links:
- https://www.fairvote.ca/open-list-proportional-representation/
- https://www.fairvote.ca/stv/
- https://www.fairvote.ca/mixed-member-proportional/
- Regional Proportional Representation
The one that actually gets implemented.
In voting theory, there are these voting graphs where every candidates is a node. If you rank every candidate, you can draw directional lines between each node then sum all the ranking from all the voters to find a cumulative ranking.
Most people oppose this system for the practical reason of no one wanting to rank every candidate at the ballot box; however, I believe I’ve found a clever work around to this complaint. You have a none option (or a lottery option) and you allow people to rank people equally. From there it’s pretty trivial to set up a tablet or something where you can send candidates to the bottom or top and modify the <=> symbols between them. Everyone starts in a random order below the None/Lottery Option. If you want to get fancy you could even give people the option of grouping and moving an entire party on the tablet. In the cumulative ranking, anyone equal or below the None / Lottery option gets tossed. If it’s an election where you need multiple people just start at the top of the ranking and work your way down. Once you hit None/Lottery, your repeat the lottery or go without for any further seats.
The None/Lottery Option also prevents it from being weak to large numbers of candidates as frankly people will just ignore the vast majority of candidates leaving them below the none/lottery option. In a polarized society people will put the opposing party below the none/lottery option. You can vote [lottery > blues > reds] or [blues > lottery > reds] and it’s the same result for red vs blue.
There’s a slightly more advanced version of this where you put numbers on each relation then normalize. It gets complaints of not meeting the condorcet criterion, but it’s actually superior. I think this gets too complicated at the voting booth though, so whatever.
Some people do criticize this because strategic voting can get weird, but since this system has a none/lottery option that argument doesn’t hold water. If the population “strategically” votes [blue > yellow > lottery > red] and [red > yellow > lottery > blue] then [yellow > lottery = red = blue] is the favored result. They could easily swap yellow and lottery and get [red = blue = lottery > yellow]. They made their choice. That’s democracy, we ought to respect it.
Also, also, if it’s truly equal e.g. [red=blue > lottery ] just flip a coin. It’s unlikely to be truly equal but we’re already accepting some luck in this system.
I like this! I do prefer physical ballots (we’ve already had a few scares with new tech being hard for folks of certain generations), but that can totally be implemented.
Yeah, maybe for paper ballots have the default as equal to lottery than let people add numbers with negative being below the lottery position? Having a default solves a lot of practical problems, but I think summing all everything will still take computers. It’s just too much to determine what’s greater than what for every relation for every ballot then sum everything. Maybe doable for small numbers of people, but not for a whole city. Still paper ballot give something to go back and reference then you can use a program hash to validate the count.
Ranked choice voting.
Along with eliminating anyone with less than ~2%
Why eliminate below a percent. Just eliminate the lowest rank candidate and redistribute. Keep going until you have your winner.
That’s first past the post.
And that leads to strategic voting, and winner takes all.
Which concentrates way too much power
I remain a huge fan of sortition. You randomly pick a bunch of people who are willing (and/or able) to do the job, let guardrails veto some of them, train them and let them cook. An unordered list of things to love:
- It’s substantially faster than elections,
- scales to any size polity,
- is definitionally fair,
- no foreign influence in elections,
- parties really do not matter,
- there’s no good way to bribe future would-be politicians because that’s everybody,
- you can enact change by persuading folks one at a time, and every supporter improves your outcomes,
- decision makers can become experts in one thing instead of being vaguely ignorant of everything,
- incentivizes everyone governed to make others healthy, happy, well adjusted, and connected with reality,
- how Athens did it,
- by multiverse theory, there is some branch where all your friends got to make any given decision.
We already do this for the life-or-death task of juries. We have the technology.
(Second choice is RCV w\ MMP; fairvote does good work.)
I like a bicameral system with one assembly being chosen by sortition. Say, expand the US House dramatically, and fill the seats by sortition. I just don’t think completely replacing all representatives with random citizens is a great idea. I don’t think you can train people to be policy experts fast enough for that to really be viable in a large modern nation.
Maybe fill the Senate by sortition from just lawyers, and maybe past Representatives, so you retain some level of expertise in the legislature.
This is very similar to how we do it with juries; a body of the people to stamp/implement the laws written by congress and rules for reading them from judges. I think it’s an improvement.
But I do want to vouch for how teachable people can be. And I think it really changes how we fund/run/manage education when ‘functioning in the senate’ is a mandatory skill.
shouldn’t then the congressional body be that and you just have everyone vote on the laws?
I’m too many levels in and I can’t tell which combination you’re talking about XD
So I mean congress or parliment or whatnot creates laws and votes on what is ready to send to the elecorate for a vote to pass.
My gut reaction is exhaustion. I would like this if folks had the time, resources, and politicians weren’t so tied up in party politics.
If you have a functional legislative arm of government, then it produces too many bits of text for the average person to keep up with it, and it’s not terribly efficient for them to try. I don’t need to know the particulars of industrial zoning policy, but I do want it to be sensical.
And if the politicians decide to bundle things together, lots of wedging becomes available. This seems less common for single-issue policy juries (one could even constrain their range on creation).
But in RCV and good support: sure. I think it could be made to work.
you could require pacing. no more than one bill at a time. a month for evaluation and on month for continued evaluation and voting so like no more than 6 bills a year and maybe a character limit on the laws to.
I like the sound of it, but I worry that instead of producing the Cincinnatus-types, we’ll produce an electorate that is mostly comprised of political hacks who are too entrenched in their views to be able to effectively compromise, because all of the apathetic and apolitical people wouldn’t have the will or the desire to take such a role on. It would require a massive cultural shift to encourage people to participate in the system willingly - “Doing your civic duty” is often said about voting, but so few people actually follow through with it because there is friction involved.
Also, special interests might not be able to bribe future politicians, but there’s nothing stopping one who takes the job from also getting handed a bunch of “favors” and “gifts” to influence their thinking when voting. Not to defend plutocracies, but I feel like it’s a lot harder to bribe a rich politician than it is to bribe one who is working or middle class - if anything, someone who is poor would be more susceptible to corruption, because even a “small” kickback from some corporation looking to get a politician on their side could be a life-changing one for them, one that they could not afford to say “no” to.
But man, wouldn’t it be cool to see what society would look like when any one of us could be called up to make decisions for the entire nation? With some effective guardrails and a strong constitution, I could see it being one of the best forms of representation.
The laws are currently written by lawyers for bankers
Changing to a system where laws are written by actual humans instead of demonoid homunculi will alleviate a lot of the pain revolving around the apathy and complexity pain points.
I worry that a lot of it comes from scale. It’s expensive/tricky to scale up human flexability; I think I’ve seen well meaning people design systems they intended to be human, and got much worse results than the lawyers and bankers. There’s some skill here.
Which systems are you referring to?
Administration in non-profits and schools mostly.
Administration has little to do with democracy and everything to do with capitalism.
They have been carving out education dollars to add more administrators over the last 30 years,leading to budgets strained for actual teaching while increasing the amount of bureaucracy.
All this just to ensure the populace doesn’t get too smart and start thinking of implementing new systems like sortition and ranked choice.
Administrative costs are high in health care and education (which are not really the US federal government), but I can’t find data on this for the labor costs to administrative professionals in government. Source?
Labor costs are high for the federal government, but I thought a lot of that was pensions + regular raises. I don’t think these things should be attributed to capitalism run amok.
Virtually every poll shows that around 1/4 to 1/3 of the population are Nazis, so it’s only a matter of time before one of them gets picked
Just logging that this doesn’t match any data I’ve seen, unless you take Nazi to be an obscenely broad tent. Sources + definitions required.
