Letters to the Editor
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Your preidential candidate: Hot or not?
Why is it impossible for Americans to actually talk about policy?
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Is that a rhetorical question?
Because our media is vacuous and depraved...?
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It's also a very good way to rate the cuteness of kittens
Go to RateMyKitten.com -- it's one of my all-time favorite websites.
Anyway, this is an interesting article on voting and the Spoiler Effect.
No matter who you blame (Nader for staying in, or Gore for not campaigning more effectively, or the Supreme Court, or Katherine Harris, or....), there is no denying that more of the U.S. wanted a left-leaning president in 2000 than a right-winger.
Instead, we got Bush. And war. And a gutted economy. Etc. Even though we didn't really even want him!
So maybe a Ranged Voting system would work. Good luck convincing people of that, though... Good luck changing the Constitution to a system based on rating kittens and drunk sorority babes...
Mmmm....drunk sorority babes...
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@neale..
yer question is irrelevant to the article.
which article, by the way, is great, and long overdue.
But who among us thinks that ANYONE in the current political system would abandon said system for a voting system that was, god help us, FAIR? You think Karl Rove would like that? I think not.
We have exactly the democracy we deserve, at the moment: a fraud, run by con-artists.
GW Bush's near-election in 2000 (and later fraudulent installation by a split SCOTUS--count the disqualified ballots in Florida and, nader or no nader, Bush probably loses) is a 900-pound canary in our electoral coal-mine, telling us that the system is fatally flawed. As does this article.
The next article: how do we get fairer election processes adopted?
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I need to correct you on something
Gore cost Nader the election in 2000
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Been wondering about this for years
had_enough writes: "The next article: how do we get fairer election processes adopted?"
Beats me. It's hard to see how it's possible, given that pretty much all of these potential improvements to our voting scheme will need to be ratified by major-party candidates who are mostly happy with things as they are, thank you very much. Most of the proposed changes can't help but reward the Dennis Kuciniches and Ron Pauls and Mike Gravels of the world, and lord knows we can't have that.
One bright spot is that the individual states do have a choice in how their voting works. You can almost envision, say, Vermont taking on the experiment, and others following suit. Almost.
I'm not giving up on the idea, and I'm looking forward to reading Mr. Poundstone's thoughts. Thanks to Salon for highlighting this book.
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Why settle for a Band-aid fix?
This article does a nice job of diagnosing the current system's many shortfalls. I especially appreciated the analysis of the spoiler problem.
But if we're going to amend the Constitution anyway - as any of these proposed voting methods would presumable require - why not go for the whole enchilada?
Proportional representation has worked pretty well for the Europeans. (Even Italy, according to the Italians I've known, though you might not guess it from the outside.) It protects minority rights, prevents spoiler effects and strategic voting, and forces competing interests and their representatives to negotiate in good faith. The potential problem of splinter groups can be neutralized by requiring parties to meet a certain threshold (usually five percent of the vote) in order to be represented.
I know it's un-American to suggest that Europeans might've gotten something right. But for you skeptics: Consider than this would pave the way for an American Green Party to gain influence. Or, if you prefer, the Party of Hot Internet Babes (I'm not a sorority girl but I could be its first party leader).
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Salon..........
You are jumping the shark.
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Re: I need to correct you on something
jamiso writes: "Gore cost Nader the election in 2000."
Riiiiight.
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The monotonicity criterion.
"But IRV fails what mathematicians call the "monotonicity criterion"
I looked at your reference. It is not an example of standard IRV. As you can see there is only 2 choices and 3 candidates. What you have in that example is a Contingent vote, or Top-two IRV. In a standard IRV election there would be three choices on the ballot and the first round loser's votes would not all fall to the minority second choice, but would be divided amongst the two remaining candidates.
http://www.chrisgates.net/irv/votesequence.html is a good animation on how the process works.
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@Neal Adams -- the first poster
Boy, did somebody not read the article, or what?
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@Peeps and "shark jumping"
You didn't read the article either, did you?
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no strategy in ranged voting?
Let's say there are a scrupulous bunch of voters, and an unscrupulous bunch, and they each support a different candidate.
Let's say the Scrupulous Party (of which there are 60 members) takes ranged voting seriously. They rate their candidate a 7 (recognizing there are some flaws) and the "other" candidate a 3 (because nobody's ALL bad, right?).
Then there's the Unscrupulous Party, of whom there are 40. They vote strategically, giving their guy a 10 and the other candidate a 1, universally.
The winner of this election? Unscrupulous Pete, with an average of 5.8 and 40 supporters, wins this election over Scrupulous Sally, with an average of 4.6 and 60 supporters.
What an awful idea.
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Re: ranged voting
Isn't that exactly what is supposed to happen? If Scrupulous Party was truly invested in their candidate, then they should rate the candidate higher. What is really comes down to is the Ambivalent Party that is very large but only has a slight preference one way or the other....
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Considering
That past elections have hinged on who you'd rather have a beer with, I'd have to say I'd take a drunken sorority girl over ANY candidate. But perhaps I have ulterior motives.
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He may have read the article?
It's the green spinich leaf that's stuck between the smiling teeth...Use pepsodent.
It's hard to focus.
I got a 60-year old,
Amish Lady to visit.
O, and cow-fly's bite.
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Here's The Obvious Concern
Suppose Republicans aren't very happy with McCain, so they all give him a 6, and they think Obama is okay or whatever so they give him a 4. But Democrats think Obama is great, so they give him tens, and give McCain a zero. And suppose that there are slightly more people who think that McCain > Obama. Then, even though the majority prefers McCain to Obama, the strength of Obama voters' preferences wins the election for Obama. At least, that's how I understand the suggestion; maybe it's a little more complicated than just averaging the scores out. But assuming that is how it works, what you then are doing is giving voters an incentive to lie about how strong their preferences really are. If I prefer McCain to Obama, there's no reason for me to be honest about how much I like him; I'm going to give him a ten because I'd be hurting him if I just gave him a six. So then you're really back to the old system, except, if there's a three-way campaign and you like, say, Nader and Gore, you can give both of them high ratings. There's probably nothing wrong with that system except that it encourages voters to be dishonest - which maybe is an acceptable cost of fixing the third-party issue. But you're assuming that everyone's going to act rationally. What will really happen is that undecided voters will go in and give two candidates a 5, or give one a 6 and the other a 5 because they think it's a close call, or give both a 2 because they think the major-party candidates are terrible. What you ultimately would get is a measure not of aggregate preference, but of aggregate enthusiasm.