Active Users:369 Time:16/09/2024 07:47:26 PM
The popular vote is the popular vote - one citizen, one vote, wherever they may live. Legolas Send a noteboard - 08/07/2024 10:37:56 PM

View original postI've made this point to you before (that the system(s) in Europe are even worse at getting to 'the person who gets the most votes wins the election' but maybe that's not your actual complaint?

I don't remember that previous discussion, but as I'm a bit of an electoral systems nerd, I'm going to have to point out that the systems in 'Europe' range all the way from the one extreme, Britain's FPTP which is precisely like America's except without gerrymandering and seats split over just 4 'states' rather than 50, to the other extreme, the Netherlands' perfect proportional representation with all seats allocated based on each party's share of the nation-wide vote. Many others are somewhere inbetween - with the country divided into a number of multi-member constituencies, then proportional representation within each constituency. Though as I mentioned to Greg, that's about legislative elections, not presidential ones (which a good number of European countries don't even have due to still having monarchies - one of those things which you couldn't possibly create from scratch anymore, but as long as we still have them, they're sure useful).

I just replied to Greg pointing out the absurd outcomes of the British election, which you also mention. But the US system is essentially the same as the British one and it sucks just as much, in fact arguably even more, at giving people a real choice. If you're a Green voter in the UK, you might well be sour at having so few seats for all the votes your party got - but hey, could be worse, you could be a Green voter in the US who may never get any seats at all, because in the US for several reasons the two-party duopoly is even stronger than the basic theory about FPTP predicts. It's difficult to put a number on how much the American system misallocates seats relative to people's preferences, because people are so thoroughly used to having only two real choices in every single election - so for psychological reasons, many end up adjusting their beliefs to bring them more in line with one of those two and develop a passionate attachment for it, so they don't really feel as deprived of choice as they really are.

One does occasionally see attempts to improve things - both Alaska and Maine recently introduced excellent reforms that give their voters more actual choice for Congress. Nebraska and again Maine still have their thing where they split their electoral college votes so they are at least marginally more representative of the states' voters. In the UK, there was for instance the London mayoral election where they had ranked choice voting. But then you immediately see other politicians trying to get rid of those innovations again so they can keep promoting the hyperpolarized duopoly - the last London mayoral election no longer had ranked choice, in Nebraska Trump allies are trying to change the system to gain an extra electoral college vote for him, etc.

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