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.
Then you end up with Ed Stelmach as leader.
Runoff elections seem the best from my view point
You end up with the actual preference of the majority best represented. You don’t get put in a spot where you have to choose one of Trump or Clinton based on which extreme is least objectionable. You can vote for someone sane, then choose between the two extremes as your “worst case”.
It allows moderates to actually be represented instead of primaried out of the race, then scared to be in the general election because they might spoil the race for their party’s winner.
You know the alternate name for ranked choice? Instant runoff.
In your opinion, why does making everyone come out a second time produce better results?
I don’t like the idea of having to vote multiple times, but it’s better than ranked choice, as with ranked you can get a person in that the majority of people didn’t vote for. If you have multiple rounds of just one vote cast, at least you’re picking the person you want each time, rather than 'i guess this person is better than person X, but i really don’t want him in.
As I alluded to, this is what happened in Alberta politics - we had 3 candidates for conservative leadership: two were very polar, and one guy was in the middle, and thus the guy in the middle won, but no one really wanted him to win. Conversely, if they had just voted regularly, the guy that won would have been kicked out since voting for him wasn’t an option. Then you could run the thing again, and get a better split between the polar candidates.
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.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/americas-hidden-duopoly-2/
Listen to this then tell me what your choice 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.
There are versions of PR that mitigate this issue. Mixed-member PR sacrifices a little bit of precision in the proportionality, but limits the seats assigned to party lists to only some additional ones used to balance out the un-proportionality of the results. Most of the elected body is not from party lists.
You can also carry out a vote where you choose the party for the proportional vote, and then rank the members of that party. And the party assigns the seats they win to the candidates with the widest support.
That doesn’t solve the issue of people liking candidates from multiple parties though.
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.
But when you have a problem, you complain to your representative that represents your area and knows all the details. That’s a powerful thing.
In the UK at least there are a lot of seats that are swung by those holding them rather than their party.
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.
CGP Grey did a video on this subject a little over a decade ago.
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.
