No, I'm not putting this in /c/electoralism , for reasons found in the third paragraph

Most people know there's first-past-the-post and there's ranked-choice. But I've recently learned there's a much longer list than that, and they all have pros and cons.

Somecomrades would say 🙄yeah bourgeois elections who cares🙄 but that is wrong: the mathematics applies to all voting. It's the engineering side of the question: "If we have a bunch of people, maybe a hundred, maybe a million, how do we decide what the collective will is in the fairest way?" The name of the field is social choice theory because a social group is trying to make a choice.

You: oh bourgeois elections are a farce lol

Me: exactly and that's why we need to study how can voting be not a farce

First-past-the-post gets a hard time, and deservedly so. But the people who say "first-past-the-post bad, ranked choice good" are oversimplifying. It turns out there are all these mathematical trade-offs, and it is formally provable that there is no perfect system.

Most ranked choice voting systems* can suffer from a crazy effect where getting more votes makes you lose. The technical name for this is a monotonicity failure because mathematicians are shit with names. (*There are theoretical ranked-choice votings that don't fail monotonicity, but I don't know of any being applied in a political system. Companies probably have used them.)

Show

In the 'Popular Bottom' Scenario, soviet-bottom gets 45% of the vote and isn't elected; but in the other scenario he gets 39% and is elected. What happened is he lost supporters to a rival (Top) who eliminated his other rival (Center) for him, so he was able to sneak in.

First-past-the-post doesn't have this problem: more votes is always better. But it has plenty of other problems. The USA system fails the no favorite betrayal criterion catastrophically; that's the criterion that you should be able to vote for who you like best. Usans "have to" vote for a candidate they hate.

This page summarises it pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_voting_rules with tables comparing the different traps multi-winner systems fall into and the traps single-winner systems fall into.

Some cool systems:

Anyway, interesting stuff to think about if we design democratic/anarchistic systems for collective decision-making. It wouldn't have to be electing representatives, it could be voting on policies, same maths either way.

  • Omashkooz [none/use name]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I don't know if you're in a political party or not, but say you are.

    And say there's a proposal that the party could choose to adopt or reject. Will we issue a statement of support for Palestine?

    Would you be want a coin to be flipped to make that decision?

    • plinky [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      Sortition deals away by having no parties. Average 7/10 brit will say piss on israel, thus majority of randomly selected people would as well.

      You talking about collective decision making or party, exactly? Gun to my head, sortition is impossible, people vote on blind programs enumerated, and don’t know which party is which, no debates nothing.

      Main reason of no direct democracy, people will check out of decision making if you have to deal with small annoying bullshit each day.

      Inside party I would assume I join like minded people, and palestine is fairly old check for leftists. Inside party I would assume democratic centralism (which is how parties work anyway, despite scary name), people who don’t like resolution quit.

      If you talk inside states as how they are now, executives heads (like transport, environment whatevs) are elected with programs, not anointed by a single dipshit and their party

      • Omashkooz [none/use name]
        ·
        2 months ago

        Inside party I would assume democratic centralism (which is how parties work anyway, despite scary name), people who don’t like resolution quit.

        Your meeting hall would be empty after ten resolutions

        • plinky [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          How are spd still functioning then? Or dems? They may grumble, they still do their shit. People “don’t like it, but will do it” happens way more often than “fuck y’all with this shit” . Inside (ideological) parties they have core program, not whatever neolibs are doing, like party goals. Commies believe in abolishing ownership, fashies believe in rounding up minorities, dems believe in private-public ownership and minority rights signaling. You agree with core program and deal with bullshit