that context. It's more about how it interacts with a
constituency system.

If you want a randomised solution to Arrow style preferential voting, the
following is the best I currently know of:

1\. If you have one candidate, stop. That candidate is elected.

2\. If you have more than one candidate, pick a candidate at random. Call that
candidate Pivot. Every candidate who the majority thinks is worse than Pivot
drops out of the race. If there is no one the majority thinks are worse than
Pivot, Pivot drops out.

3\. Goto 1.

Edit: Err. Correction. That's an algorithm for selecting a single winner from
Arrow style preferential voting. It's based on an only slightly more
complicated one for giving you the full range though.

------
yesbabyyes
This is a refreshing and interesting suggestion for a voting system, and it
seems like David and others here are far more knowledgeable about voting
systems than I am.

I have been thinking about a voting system for a while and I really need
feedback from people who know this stuff - I have a feeling there's large
flaws with it. Here's the general idea:

· Each voter can delegate his/her vote to any other voter, in any number of
levels. I.e., if Alice delegates her vote to Bob, and Bob delegates his vote
to Carol, Carol carries three votes.

· Delegation of votes can happen at any time, so Alice can delegate her vote
to Bob until further notice.

· Each voter can change their delegate at any time.

· Each voter can vote for a motion. If the voter has previously delegated
his/her vote, the delegate will not carry that voters voting power in this
motion. So, if Alice uses her vote in motion 1, Bob only carries one vote and
Carlos 2, but only in that motion.

· Each voter can delegate his/her vote to different voters in different
issues; Bob may delegate his vote to Carlos in financial issues, and to Alice
in justice issues.

My hope is that this would scale to e.g. a nation state, as an alternative
direct democracy. Today in Sweden, we delegate our votes to 349 MPs every four
years. When introducing my system, that would be the initial state. After
that, voters would start delegating their vote to other people that they
trust, while using their vote in issues that they know or feel strongly about.

This is probably an old idea, and as I stated earlier, I'm guessing there are
major flaws with it, so fire away!

~~~
limmeau
This sounds like the Liquid Democracy system, which the Pirate Party of
Germany uses to decide on party-internal policy questions. (Other
organizations may have had it before them, but they're the first I heard it
of)

The major point of dispute there is that this system cannot be simultaneously
anonymous (nobody knows whether I voted for or against nuclear weapons for
public schools) and independently verifiable (anyone can check that
everybody's delegations have been computed correctly).

~~~
aamar
Right, and liquid democracy is really a specific application of proxy voting:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting>

A startup working with this idea:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-
media/8394883/J...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-
media/8394883/Jolitics-Bebo-founders-political-social-network-launches.html)

------
iwwr
The problem is not the allocation of power, but the centralization of power.
Once you have a lot of power in the hands of the central government, it will
be captured and misused by cliques and special interests.

The way to 'fix' democracy is to reduce its scope, to make it as localized as
possible. In this way, political decisions tend to be made closer to those
affected.

The idea that the various branches of government can block and check each
other's power has proven quite misguided; they will always cooperate to
increase their collective power.

~~~
guelo
I'm guessing you're american even though this story Is about a british voting
system. So you want local military, local FAA, local social security, local
CDC, local EPA, local interstate highways, local FDA, local FDIC, local NASA,
local weather satellites... I could go on but it seems like every little city
providing all these services might be a tad wasteful.

~~~
iwwr
Why would that be wasteful? Note that having local authority does not preclude
having larger organizations in place.

Changing the voting system does not change the dynamics of political power.

~~~
knowtheory
Why would it be wasteful: Lack of economies of scale.

If you claim that states or municipalities can get together to leverage such
scale, then you've just reintroduced bureaucracy and waste. This is why
centralized control is useful. The US Federal government, one of the largest
employers in the US (cause there is a lot of stuff to do for citizens) can
guarantee health insurance to its workers because it's big.

This is what frustrates me so much about republican/conservative free market
rhetoric. They hate government because it interferes with markets, and then
they try and hobble the government's ability to use market forces to save tax
payers money. And then they accuse the government of being wasteful.

------
TravisLS
There's an interesting side effect of this system which I think means that it
would have lessened impact on the policies implemented by the elected
officials.

As in his example, pretend the Kitten party appeals to 10% of the electorate
distributed evenly across districts. So in roughly 10% of districts, the
Kitten party would earn a seat, but would only represent 10% of their
constituency.

In this case, the incentives of the elected Kitten party representative shift.
Instead of keeping to their Kitten party ideals, they would seek to maximize
their following within their district by shifting to a median political
position. This would ensure them the maximum likelihood of re-election in the
following campaign.

So theoretically the actual policies coming out of each district would still
represent the median view of the electorate in that district, and the Kitten
party would remain disenfranchised.

~~~
DRMacIver
Hmm. I'm not sure I believe that. I'm not sure I don't believe that either
mind you. Consider the following questions:

* If they're willing to do anything to stay in power, why were they running for a minority party in the first place?

* How likely are the voters to use their single vote to vote for someone who is still running as kitten party but is acting like a watered down version of the people they actually want to vote for?

------
eli
I think it fails the "easily understandable by the average voter" test. And
that's kinda a big one if you actually want change.

------
arethuza
Discussing this with colleagues someone suggested a splendid addition - give
the person whose vote was used in a constituency a nice bonus (say £100,000)
to encourage people to come out and vote.

[Edit - think how interesting election nights would become rather than the
usual few hours of predictable tedium that I always feel compelled to watch.]

~~~
jan_g
You generally do not want to know who voted for which candidate. E.g. voting
should be anonymous.

~~~
arethuza
I'm pretty sure voting isn't 100% anonymous in the UK - it isn't public but
don't the ballot papers have a unique serial number on them?

As for collecting the cash prize - we could make people select if they want it
anonymously or not (like the lottery).

~~~
jacquesgt
The main reason for the secret ballot is to prevent vote buying. With the
secret ballot, there's a low incentive to buy someone's vote, because there's
no way to make sure they held up their side of the deal. Under your plan,
candidates could offer a big multiple of the cash prize to the voter whose
ballot was selected, if they win.

~~~
arethuza
Make the offering of such cash inducements a serious criminal offense and
offer a very high reward (millions) for any voter who acts as a witness for
the successful prosecution of a candidate. If voters are simply doing it for
the money they could take the bribe from the candidate and then dob them in
and collect the reward.

------
limmeau
This needs random numbers whose randomness can be demonstrated.

You could ask every candidate to commit to his random number, publish a hash
of it, and afterwards compute a hash of all candidates' random numbers to get
the final random number. As long as most candidates distrust each other, this
should work.

~~~
gyom
And then you need to explain how hash functions work to a bunch of people who
dropped out of high school to work on the farm so that they don't feel cheated
by the new electoral system.

In the long run, though, it shouldn't be so hard to get people to accept these
kind of solutions.

~~~
limmeau
We could use sealed envelopes made of heavy paper instead of the first hash
function usage, and then have a guy in a lab coat point at a colourful picture
of a fractal to demonstrate the randomness of the second hashing step.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
Except that you've got people like Beck or Breitbart running around. Your
election system has to be simple and transparent in order to make it as hard
as possible to delegitimize in the eyes of the electorate. It's bad enough
we've got a serious fraction of Americans who think Obama's not a legitimate
president and/or who think that ACORN rigged the election, based on extremely
spurious evidence. We can't give these factions (on either side) more
ammunition.

~~~
limmeau
The goal "impossible to delegitimize" is incompatible with almost all
sophisticated election modes, and hard to measure. I'd settle for "impossible
to delegitimize rationally once you analyse how many people who normally
distrust each other would have to cooperate". Crackpot-safety is just too much
of a requirement.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
There's no such thing as crackpot-safe, but there is such a thing as "more
crackpot-resistant" and "less crackpot-resistant".

------
colanderman
Random voting is stupid for one reason: there is little incentive for any
individual to vote for a competent candidate. You have the same chance of
choosing the next president whether you vote for Obama or Joe the Plumber.
Yes, reasonably-minded citizens will vote for one of a handful of competent
candidates, but a vast number of people will simply vote for themselves.

The equivalent in a plurality system would be if all write-in votes were
counted together, and then a write-in chosen at random should the write-ins
outnumber the votes for any other single candidate.

I guess the "solution" would be to require a minimum # of signatures for a
candidate to be on the ballot (and votable). But that's just starting to sound
like approval voting, so you might as well just go all the way with it!

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I hadn't realized this, and your comment is too late to gain many upvotes, but
yes - very good point.

Couldn't you solve this by requiring any randomly-elected candidate to have at
least, say, 1% of the popular vote, though? (This means that you don't
entirely eliminate strategic voting, unless people can specify a fallback
option; but it reduces it by a lot.)

------
judofyr
A simple way to generate random numbers:

Let's assume we have N positions that we want to elect MPs for. Each ballot
contains an ID and a secret number between 1 and N (both numbers are
physically on the ballot, but you can only see it by scratching an area). Next
you define a hash function that takes a vote and returns an integer. For each
1 to N, you simply take all the ballots with the secret number and sum the
hash of the votes. You can then use _that_ value you choose choose a ballot
ID.

The good thing about this solution is that you can easily re-count the votes
and you end up with the same answer. And, you can place all the information in
public so other parties can verify it.

Hm... Any randomness problems in this solution?

~~~
perlgeek
Have fun scratching off the tissue from millions of votes.

Even if it's statistically sound, it's not practical, because it doesn't
scale.

~~~
rudiger
There may be issues with the above solution, but scratching off tickets isn't
one of them. Do you know how inefficient the process of counting votes can be
_now_? You might think that it is impractical, or that it "doesn't scale", but
they manage.

------
StavrosK
For some reason, I like this. However, I think that a voting system that 95%
of the population can't even understand won't be very popular overall...

~~~
DRMacIver
I don't think it's that hard to understand. Certainly as a voter it's very
easy to understand what it is you should do - easier than under FPTP where you
are forced to think tactically. The consequences are slightly hard to think
through if you're not good at probability, but it's easy to boil those down
into a set of pithy statements that will tell you most of what you need to
know.

~~~
greendestiny
It's not hard to understand how it works. It is harder to understand how it's
fair.

Of all the voting systems that will never see the light of day, I think I like
this one most of all. However I would say despite its similarity to the status
quo it would completely change the nature of government when parties couldn't
count on who would get elected despite the safeness of their constituency.

~~~
DRMacIver
Yes. Agreed. I suspect it would be ridiculously hard to get this through
(witness how much trouble we're having with IMO the far less controversial
AV), 'though with the right framing and a sufficiently disgruntled populace I
could see it happening. Maybe. Not going to hold my breath though.

~~~
greendestiny
The cynic in me can't help but see the parties moving power out of the
parliament as much as possible. The public sector would likewise also become
more powerful. I can't help but think this is the chaos monkey of voting
systems.

It's definitely crazy, I have a feeling it might work though, eventually as a
voter I'd simply vote for whoever in my area promised some kind of sane
approach to making decisions.

------
TamDenholm
I find CGP Grey does an excellent job of explaining things very simply in his
youtube videos. Personally, i'd like to see these run on British TV.

<http://blog.cgpgrey.com/the-politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/>

~~~
yannickmahe
I was going to show that link as well. His explanation of instant runoff
convinced me.

~~~
DennisP
Instant runoff has some mathematical problems. Ranking your favorite candidate
highly can actually work against you.
<http://www.rangevoting.org/IrvPathologySurvey.html>

Empirically, every country with instant runoff still has two-party dominance.

A better system is range voting: <http://www.rangevoting.org/>

For a really great book on different voting systems and their advantages and
disadvantages, see Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone.

~~~
jacques_chester
> Empirically, every country with instant runoff still has two-party
> dominance.

I suspect this a property of single-member electorates. Australia has IRV, but
Senators are elected proportionally within each state. The major parties have
more members but do not always command a majority, and most Senates require
negotiation to proceed. However because the House of Representatives almost
always goes to one party or the other, it is possible to form the Executive
and govern.

It's a fairly effective hybrid.

------
tobylane
I'm voting for AV because I want a chance to vote for PR. Proportional
Representation is the proper/good/final solution.

I'm slightly confused about voting multiple people for a larger area. Is this
PR, or something else good?

It will always be a boring night, even more so if there are coalitions formed.
More election night comedy, and transparent coalition agreements.

~~~
DRMacIver
> I'm slightly confused about voting multiple people for a larger area. Is
> this PR, or something else good?

It may or may not be PR. It depends on how you elect those multiple people:
They may be elected under a PR system, or they may be elected under something
non-proportional.

I'm for PR in general. I'm not sure how I'd feel about a PR-per-constituency
approach.

------
lyudmil
This is a cool thought, but I think it's a bad idea to use it in actual
elections. The author failed to really address the "crazy minority party"
concern. His argument was that, while his system would give such people a
chance in getting elected, it's only fair that it did since they indeed had a
constituency and their chance of winning is proportional to their constituency
size. He adds, "The fact that I consider someone to be utterly despicable
doesn’t give me the right to disenfranchise them."

I'm not sure the point is valid. I certainly believe in freedom of speech and
I accept my duty to protect the right of even the most offensive people to be
heard (in fact, they should receive a greater degree of protection). However,
by supporting a voting system that gives them no chance of being elected
before they convince enough people for their ideas to be considered mainstream
I'm not disenfranchising them since I'm not denying them the right to vote.
I'm just marginalizing them, which is the proper response to all crazy claims
and ideas. I offer two hypotheticals in support for those who still feel I'm
infringing on someone's liberties by writing what I did:

(1) Suppose we live in a country that's a nuclear power. Suppose also there is
a fascist party completely bent on nuclear war with Israel (for example) in
our country and that they have a constituency that amounts to 1% of the
electorate. Suppose nuclear war means total destruction on a global scale.
I'll argue that giving those people a chance at forming a government is
immoral and, in fact, disenfranchises everyone outside of your country since
they have to control over who you elect, yet they suffer the horrible
consequences.

(2) Suppose my party ran on a platform of dismantling democratic institutions
(including elections of any sort) and vowed to distribute the majority of
resources to my constituents, basically re-instituting feudalism. Random
selection would give us the opportunity and the power to dismantle the
democracy it was meant to be the engine of. It would also technically make it
illegal for other countries to intervene, since our "feudal" government would
be democratically elected.

~~~
DRMacIver
It's worth noting that the consequences of random election are not "the crazy
party gets into power". It's "the crazy party gets a couple of seats". The
chances of someone with even 5% of the election are astronomically low
(<http://twitter.com/johnmyleswhite/status/62863260566827008> \- the
probability of someone with a 5% minority getting the majority over the course
of 50 elections).

The likely scenario here is that your crazy party gets 1, maybe 2, seats at
the worst and promptly demonstrate themselves to be incompetent tools,
spoiling their chances of reelection.

~~~
lyudmil
I don't think that's what the author was describing. I think it was a case of
everyone gets a vote, then we pick someones vote at random.

------
d4nt
I love it. We Brits would never go for it though. I can see the Daily Mail
headlines now: "Fascists Given Seats in 'Election Lottery'".

~~~
arethuza
Surely the Daily Mail would be delighted with such a result?

~~~
estel
No, their particular brand of hateful racism is only acceptable if they can
portray as despicable another group even more hatefully racist than them.

------
aranazo
Using random factors in election is a really old practice going back to
Athenian Democracy at least.. It's known as Sortition.

~~~
DRMacIver
Both of which terms are explicitly used in the article. :)

However this is not a sortition. It's an application of random-dictator to the
problem of electing a per-constituency representative. This turns into a
sortition only in the degenerate case where everyone runs and votes for
themself.

------
radu_floricica
There is less feedback this way. Somebody could find a way to game the system,
and all the statistics in the world couldn't prove he cheated.

Plus, randomness is a lot more random and a lot less uniform then people
usually give it credit for.

~~~
bluedanieru
You'll still know how many people voted for each candidate in this system, but
instead of that determining who wins, you pick a random vote from the pool.

------
shasta
I think you might improve this scheme by doing it twice. First, a random
sampling of votes cast are used to create a candidate pool. Next, one lucky
voter's vote is selected to pick a candidate from the pool. The upside to this
is that it helps get rid of self interest / crazy voting. If the scheme David
MacIver proposed were used for determining president, I expect 25% of people
would vote for themselves. (Well, he proposed starting from a small pool, so I
guess I'm wondering about what would happen if you used this scheme to produce
the pool in the first place)

------
omouse
_The BNP have a percentage of the voters, they should get a percentage of the
say. The fact that I consider someone to be utterly despicable doesn’t give me
the right to disenfranchise them._

I completely disagree with that. Anyone that would deny you the right to do
something should not be allowed to have that right. They wouldn't give
immigrants and non-British citizens a right to vote, so why should they be
allowed to have a say at all?

Democracy and freedom need to be defended. Allowing people who actively
subvert it to win an election would be absurd.

~~~
lucasjung
Put another way: marginilization of fringe positions could be considered a
_desireable_ quality of a voting system, as long as sufficient free speech
protections are in place.

In a sense, elections act as a sort of filter between ideas and actions.
Freedom of speech can be used to disseminate ideas, and some truly awful ideas
will disseminate rather widely. However, they won't usually gain enough
adherents to get enough votes to make it past the "filter." That's why there's
little harm in letting people espouse "dangerous" ideas with their speech[1]:
most people will recognize bad ideas for what they are, and the proponents of
the worst ideas generally will not be elected to positions where they can
influence policy directly.

This "filter" is far from perfect: some bad ideas will become laws
nonetheless, and some good ideas will get blocked. More of the former than the
latter, though: if an idea is good enough, it will eventually garner
sufficient support to become a significant factor in elections.

There have been cases in history where entire societies _did_ adopt bad ideas
(e.g. fascism). However, I think that when an entire society takes such a
dramatically wrong turn, even the most perfect voting system will not save it.

[1]It's important to draw a line between espousing ideas and encouraging
actions.

~~~
omouse
You're revising history a bit; when fascism was rising there were a lot of
people that were fighting against it such as the socialist and the communists
and the anarchists. Unfortunately, other societies were trying to contain
those socialist forces and this reduced their power to counter the fascists.
You can see this happen in Spain and Italy as well (there were a large number
of collectives in Spain and Italy has had anarchists and communists for a long
time, in the 1970s they were quite the active movements).

The "filter" shouldn't be just at the voting booths. We should be reminded
before and after election day why the ideas of those fringe positions is a bad
idea.

Espousing ideas in such a way as to hide the true nature of them is something
that political parties are getting good at. If there are dangerous ideas,
they're hidden behind nice language or buried in the back of the political
party's plans. So it's harder for people to recognize those bad ideas.

I think we would do well to learn from the past and be more active in
denouncing ideas such as those of the BNP and other fringe parties.

~~~
lucasjung
I don't see how a statement as brief as mine could be seen as a revision of
history: fascism was a dangerous idea that took over entire countries (so was
communism). That leaves out a lot of details, but hardly constitutes
revisionism.

I also wasn't trying to suggest that we shouldn't denounce dangerous ideas, in
fact such denunciation is one of the primary mechanisms which prevents bad
ideas from garnering enough support to make a difference in elections. Rather,
I was trying to say that censorship is not the proper way to marginilize
dangerous ideas. Only after reading your post and then re-reading mine did I
realize that I never specifically mentioned censorship, but that's what I was
thinking about.

------
rmc
In Ireland, we use PR (single transferable vote), however we do have local
politicians. PR does not mean no local constituency stuff. If anything there
is too much locality in ireland.

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bobwebb
The thing that interests me about this article is that ~200 years ago,
compared to the simplicity of FPTP, most other voting systems would be quite
difficult to implement, because all bureaucracy/vote counting would have to
have been carried out by hand.

I wonder what voting systems would have looked like, had electronic systems
been around at the time of (public) democracy's inception.

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FrojoS
Great, but I think he is missing one more big requirement. Your vote must be
secret. That is, there must be no way for YOU to prove others how you voted.
If not, bribery and enforcement become possible - and will happen.

To make things even more complicated, it would also be good if you can be sure
and CHECK at any point that you vote was counted the way you intended. I don't
know if there is a solution to this, but I'm imagining something like a hash
code, that you see the moment you vote, together with feedback. That is, you
can actually see, that your vote got counted the moment you vote and then
later you can use the hash code to see, that the data base was not corrupted.
Of course you should not be able to prove how you voted.

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merloen
You need to make it expensive (in time or money) to run for office. Otherwise
everybody would simply vote for themselves. Or people would vote for the
special interest candidate of their pet special interest, and mainstream
parties would vanish.

~~~
DRMacIver
The proposal someone provided on my blog was that you should require X
signatures for a nomination. e.g. if you have a constituency with 10,000
people and you want 10ish candidates require 1000 signatures for nomination.

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logicchop
Not to be dismissive, but this is a pretty unhelpful approach to the voting
problem. The idea of picking a random person is motivated by the thought that
the more support a candidate has the greater chance they have of being
selected. But then why not just select the person with the highest probability
of being selected? The difficulty is that even this "harmless" process is
infected. The real upshot of Arrow's theorem is that you can't aggregate
preferences: there is no "measure theory" underlying the concept of group
will.

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protomyth
The NBA draft works this way (most votes = lowest finish previous year). It
has not done a good job and I think this would create riots in the streets.

~~~
kgermino
I'm sorry but how is this similar? I'm probably missing something but I don't
see the connection.

~~~
protomyth
If I understand this scheme, we put the "votes" in a box and pick a random
winner from them. The NBA draft puts its "votes" (# based on finish order of
bottom) and picks a random winner from them.

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leot
A particularly problematic aspect of this system is that, in close elections,
it provides little incentive to the elected representative to do a
particularly good job once they get there. If the pol won with 51% of the
vote, then perhaps if they work their arse off they could get to 55%, and if
they do jack they might only get to 45%.

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ajslater
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495775>

Compares One Vote, Instant Runoff Voting, Acceptance Voting, Ranked Choice
Voting, Condcorcet Method and various methods of Rated Voting via simulation
testing for maximum voter happiness with the result.

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known
I think no voting system is perfect till people can/will vote as per their
conscience.

~~~
thelema314
The entire point of this system is to produce a voting system that does not
discourage people voting per their conscience. All deterministic systems so
far have flaws that encourage people to vote "strategically" to improve the
chances of their candidate being elected or other flaws.

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billpg
Yes! Cancel the referendum and replace it with one that has this option as
well!

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atacrawl
Until voting is made mandatory, a "perfect" voting system is a non-starter,
because no system could therefore truly reflect the will of the people.

~~~
jpadkins
you can't reflect the will of the people with representative democracy. People
have different value judgement, therefor it is impossible to create laws that
are 100% reflective of the people.

Democratic representatives do not represent you like a lawyer or financial
advisor. They have to act in your and your interest alone, or they breach
ethics and possibly get sued. 1:1 vs. Many:1 relationship.

~~~
atacrawl
I'm referring to the result of an election, not the actions of those elected.

