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
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.
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.
You already got a bunch of responses on the ranked system so I’ll mention other stuff.
There are many elements that go into the voting system. Here in Brazil if a candidate doesn’t get over 50% of the votes we do a second poll with just the top two performers, which on top of counting every individual vote instead of grouping them by county, makes it a lot better than the US system. On the other hand, we don’t have anything like the American primaries so we have no say over which candidates are going to run.
If the US election was like the Brazilian system, Trump wouldn’t have won in 2016. If Brazil used the American system (with just two to three parties), Bolsonaro would probably not even have a party to run on in 2018.
Other important stuff is how to vote. Here there’s a single day for polls which is a federal holiday and everyone has their own assigned location for voting, which is mandatory (but not really). If you’re away from your designed location you can go to any other to fill a form or even use an app to notify that you can’t vote. In some states it’s also illegal to sell alcohol on election day. You’re not allowed to do anything for a campaign while polls are open but it’s also illegal for cops to arrest anyone (for anything) without flagrant. We can’t vote by mail and we need to have an ID to vote. Oh it’s also illegal to take a picture of your vote or bring people with you while you vote.
Polling locations are usually the closest school to your house or some other public building that is just a short walk away (except for very small rural towns). However, if you move and don’t change your voting location within a few months or the election, you’ll have to go back to where you lived before in order to vote - too many people never update it and have to go back to their home town every election (or just skip it).
All of those little things impact the end result because they can help (or prevent) people from voting. In the US, actual access to polls is already being weaponized by parties extensively, but here that is only now starting to be a thing.
Finally, there are the urns themselves. Here we have electronic urns with closed source code that can be audited by every party. At the end of the day each individual urn prints its own totals which are then displayed to the public and made available on the election website. It’s not a perfect system and if (or more likely when) someone manages to hack it, they could easily change the result of an election, though I believe the systems in place are enough to at the very least expose that such a hack happened. The paper ballots used by the US on the other hand are much easier to fraud, but with much smaller impact to the total vote count (maybe high risk of impacting the results on key counties). Both systems still have a very large room for improvement in terms of fraud safety.
We have a similar system in California called the jungle primary—basically there are no party specific primaries (except for president because this system is incompatible with other state’s elections), and the top two advance to the general election.
There are a few issues though. If a candidate wins more than 50% of all votes in the primary, they win the election and don’t appear on the ballot in the general election along with the president. Since there is generally higher turnout for the general election rather than the primary, you can sometimes have a generally unpopular candidate win in the primary with 50+% of the small number of primary voters.
We also have issues with spoilers—if a bunch of similar candidates run, and all split the votes between them, it’s possible they don’t make the final ballot, even if any of them individually would have won the final election. This seems like a fringe issue until you realize that parties have actually supported lots of minor candidates on the opposing side in order to eliminate an otherwise dangerous challenger.
So overall it is somewhat better than first past the post but it still has significant issues. In general I think elections that select a single candidate are somewhat undemocratic by nature and we should think about ways to give the minority a voice but not the ability to shut things down. This may be a difficult balance to achieve but it’s still worth aiming for.
Some useful simulations for understanding many proposed voting styles, and the potential drawbacks of each.
Awesome tool, thanks for sharing. I wish they included STAR voting since I’ve become interested in that one.
It seems like every voting system has pros and cons, but I’ve become interested in STAR voting as it seems to have a nice blend of positive characteristics without the worst flaws of other systems.
It’s effectively a mix of score voting and instant runoff (ranked choice).
You can read more here: https://www.starvoting.org/
It hasn’t been tested much, mainly because it’s relatively unknown, so I’d like to see more real-world testing before I say it’s the best, but it’s definitely intriguing.
CGP Grey did a video on this subject a little over a decade ago.
Texagons are the bestagons.
Slightly late, but I currently rewatch the lecture I talked about in my other comment. The interesting part starts roughly here:
https://youtu.be/T3-VlQu3iRM?feature=shared&t=2550
But really, the entire lecture series is quite worth a watch.
Watch this lecture series:
https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=BDqvzFY72mg
Iit’s really insightful on many topics, and he also makes a point why the American two-party system is not as bad as it sometimes feels like (although of course not perfect either). I forgot which lecture exactly was about the voting systems, let me know if you watch it and find out.
Whatever people choose, but with second turn. Too many times a fragmented vote makes it seem like a certain candidate has larger support when it is not the case
