Judging by the sentiment on news aggregator Reddit at the time, the 2008 US presidential election should have been a straight fight between Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul
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I think your set should include { Reddit, the US electoral system, Members of the AARP }. This set should tell you why it wasn't a fight between Kucinich and Paul.
Yep :-( Polling's not much help, unfortunately, because it's subject to many of the same distorting forces as elections themselves. Though when asked about issues, Brits reveal themselves to be generally much more liberal than our politicians...
(about which we should have a conversation at some point. Did I tell you I'm secretary of the Yes campaign in Oxfordshire? What's going on in Scotland so far? Are people actually bothered about the May 6th too many votes problem?)
Aha! I would be extremely interested to know why you think voting Yes is a good idea. As far as I can tell, AV is the only widespread system which is less proportional and vulnerable to more voting paradoxes than FPTP.
I actually think the Tories/Labour have been very smart with this: either we vote to adopt an even worse system, or we reject it in which case they say there's no appetite for reform. Either way they win and we lose.
Are people actually bothered about the May 6th too many votes problem?
A lot of people who I hang out with (which these days includes a few SGP members/candidates/staff) are really pissed off about this. And the "general election timed to coincide with Holyrood elections" problem. Massive slap in the face for the devolved government. The problem's not that there are too many votes (Scots have shown themselves well capable of ticking more than one box on a given day in the past), but that it makes campaigning a bugger.
I haven't noticed any AV campaign action going on in Scotland.
And what you really want is not preferential voting, but "Am I Hot Or Not"-style cardinal utilities, which are not vulnerable to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem :-)
Ah, excellent, for I have studied this in detail, and so we can have long rants at each other :-)
I don't believe in comparability of cardinal utilities across individuals - at least, not in a feasible way.
And Arrow's impossibility theorem requires the axiom "independence of irrelevant alternatives", which is (to put it briefly) borked. It's just nonsense.
If you replace independence of irrelevant alternatives with pairwise consistency (a limited version of it that actually makes sense) then there *no* impossibility - the answer is the Condorcet method. (I see wikipedia's page on Arrow's impossibility doesn't know this -- I should update that in my copious free time).
Instant runoff voting isn't Condorcet, and has problems - but it's halfway to Condorcet, and a damn sight better than FPTP. If you're going to stick to single-member consitituencies, then it's the best you're likely to get (Condorcet being rather time-consuming to count, in practice).
Anyway, really don't have time to talk about this now. Teaching at 2, not
I conjecture that the weirdness of the American electoral process is explained by our turnout at the polls.
Half of us - fewer for off-year elections, purely local elections - don't bother voting. I think I have read that more people say 'I will vote' than actually do.
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(about which we should have a conversation at some point. Did I tell you I'm secretary of the Yes campaign in Oxfordshire? What's going on in Scotland so far? Are people actually bothered about the May 6th too many votes problem?)
Reply
I actually think the Tories/Labour have been very smart with this: either we vote to adopt an even worse system, or we reject it in which case they say there's no appetite for reform. Either way they win and we lose.
Are people actually bothered about the May 6th too many votes problem?
A lot of people who I hang out with (which these days includes a few SGP members/candidates/staff) are really pissed off about this. And the "general election timed to coincide with Holyrood elections" problem. Massive slap in the face for the devolved government. The problem's not that there are too many votes (Scots have shown themselves well capable of ticking more than one box on a given day in the past), but that it makes campaigning a bugger.
I haven't noticed any AV campaign action going on in Scotland.
Reply
Reply
I don't believe in comparability of cardinal utilities across individuals - at least, not in a feasible way.
And Arrow's impossibility theorem requires the axiom "independence of irrelevant alternatives", which is (to put it briefly) borked. It's just nonsense.
If you replace independence of irrelevant alternatives with pairwise consistency (a limited version of it that actually makes sense) then there *no* impossibility - the answer is the Condorcet method. (I see wikipedia's page on Arrow's impossibility doesn't know this -- I should update that in my copious free time).
Instant runoff voting isn't Condorcet, and has problems - but it's halfway to Condorcet, and a damn sight better than FPTP. If you're going to stick to single-member consitituencies, then it's the best you're likely to get (Condorcet being rather time-consuming to count, in practice).
Anyway, really don't have time to talk about this now. Teaching at 2, not
Reply
Half of us - fewer for off-year elections, purely local elections - don't bother voting. I think I have read that more people say 'I will vote' than actually do.
This has got to skew the results.
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