Ask Lemmy

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.)

The image in the post is from this video about STV by CGP Grey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI

I'm a fan of approval voting

Demarchy. Random selection is good enough as long as the pool is big and fresh people get cycled in regularly. It sidesteps a whole host of problems, and the new problems it introduces are relatively minor in my view.

Ranked choice voting.

Along with eliminating anyone with less than ~2%

None of these should be goals.

Direct/liquid democracy where you have the individual right to vote on everything, and so be your own representative, in addition to the right to transfer your vote to a representative, and transfer it back to yourself or someone else at any time, is the only democracy.

Instead of a cabinet, direct recallable functional administrators are elected until they piss off the people. Liquid/direct democracy can create subdivisions of functional silos with administrator in charge of single task/project, so you don't have to think of a single cabinet official of a full department, even if there is some coordination/offices in same building.

Direct proportional representation, like we have in the Netherlands, preferably with minimal seat threshold for a party to get into parliament.

It doesn't have regional representation or voting districts, but I don't think that that really matters much on the national level. Instead you get an as close to accurate as possible representation of which parties the people voted for.

The low seat threshold also allows people to vote for small parties that may be closer to their political views. And it allows people to feel confident punishing a big party by voting for a close alternative, if they fail to listen to their voters.

STV with multi-member constituencies.

• No ranked list of party members that parties can put their best buds at the top of. All candidates are equal, party affiliated or not.
• Ranked voting system, so people can express their preference with no need for tactical voting.
• All takes place with a single vote.
• Members of the public will have a choice of representative when raising concerns with them. Better chance of talking to someone who simpathises with your issue.
• It's still representation on a local scale.
• Whilst it's still an approximation to full PR the margin of error compared to FPTP is massively reduced.

I think it gets discarded because "it's still not PR" but I think the advantages outweigh this.

Personally like MMP, it is already shown that it can work in the real world (used in NZ and other places) and generally produces fairer results than other systems, as well as giving minor parties more power and influence than in other systems. I would also suggest using preferential instead of first past the post voting for the constituencies to reduce strategic voting.

MMP for me. Produces results which are broadly regarded as fair and easily to understand, but does not result in an excessively long ballot paper or confuse voters.

My city recently implemented single transferrable vote for local council elections. It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.

Many people gave up and just marked a single candidate or got confused and didn't bother voting at all. This was for an election where each ward returned three councillors. CGP Grey actually criticised implementations if STV where each constituency returns only three representatives, insisting it should be five, or more. In a world of short attention spans, we have to accept that asking people to research potentially 20 candidates and even just pick their top five will result in a large number of people getting frustrated and giving up.

It's all well and good to have a system which is mathematically optimal in your view, but the problem is that elections also have to retain the confidence of the voters to be effective, and if voters cannot understand a highly-complex system then they will not have confidence in its fairness and will be easily tricked by people with ulterior motives who tell them it's actually rigged against them.

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.

Single-transferable vote with multi-member districts is not really a proportional system. Due to the necessarily small number of seats per district, it favours the larger parties, though not by as much as first-past-the-post or STV with single-member districts.

If you consider the political dynamics of systems with open-list PR, closed-list PR and MMR, the difference actually isn't all that significant. The average person doesn't have the time to investigate the merits of each candidate, so in these systems most people vote according to party preference, perhaps also considering the charisma of its leader. Of these systems, MMR is probably the least effective, since it requires an electoral threshold (5% is chosen in both Germany and New Zealand) to keep the system workable. This electoral threshold again favours the larger parties, and skews the system away from proportionality.

The top of the global quality-of-life rankings is dominated by countries using open and semi-closed PR.

1. have different "houses" to represent different dimensions of the country ( by-population, by-area, nature-&-future-generations, economy-as-a-whole )

2. limit each level's "house" to 144-ish representatives, to suppress auto-factionalism ( which begins around 150-people )

3. people vote on approval-basis only: these are OK, the not-checked are not, & then use simple approved-by-most-people to choose the winners.

4. prevent DarkTriad/DarkTetrad types { narcissism, machiavellianism, sociopathy-psychopathy, sadism } from being eligible for any election.

5. Judiciary, AND JOURNALISM, are required to be standards-based, objective, correct-reasoning, not-for-profit, & holding-to-actuality. Without honest accountability, we've got "civilization"-feudalism, NOT Civilization.

6. Issue-diagram forums, NO LOBBYING/bribery. NONE. ISSUES decide everything. That means that ALL debates happen in asynchronous issue-diagrams, NOT in most-alpha-personality-"wins", TV-debates bullshit.

7. All draft-legislation needs to be done in issue-diagrams, letting anyone in the world ( real-person, or useful-insight, not mere astroturfing-by-ideologies or corporate "persons" ) help us get the points right: draft-for-1/4-year before being elegible for signing-into-law, with few exceptions ( emergencies actually do happen )

8. no enemy-agent can have citizenship, no incompetent-in-the-issue can vote in that issue ( same as you don't allow passengers to decide the flying of the airliner: only the pilots are permitted that, same with ecologies, same with regulation, etc: if you aren't domain-competent, you may participate in the discussions if you're doing-so responsibly, but only domain-competent people VOTE in the domain ), & we actively devlop/provide automatic education to get as many people as completely domain-competent in all areas as possible.

9. critical-reasoning is required for full voting citizenship, & education-systems which won't produce it are fraud, & have to be treated as such. Yes, it's true, that high-lead regions may have enough IQ-deficit as to have a lower critical-reasoning capacity for that reason, but CORRECT THE PROBLEM, & unbreak as many lives as you can! The "education" which pushes imprint->reacting, or abdication-to-LLM, MUST be put in its place, disempowered, while putting proper development-of-human-intelligence as free as possible, as pervasively-available as possible, & as central as possible, for our civilization to remain viable, especially in ClimatePunctuation which is still in its accelerating-stage.

10. Enforcing-disinformation is criminalized. Troll-farms, for-profit-propaganda, ideological-propaganda, institutional-dishonesty, ALL of it. Accuracy, objectivity, testability, correct-reasoning, etc, are the strength-of-the-"beam" on-which civilization sits: we allow that to fail, & we don't deserve to live through The Great Filter. Spine/uprightness is required in the individual, & it is required in the civilization, too.

Item 2 requires that the levels-of-government change as appropriate to the total-population, so extra-levels may have to be inserted, if the population expands enough, & the chain-of-representation was getting too deformed.

I don't yet know how many each representative would have to be limited-to, to make it still properly responsible.

This is just a top-of-my-head sketch, not a fully-worked-to-correctness rendition, so it's probably missing a few key things, & it's probably sloppily-worded.

But it communicates the gist of it, which is good-enough for considering.

Responsibility-archy is the point.

Nothing else is strategically-viable: we're deadmeat unless we enact/enforce responsibilityarchy for enough of humankind. At the whole-species level: gone.

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Oh, gratitude to that yt video which identified the different voting-systems, & the flaws with each, eventually concluding that the only one which mathematically could work right was the approval-voting system.

I'd never have clued-in to that, on my own.

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