| General > General Technical Chat |
| Improving democracy through math |
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| daqq:
While the US elections are the hot topic now, this topic annoyed me well before that in my own country, where I regularly get to strategically decide to vote the lesser evil. There are alternative voting systems that are more mathematically and ethically sound. Enjoy the videos. It's a great channel by the way: Complete list here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNCHVwtpeBY4mybPkHEnRxSOb7FQ2vF9c |
| magic:
I offer a simple mathematical proof that you cannot improve democracy: If you vote for lesser evil and the lesser evil gets in, it will know damn well not to allow you to vote for anything else ;) |
| TimFox:
Election design and voting systems are examples of what should be technical problems, but become political problems when the proposed technical solutions affect different political factions differently. The first technical article I read about election design (Scientific American magazine, sometime before 1980) defined a bad system thusly: In a three-person race between A, B, and C: if A beats B and A beats C in two-person races, but B wins the three-person race. |
| SiliconWizard:
There is indeed a fundamental known problem with the voting systems we use in almost all democracies these days. To begin understanding what is wrong, you can start with the Condorcet paradox (and derive corollaries from there): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox We sure knew something was fishy, a long time ago. Even basic survey techniques these days (unless they are willingly biased) are designed to avoid this problem, and often repeat related questions in different ways and contexts to make sure the answers are consistent. Voting the way we do to select candidates is one of the worst possible ways of eventually selecting the preferred candidate for a majority of people. Now "less evil" doesn't mean much in reality. So that's yet another debate, but I do agree it worsens the voting problem as many people vote this way (each with their own - or through propaganda of some form - notion of "less evil"), which by nature can't get you anything representing the people in general. So that's just adding to the voting paradox. Which gets us to another issue: is representative democracy really democracy? I for one am not so sure. |
| David Hess:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on November 06, 2020, 06:01:33 pm ---Which gets us to another issue: is representative democracy really democracy? I for one am not so sure. --- End quote --- If plurality (first past the post) voting is used, then no democracy represents the voters. How much better are the people represented when there are two choices instead of one? |
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