Proportional representation, the federal government enacts laws and levies taxes on everyone and isn't just some far away entity you can ignore. The multi level democracy USA has now where each party sends candidates based on local votes makes sense when the federated entity doesn't have direct power over people, but since USA has such a strong federal government that taxes people directly it needs to better represent its people than now.
Alternatively we can scale back the power of the federal government massively and have it be funded by the states rather than via direct taxes, similar to how EU works. But right now it is the worst of both worlds, taxes and control like a local government but poor representation like a federated one.
Sums up most of the points about it.
I want to highlight the "leads to two party dominance in countries that use it" (australia for example) point. This is exactly what we want to avoid.
I prefer approval or score voting for single member elections as it does away with all these bad voting incentives.
But regardless, I think single member elections are stupid and proportional systems are far better and more democratic. The idea that the thing most representative of you is the piece of land you live on is very outdated. Zweitmandat is the most advanced implementation of proportional representation imo.
I absolutely agree about the Zweitmandat system. For those unfamiliar:
> The Zweitmandat (English: second mandate) is a feature in the variation of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) used to elect the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Unlike most variations of MMP, such as the German federal electoral system, Baden-Württemberg's system does not use party lists. Instead, proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes.
The main distinction is that Ranked Choice can elect someone which is not the best compromise of everyone's choices, while Schulze and Ranked pairs will always elect the best compromise of everyone's choices. If there is a candidate who is preferred over the other candidates, when compared in turn with each of the others, they guarantee that candidate will win, while Ranked Choice does not.
The downside to Schulze or Ranked Pairs is that saying that someone is your second choice could hurt the chances of your first choice to be elected, because by putting forward a compromising candidate, and since Schulze or Ranked Pairs optimize for that, you lean the tally towards your potential compromises (which are your second, third, etc. choices) in the case where the election are a "close call".
If I understand correctly.
I personally would prefer a system that optimizes for the compromise, as I think it's more important to get the candidate that the least people dislike, than it is to get the candidate that the most people adore.
So if I understand correctly, it means something like:
If you have A, B and C.
100% think B is second best.
40% think A is best.
19% think B is best.
41% think C is best.
With Schulze or Ranked Pairs B will win, but with Ranked Choice C will win.
That's because C is most people's first choice, so they win. But if you asked people to pick between C or B, B would technically win, because 19% would pick B (as it is their best), and 40% that think A is best but B is second best would also pick B, thus B vs C would get 59% votes for B and only 41% votes for C, that means that in a vote for B against C, B would win, but with Ranked Choice B loses, and C is elected.
The fallacy in the argument is that, first choice only, NO candidate has even a slim majority, let alone a strong one.
If you decay the hypothetical 3 party set of options by eliminating the least popular candidate then you're back to first past the post which is the current status quo in the US.
Schulze and similar methods use the ranked lists to evaluate pairs of candidates and eliminate the candidates that are universally the worst first / retain candidates that rank well in isolation. This is more likely to result in a compromise that works best for the most people.
> Ranked choice seems to be the best one I've read about.
IRV (sometimes called “ranked choice”, but its among the worst of the ranked choice single-member methods) can be improved by getting rid of the loser elimination step, and counting down on all ballots (instead of those with an eliminated loser) until some candidate had a total that crosses the winning threshold (this is a version of Bucklin, but historical Bucklin implementations have often done dumb things like limiting the number of preference ranks to a much smaller number than candidates (often 2-3) rather than using fully-ranked (forced preference or unforced preference) ballots.
But, other than things like unique executive offices, single-member elections should be avoided. Legislative elections with small multimember districts (say 5 members) with a system like STV (or a Bucklinish cousin, again without loser elimination) gets decent proportionality, the candidate accountability of single-member districts (but more, because parties are likely to run more candidates than they'll win seats, so there os general election accountability even within preferred parties) and avoids high-stakes districting (eliminating gerrymandering opportunities.)
Even executive offices with a designated successor (e.g., governor and lt. governor) can be made multiwinner (sequential rather than proportional) using a ranked ballots method with a normal single-winner majority threshold: once the first winner is selected, eliminate that candidate and recount the ballots (for some methods, this can simply be continue the count till the next winner crosses the threshold with the same effect) to select the winner of the successor office. This improves candidate accountability when one party is clearly preferred, because a disfavored incumbent can be demoted without abandoning the preferred party.
The Condorcet Method has a huge disadvantage that it is hard to understand.
Being simple to understand is crucial for voting systems and I would argue is the most important factor since an election without public buy-in is worse than worthless.
Understanding is one thing, counting is another. Plurality voting is great because it’s easy to count by hand and audit with volunteer observers. I’ve personally observed the counting of ballots as a volunteer and it gave me a lot of confidence that the election had been conducted fairly according to the law.
While I would really love to see what outcomes could be produced by a Condorcet method I can’t imagine actually implementing one without relying on computerized counting and software. This makes it impossible for volunteers to audit due to the need to audit the hardware and software of the computers doing the counting. If only security experts are capable of auditing such a system then our whole democracy is at their mercy. That’s essentially a technocracy.
Sweden has an extremely complex system for tallying votes and very very few people can explain the exact algorithm that turns a collection of ballots into a list of names of people in Parliament. Even people that follow politics closely only have a vague idea of how it works. Yet most people feel the system is fair and reasonable and there is no real push to change it or make it simpler to understand.
If your business relies on some big pile of spaghetti code, you might be very reluctant to change it, but you also would be unlikely to recommend that design to someone who was starting from scratch (unless they were a competitor).
I'm not recommending the Swedish system per se. Just pointing out that as long as people feel they understand how to vote to nudge the result in their desired direction, and that the outcome (ie. who ends up in parliament) feels reasonable and representative then people probably don't care too much about the details of the voting system
The Condorcet property (not method) is easy enough to understand.
"Imagine this candidate ran in a two person race against each of the other candidates in turn. If he'd win ALL those races individually, he should win when running against all of them at the same time too."
Now, explaining various methods which guarantee this property is not as easy - nor is it easy to understand why you might prefer one such method to another.
But this isn't actually a big deal. In the many, many countries that use proportional representation, it's the outcome ("parties share of seats in parliament should be roughly the same as parties share of votes in the election") which is agreed upon. The actual mathematics to achieve it are somewhat counterintuitive and not many people are aware of them, but that doesn't matter. We can all see it works, and so we would in an election with, say, Ranked Pairs.
Well, I'm not really seeing people complain about the math itself, but instead more about fraud in the votes themselves, or machines/people cheating when tallying.
Just to be clear, the difference would be something like having to say B won because he was the most common second choice and beat every other candidates in a one on one. Versus saying B won because it had the most first choices, yet did not have a majority of first choices.
I think it's easy enough to understand that while someone had more first choices, they didn't have a majority first choices and since someone else had more second choices they took the win.
