"Cumulative Voting" Method Gaining Attention 375
Local ID10T writes "The AP reports on a system of voting, called 'cumulative voting,' which was just used under court order in Port Chester, NY. Under this system, voters can apportion their votes as they wish — all to one candidate, one to each candidate, or any combination. The system, which has been used in Alabama, Illinois, South Dakota, Texas, and New York, allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates. Courts are increasingly mandating cumulative voting when they deem it necessary to provide fair representation." Wikipedia notes that cumulative voting "was used to elect the Illinois House of Representatives from 1870 until its repeal in 1980," without saying why the system was abandoned.
Sigh... (Score:5, Informative)
This one has flaws too, but at least it's better than FPTP hopefully.
Some important things regarding the flaw of this voting method...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Voting_systems_criteria [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Tactical_voting [wikipedia.org]
The Illinois experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:5, Insightful)
and was hard for voters to understand.
Is there any alternative voting system which isn't "hard for voters to understand"? Of all the weaselly excuses to keep FPTP that is the lamest.
Seriously. If you can't understand this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cumballot.gif [wikipedia.org]
then maybe you shouldn't be voting.
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:5, Funny)
That's quite an unfortunate filename.
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, people should really be using PNG these days.
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That's quite an unfortunate filename
You'd have to measure votes by volume.
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Someone clearly thinks it's hard to understand - they revised the diagram.
And now it's more confusing. Would my vote be invalid if I put my red mark for Mary Hill in column one or two?
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that one is harder
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3e/Wcumballot.gif/160px-Wcumballot.gif [wikimedia.org]
I have problems with additions when I'm tired :-p
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What's a share? It looks like a lump of four votes, but it seems to confuse more than it clarifies. Does it mean I can only use multiples of four? If so, why not just have 1/4 the number of votes and make the arithmetrickery easier?
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My guess is that using fractional numbers is more difficult than the kind of numbers you can count on your fingers.
Please remember that everybody has a right to vote, including a lot of people that don't understand the most basic math.
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and that one
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e7/FracCumBallot.gif/180px-FracCumBallot.gif [wikimedia.org]
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It's good to see I'm not the only person getting a little pissed off at the current trend of people to just use "it's too hard" and "it's too technical" as excuses.
Life is hard. People need to grow up and get with it or the United States is going to finish up sliding into a 2nd world baby-mama welfare state in the next few decades. I think where I live in Michigan, we already are a 2nd world baby-mama welfare state.
then maybe you shouldn't be voting.
Maybe it's time that we as a society look at enacting some barriers to being a voter a
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should a stupid person have any less right to choose his representative than a smart person?
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:5, Funny)
Because they'll vote for Sarah Palin.
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Because they'll vote for Sarah Palin.
Why are liberals so scared of Palin, do they fear a strong willed woman that some women would vote blindly for instead of blinding voting democrat.
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are liberals so scared of Palin...
You don't have to be liberal to be scared of Palin. I fear Palin because she represents that absolute worst of politicians. She is totally ignorant, yet is so arrogant that she thinks that ignorance makes her more legitimate and "real". She literally thinks that she doesn't have to know anything, because God will give her the answer through prayer.
I freaking HATE Palin. She is the absolute definition of a brainless demagogue.
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Scared? Hardly.
Fear and dislike are completely different. And being a "strong willed woman" is not the problem. I've happily been voting for Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer for years now. And it'd be very hard to say that any on them are not strong-willed. In palin's case though. the overt malice, mind-boggling stupidity, and insufferably snotty attitude just lead to a pure and intense visceral emotional dislike of her. And that's *before* considering the damage she would do to the country if she were ever to wind up in a position of significant power.
Re:The Illinois experience (Score:4, Insightful)
You think you're being clever, but you're not.
The GP is right. Sarah Palin can hardly open her mouth without being snotty and condescending. And the only way you could not cringe when she spouts off with crap like: "Well, that's kinda like being a community organizer, dontcha know? Except that I had actual responsibilities." and not cringe at how obnoxious she was being is if you're nothing more than a partisan minion who's already made up his mind that all liberals are commie traitors and anyone who opposes them must be good regardless of any other consideration.
Pelosi is an ass and the GP is obviously a San Francisco liberal. But he's right about Palin and Pelosi is a paragon of humility and intelligence in comparison. For better examples than his, consider Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the (female) republican candidates for governor and senator in California; both of whom I, for one, will be voting for in november. Compare and contrast how they present and comport themselves in public compared to Palin's showboating antics. Compare their considerable accomplishments to Palin's utter lack therof.
Democrats may have the wrong ideas (in my opinion) about how to run the country. But they're not evil and they're not traitors. And they are 100% right about Palin. We do all conservatives a disservice when we rally around dingbats like her, Michael Steele, and "joe the plumber". God... I'm almost glad that Bill Safire isn't around to see what we've become. Hopefully SOMEBODY will come along and rescue us from the idiots and fools running things now.
pinch me (Score:5, Funny)
Did I just see "Carly Fiorina" and "considerable accomplishments" in the same post?
If she mentions anything about synergies, economies of scale or anything that sounds remotely like merging with any nearby state I suggest you run to the hills.
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Seriously. If you can't understand this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cumballot.gif [wikipedia.org]
then maybe you shouldn't be voting.
Intelligence as a requirement for voting has been fought for a long time see voting tests.
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If you fall out of an aircraft you'll requires a parachute. It doesn't cause you to actually have one.
Cynical? I used to be, but what's the use?
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There is a way more significant flaw: You still vote for other life-forms (in this case humans)!
Call me crass, but I see natural selection as the fundamental driving force behind the outcome of everything, and hence the judgment on the quality of a behavior or decision.
If that is true, (which I am very sure it is), then a life-form either (directly or sometimes very indirectly) works solely for its own interests, or will die out pretty quickly. Especially when the resources must be fought for.
Of course this
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Personally, I'd be in favor of a Condorcet method for single-winner and a proportional representation method like STV for multiple winners. The Condorcet criterion simply says that if one candidate is preferred to every other one-on-
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
This one has flaws too, but at least it's better than FPTP hopefully.
It's not good enough. We have the technology to run a democracy right now. Anything less is tyranny.
Better take a look at past attempts at democracies, like ancient Greece. Pure democracies fail as soon as people realize they can vote themselves free stuff. That's part of the problem the US is having currently as ~46% (and growing rapidly) of US citizens pay no federal income taxes, so voting for more/larger entitlements doesn't cost them anything.
These expansions in government give more & more power to those in government, thus giving them incentive to keep the feedback loop going until the system crashes.
You want to destroy a country? Make it a democracy. A democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Strat
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You want to destroy a country? Make it a democracy. A democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-- Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-- Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
...said the Prime Minister of a constitutional monarchy.
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Funny)
"I'll wager that a countryman's half of all Churchill quotations are fictions, dream'd up on a whim to aid the malarkinations of sophists and deceivers. I for one have never met the fucker, and know not one man of good sense who hath."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Re:Sigh... (Score:4, Funny)
"I'll wager that a countryman's half of all Churchill quotations are fictions, dream'd up on a whim to aid the malarkinations of sophists and deceivers. I for one have never met the fucker, and know not one man of good sense who hath."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"What are you staring at, homo?"
- Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, to FDR, after the PM emerged naked from his shower at Yalta.
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Informative)
We should represent our greatest heros with care. Churchill was by no means perfect but he was one of the best of us and is still held in the highest regard in Britain. There's no reason to sully his reputation with truncated quotations:
“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,”...
let our hero continue: ... “making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory [i.e., tear] gas.”
The theme is concluded thus:
“The moral effect should be so good as to keep loss of life reduced to a minimum” and “Gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror yet would leave no serious permanent effect on most of those affected.”
I think you'll agree that the full text befits his reputation as Britain's visionary saviour, whereas the person who first sought to sully his reputation by offering up into popular currency the truncated misrepresentation of his view deserves shame.
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
But they still pay all kinds of other taxes. Looking at federal income taxes is very skewed in favor of those that make a lot of money. Add payroll, sales and property, and the picture is a whole lot different. You end up with people who end up paying more taxes overall than people who pay federal income taxes, but it's all due to capital gains.
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A democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
It isn't any better the other way around: two sheep and a wolf voting on what's for dinner.
You don't care how much of a majority the sheep have, you know that the wolf will eat them anyway.
And THAT is democracy: the voters vote, and the corporations subvert both the voters (guess who own all the media?) and the government (guess who funds all the politicians?)
Single Transferable Vote (Score:3, Informative)
allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates
I'm pretty sure that's how most voting systems work.
It's too bad that a proportional STV (Single Transferable Vote) isn't more widely used, then there would truely be no wasted votes
Re:Single Transferable Vote (Score:5, Informative)
It really is unfortunate that STV, proportional or otherwise, hasn't caught on more. You can sell instant-runoff voting in three sentences: "You can vote the new way or continue voting the old way. To vote the new way, number the candidates from 1 to n in your order of preference. To vote the old way, mark the candidate you want to vote for as 1 and leave the rest blank." There's really no disadvantage to it... except that it would give third parties a foothold against the entrenched two-party system, so why would any politician in power bother to support it? (Sorry to sound so cynical, on Slashdot no less.)
Sadly, the notion that right-versus-left is American politics is getting more entrenched as well. The voters in my home state of California unfortunately just passed a ballot measure [wikimedia.org] that will allow only two candidates on the ballot for any state general election. So long, third parties. Granted, most voters were probably taken in by the promise of open primaries, which was wrapped up in the same proposition and dominated the discussion. But that's just what was so outrageous about it: no one bothers to think that politics can be more subtle than Democrats versus Republicans.
Re:Single Transferable Vote (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look at Australia. They've used IRV for over 100 years, and their house of representatives has two parties (well; one party and one 60+ year long two-member coalition that never oppose incumbent members of the other coalition-member; close enough.)
But approval voting and score voting really CAN allow third-parties a foothold. http://rangevoting.org/ [rangevoting.org]
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Arrow's Impossibility theorem (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Single Transferable Vote (Score:5, Informative)
Thus, if a 3rd party has sufficient support to have any chance of prevailing in the general election, it must certainly have sufficient support to come in first or second in the primary election, yes? Or are you seriously arguing that a 3rd party might be able to garner 51% of the vote when running against the 2 major party candidates, but can't manage to get about 30% of the people to vote for it in a wide-open primary election?
"Fair representation" (Score:4, Insightful)
What they really mean by "fair representation" would be more accurately described as "damn voters won't vote for the people we want them to, so we're screwing with the rules."
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What they really mean by "fair representation" would be more accurately described as "damn voters won't vote for the people we want them to, so we're screwing with the rules."
Well, it's pretty much the opposite. Cumulative voting is a system for elections involving party lists (such as city councils, in some jurisdictions). The point is that you get to assign your votes to the candidates you actually want to elect, rather than having to vote for a list of candidates that some party drew up for you, while still giving the parties a chance to nominate candidates and suggest to (not force upon) the voter a ranking among them.
This system is commonly used in local elections in Swit
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It's simple mathematics.
W = Voters of the first type
B = Voters of the second type
Wc = Candidates of the first type
Bc = Candidates of the second type
N = Number of votes each voter gets
Then each Wc candidate will get (W*N)/Wc on average, and each Bc candidate will get (B*N)/Bc on average, assuming W people only vote for Wc candidates and B people only vote for Bc candidates.
If the ratio of W/Wc is less than the ratio of B/Bc, then the Bc candidates will win.
In the usual case, W = White people, B = Black peopl
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Also, it's borderline asinine to suggest that a system that works well under a Parliamentary system would trans
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What was that rant about?
And yes, your six votes for six candidates count as much as the six votes of anyone else. If you want to spread them among six candidates, that's ok. If you don't want to spread them and pile them on a single candidate -- that's a-ok. too. The candidate with the most votes wins in the end.
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>>What was that rant about?
The background story involves Hispanic voters complaining that they weren't getting people of the right race elected.
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If 16% of the populace broadly agree with a certain set of policies, then shouldn't those policies have 16% of the reputation? There are a lot of sets of policies, and lots of overlap between different candidates. But using a first past the post system means that all candidates may well be clones of the most popular candidate of a small minority. You lose any benefit of having multiple representatives.
Something tells me your tune would change pretty quickly if that 16% were Nazis rather than Hispanics.
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What they really mean by "fair representation" would be more accurately described as "damn voters won't vote for the people we want them to, so we're screwing with the rules."
A more fair representation would allow the "No Confidence" vote and a "Recall" vote box for each and every candidate in office every two years whether they are running or not. Then and only then will the *employees* of this nation take notice of their true employers. Also, no pay raise for any politician unless approved by 75% of the voting populace. And just like all the commercial businesses, the politicians should start paying a greater portion of their health benefits themselves and get off the free gra
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>>that the simplest voting systems don't actually give a result which represents the opinion of the people who are voting.
Except in cases where 0, 1, or 2 candidates are running for office, no system can both:
1) represent the opinion of the populace and
2) be immune to gaming the system.
In use since 1870? (Score:4, Funny)
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I read Slashdot via repeating telegraph, you insensitive clod!
I prefer the semaphore. Its hard on the arms but the message gets through!
not proportional voting, rather representation (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite Thomas Jefferson's fantasies, most Americans seem to prefer parties. That's why we need a Bundestag-like proportional representation system at the state Legislature and Congressional levels (BTW, save some money and get rid of the silly state Senates). Any party (or, in our case, add individual) that can gather some significant number of members/petitioners should be placed on the ballot, and the seats of the legislative body apportioned according to the votes cast for the party/individual. That way, maybe we would have some representation of more than two (increasingly lunatic) points of view. California, for example, has several registered parties (American Independent, Democratic, Green, Libertarian, Peace and Freedom, and Republican), but legislators from only two, so a large portion of the registered voters are simply not represented at the state level. Before some idiot says "well, they just need to get enough votes", the district lines are drawn to prohibit any but the Demopublicans from getting a seat (see "Gerrymander") in any district in the state.
The real reason that we don't have such a system is that the corporations that own the Demopublicans ("Big Oil", Hollywood, ...) would have to spread their bribes over a lot more politicians and they will do whatever it takes to prevent that additional expense.
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would have to spread their bribes over a lot more politicians and they will do whatever it takes to prevent that additional expense.
But the number of elected politicians would not increase so I don't see how this would significantly increase the number of people to be bribed.
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Lump sum payments to the respective party's state/national committee would increase from 2 to six.
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You will usually see donations from big industries to candidates from both parties. If there were seven parties that had a decent chance of getting their candidate elected, then they would have to bribe all seven of them - even if they don't get in this year, politicians tend to remember those who've paid them over the long term.
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Great Britain, IIRC, also has Members of Parliament from specific districts.
If the "Silly Party" candidate out-polls the Conservatives, "Very Silly Party", ..., then the "Silly Party" candidate wins and represents the entire district.
Re:not proportional voting, rather representation (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're misinformed about how such things work. Here in New Zealand we use something very like the German system - while the tiny details may be different the basic idea is the same.
Parliament or whatever has N seats, everyone gets two votes:
- the first is for a local representative elected using FPP almost exactly as you do for the House in the US - there are N/2 local representative seats.
- the second is for a party, after the first set of votes are counted and the number of party representatives with local seats are determined the total party votes for the country are tallied - the second N/2 seats are allocated to representatives off of party nominated lists so that when added to the first N/2 the party seat count in parliament comes out according to the second vote
There are various details around minimum votes to get party seats and various rules for strange overhang situations that those can create that are different from system to system.
And yes we haven't had a single government since we changed to this system where a single party got 50% or more of the vote - all governments have been coalitions - it means politicians have to make public agreements and compromises which result in them acting more constrained in their actions than they would have been if they'd gotten 30% of the votes in an FPP election but 60% of the seats - it's a wonderful thing - many of the politicians, especially the old school ones, hate it.
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Around here a large part of the problem is that the political par
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Most of the World's democracies work with proportional representation, AFAIK. The American system of giving all the representatives of one state to the most voted party (national election) always looked odd to me. If I understand it correctly, a party getting 30% of the votes gets all the representatives if the other (hypothetical) parties get 29%, 29% and 12%. Doesn't seem fair.
Actually that is not true (except for Electoral College representatives in Presidential elections, and then it depends on the state). The National elections work like this: For Senate, the candidate who gets the most votes in the state wins the election (only one of a state's two Senators is up for vote at a time, Senate terms are staggered). For the House of Representatives, the candidate who gets the most votes in a particular district gets the seat, but the votes in that district have no impact on the el
Re:not proportional voting, rather representation (Score:4, Informative)
No, don't get rid of the state legislatures.
They're some of the last fragments of the way the US was supposed to work, before Lincoln screwed it all up with his ham-fisted approach to ending slavery, that ended up giving colossal power to the federal government.
The states were supposed to have all the power, and to have that, you need your own governmental system.
That's also why there's the electoral college - it's counterproductive in a federal-centric system, but it makes sense in a state-centric system. And the US Senate - which should be elected by the governments of the states, IIRC, NOT the people - that was an attempt to prevent mob rule, and represent the states themselves in US government - the House of Representatives was intended to represent the people.
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Despite Thomas Jefferson's fantasies, most Americans seem to prefer parties
Can we have proof of this? Maybe some kind of study where Americans were given a genuine choice between voting for parties and voting for individuals and they picked one or the other? From what I can see, most people have never experienced anything that isn't a binary choice between Democrats and Republicans.
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Despite Thomas Jefferson's fantasies, most Americans seem to prefer parties.
I don't think that's actually true. Parties seem to prefer parties, and the accumulation of wealth within parties to support their own members as candidates - i.e., advertising - sells those candidates to the voters better than unaffiliated candidates are able to.
Re:not proportional voting, rather representation (Score:5, Insightful)
Ranking system (Score:5, Interesting)
A ranking system is the right solution.
If 50%-something would like A to win, are ok with B, but definitely don't want C, and if the 50%-something others are the exact opposite, then the best candidate should be B, not A or C where it's only down to little percentage different.
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I totally agree that B would be the best candidate, but I do not think ranking is the best solution. Any ranking system is relatively complex compared to the triviality of one single selection. And you definitely do not want to add complexity to voting systems.
In my opinion the best voting system is to give one vote to every candidate you approve of. This has two very important properties:
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then the best candidate should be B, not A or C
Which is why a two party system is so much better than multiparty or cumulative. With two-party and one vote per candidate, both parties have to *compromise* in order to represent a majority of the electorate. Multiparty or cumulative voting means fringe groups get disproportionate representation.
Those who want Puerto Rico statehood are stuck in your ABC scenario today (Statehood, Independence, sovereign protectorate, or status quo). The Obama administration is trying to force their agenda through [hotair.com] by requir
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In Australia we use a similar system: preferential voting [wikimedia.org].
And yet we still have to choose between Rudd and Abbot. Don't get me wrong, its good that we have a few minor parties there but preferential voting won't break us out of the two party system.
I think its also a marketing problem. Ford vs Holden, Coke vs Pepsi, Nokia vs Apple.
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It's still lightyears better than FPTP. Having a two party system only because of marketing rather than because the system actively abhors third parties is progressive like fucking space aliens handing down super-advanced direct-brain democracy technology compared to Britain.
Share of vote: Labour 35%, Conservative 32%, Lib Dem 23%.
Share of seats: Labour 39%, Conservative 47%, Lib Dem 8%.
The Lib Dems needed 120,000 votes to win each of their seats. Labour needed 33,000.
The system itself makes it almost liter
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Say the three candidate for President is Bush, Gore, and Nader. You like Nader but don't want Bush. If Nader has negligible support, you would vote for Gore and Nader, so that your vote still helps Gore keep Bush away. However, if
Some interesting stats (Score:3, Interesting)
"Black Representation Under Cumulative Voting in IL"
http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=419 [fairvote.org]
Did careerism also play a part?
Cumulative Voting and Vote-Splitting (Score:5, Informative)
There are also a lot of other parties, however they didn't make it in any parliament. But there are parties for families, "true to the Bible"-Christians, or a party with yogic flyer called natural law party (however they dissolved 2004).
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Like a 50% vote, a ghoul or gremlin would have got "more" for the final seat.
Also have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Contemporary_conflict_over_the_Electoral_College [wikipedia.org]
I agree this is bad. (Score:2)
Re:I agree this is bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Electoral college wasn't intended for the top-heavy government we have today - it was intended for the pre-Lincoln weak central, strong state governments. And the people weren't SUPPOSED to elect the President or Senators - the people got to elect the House of Representatives - that was for the state governments themselves.
Single Transferable Vote (Score:2, Interesting)
Negative votes (Score:3, Insightful)
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Personally I like proportional voting systems; example: Say there are 100 seats in the legislature, party "A" gets 40% of the votes party "B" gets 30% of the votes, party "C" gets 25% and party "D" gets 5%. So they get a number of seats proportional to the votes they receive. Party A gets 40 seats and so on. Party D however doesn't get any seats as there is an 8% minimum you have to reach to get in the legislature, to help prevent radical minorities getting a foot hold. (last part is just kinda in-theory)
Bu
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This is mostly a silly proposal, but I think even if you only have two candidates, negative votes would be great. The main implication is that the candidate will no longer be able to pretend s/he has anything like a "mandate" from the voters.
Actually, negative votes don't address most of the issues with voting systems. But I think most of the innovative and useful voting systems can be adapted to accomodate this. Assuming of course that voters have a lot of time to figure it all out (imaging range voting
Cumulative vomiting (Score:2)
I read 'cumulative vomiting' and thought it was some new artsy thing people do in the States.
Approval Voting (Score:2)
I prefer approval voting. For every candidate on the ballot, you can either vote for him or not vote for him. That would fix the tactical voting problem, since voting for a non-mainstream candidate doesn't affect your ability to choose between the 2 largest parties, so the weaker parties would see more popularity. Also, it would encourage politicians to campaign positively, proposing solutions to problems, rather than relying on a smear campaign against their opponents.
Voting? Useless. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry.
The system is broken. You get to choose charming and evil or just plain evil.
The government is bought and paid for. Voting is a charade.
For voting to work as we'd all like it to work, first we'd have to...
1. Have an independent media not owned by the oligarchs. This way real debate can happen.
2. Test candidates and sitting leaders for psychopathy and remove those who fail the tests from the system.
3. Make corporate sponsorship/lobbying a crime with real punishments which stop the crimes from repeating.
4. Fix the money system so that we are not all debt slaves in the giant pyramid scheme which is the global economy.
Since none of those things are going to come about, debating how to vote is pointless.
The system is collapsing, and a LOT of people are going to suffer horribly.
The only thing you can realistically do is to find your neighbors and figure out how to help and support each other through the hard times, because the government is an evil leach which is here to feed on you and enslave you. Disengage from it.
-FL
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Well then it's a good thing that it's the judiciary's role to enact public policy!
No, but it is the judiciary's duty to enforce the current law: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [wikipedia.org].
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Though personally I don't think those whom are elected should be able to make/change laws about elections... but that would just make the system more complex and larger... So when the judicial system steps in and tries to keep things constitutionally in line I appreciate it.
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The main issue with the US voting system (well, apart from "lobbying" which is actually legalized corruption) is gerrymandering, with which outgoing politicians try and tailor constituencies to maximize the probably they'll be reelected, and the numbers of successful candidates on their sides. Apart from the judiciary, who's gonna stop them ?
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So whats your preference? First past the post or Single transferable vote?
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But with STV your vote only ever goes to one candidate. Its just a way of saying I want candidate C to win but if it comes down to A and B then I choose B. In this scenario B gets your vote.
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The system you favour inevitably leads to a two party system with conservative policies. That may be okay if you like the status quo, but life generally requires adapting to new conditions and the first past the post system does not encourage new candidates who will propose genuine change.
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If anyone can cast the votes he wants how can you be right about how many people have voted.
Count the ballot papers.
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voters can apportion their votes as they wish -- all to one candidate, one to each candidate, or any combination.
According to this, there will be more ballots than voters.
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Everybody get 6 votes. (Score:3, Informative)
Tthey always got 6 votes. All that has changed is that before they had to vote for 6 different candidates, but now they can combine their votes.
So how does benefit minority groups? Well say there were 6+ white candidates but only one black candidate. Then voters could spend their votes only on white candidates, but did not have the option of spending their votes only on black candidates. So under the new system, if one sixth of the population wants a black representative, they get one. In principle this doe
Re: (Score:2)
Um, what?
Where's the -1, Wrong mod when you need it?
You get six votes. You DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO with them. Don't use them at all. Give all six to one candidate. Give them to six different candidates. Any other distribution of those six votes among less candidates. Your choice.
Either way, your voice gets heard equally, no matter who you are. It's just that you can weakly say you prefer all of these candidates, or strongly say you prefer one candidate, or moderately say you prefer a smaller group of c
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Your first vote counts as one if your over 50%.
The rest is coalition building in the hands of the people.
Not some closed room political machine, pundit or cleric.
Malicious tampering is more in the counting by computer without a paper trail
Re:The "fairest" thing since affirmative action (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The "fairest" thing since affirmative action (Score:4, Informative)
it's making everyone else's vote count as 1/6th the vote of people "selected" by the government.
If that was the case, cumulative voting would be bad, yes. But it doesn't work that way. What cumulative voting is, it gives everyone more votes to distribute among candidates. So everyone's vote is basically split into fractions, but everyone's ballot has the same weight overall. So if I (and everyone else) got 10 votes, I might chose to give 3 (respectively 3/10 of my vote) votes to candidate A, 2 (2/10) to candidate C, D, and J and 1 (1/10) vote to candidate X. This way, I can show that I like candidate A the most, but I'm also ok with candidates C, D, J, and X, but not with everyone else on the ballot.
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No, looks like everyone gets six votes.
What it looks like to me is that, under the old system, there was one candidate being elected at a time. So, 25% of the people wanted a Hispanic in office, apparently, but everyone else didn't.
Under the new system, all six candidates get elected at a time. Those 25% of the people now got their wishes heard, because everyone was running against everyone, and not some crap like being pre-assigned a seat, and having to fight for that seat (at least that's how things work
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While you are right, the system itself is very, very, wrong.
We are supposed to be a democratic republic, where every legal voter gets one vote for each set of candidates. In this system, one gets six votes, one vote for each candidate and can vote multiple times for a single candidate.
The proper thing to do was to break the town in to districts. Another thing that could have been done was have all the trustees elected at the same time, with the top six as the winners.
The judge should be removed from the ben
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Under the old system, two of the seats were up for vote at a time and you got to vote for which person you wanted in each seat, but you had to choose a different person for each seat. Under the new system, all six seats are up for election at a time and you get to vote for which person you want in each seat, but you can
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Why is the idea of splitting up that area into 6 seats "a bad idea", like you would your county commissioners in most American areas?
The town did not like that solution...I don't know who is meant by "the town". Is it the town government, a poll of the people of the town, or just the town lawyer?
Considering that the only evidence I have seen presented about discrimination is the results of the elections, I think that allowing the town to decide how to mitigate the problem is appropriate. Personally, I think that more evidence of discrimination than just the election results should be required to force a municipality to alter its method