SubscribeBut if representative government turns out to be your intention there still may be ways to achieve it better than the territorial district. For example you each represent about ten thousand human beings, perhaps seven thousand of voting age -- and some of you were elected by slim majorities. Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial consituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with eight thousand supporters might have two votes in this body. Difficulties, objections, practical points to be worked out -- many of them! But you could work them out ... and thereby avoid the chronic sickness of representative government, the disgruntled minority which feels -- correctly! -- that it has been disenfranchised.also virginia's lieutenant governor was saying the other day how australia mandated voting, so like if you didn't you get charged $250 or something. and then mark warner chimed in "that would save the budget!" he also talked about prospects for online voting :D
These insights came quickly, but it was many years before Natapoff devised his formal mathematical proof. His starting point was the concept of voting power. In a fair election, he saw, each voter’s power boils down to this: What is the probability that one person’s vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands. To figure out these probabilities, Natapoff devised his own model of a national electorate--a more realistic model, he thought, than the ones the quoted experts were always using. Almost always, he found, individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts--such as states--than when pooled in one large, direct election. It is more likely, in other words, that your one vote will determine the outcome in your state and your state will then turn the outcome of the electoral college, than that your vote will turn the outcome of a direct national election. A voter therefore, Natapoff found, has more power under the current electoral system.What the author of this article fails to take into account is that the EC increases the voting power of some voters at the expense of others, relative to a direct election. A voter in one state has more power than one in another. The EC may even increase the average voting power of voters relative to a general election, but that's little comfort to those who have less power than they would with direct election.
Why worry how easily one vote can turn an election, so long as each voter has equal power? One person, one vote--that’s all the math anyone needs to know in a simple, direct election. Natapoff agrees that voters should have equal power. "The idea," he says, "is to give every voter the largest equal share of national voting power possible." Here’s a classic example of equal voting power: under a tyranny, everyone’s power is equal to zero. Clearly, equality alone is not enough.Fair enough: equality alone does not a good voting system make. But Hively never addresses the fact that the EC gives more power to some voters than to others.
Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close.And without realizing it, Hively provides the refutation to the World Series analogy. The World Series is decided by games, not runs, becuase that's the more exciting way to do it. That's all well and good for sports. But the method we use to choose our president shouldn't be decided primarily on the grounds of what method is most exciting. After all, the 2000 presidential election was the most exciting in a long time, yet I don't see anyone clamoring to repeat that experience.
...
The Yankees had finally toppled. There they were, ahead in the polls, piling up votes like nobody’s business, until one last swing of one player’s bat turned the whole season around. "Everybody regarded it as one of the most glorious World Series ever," Natapoff says. "To do it any other way would totally destroy the degree of competition and excitement that’s essential to all sports."
In a nation of 135 citizens, says Natapoff, one person’s probability of turning an election is 6.9 percent in a dead-even contest. But if voter preference for candidate A jumps to, say, 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of your one vote turning the election, falls below .4 percent, a huge drop. If candidate A goes out in front by 61 percent, the probability that one vote will matter whooshes down to .024 percent. And it keeps on dropping, faster and faster, as candidate A keeps pulling ahead.In contrast, for a districted election:
The next step is the kicker. The effect of lopsided preferences, Natapoff discovered, is far more important than the size effect. In a dead- even contest, remember, voting power shrinks as the electorate becomes larger. But a 1 or 2 percent change in electorate size, by itself, doesn’t matter much to the individual voter. When one candidate gains an edge over another, however, a 1 or 2 percent change can make a huge difference to everyone’s voting power, giving candidates less of a motive to keep the losers happy. And the larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, like a house advantage.
The degree to which districting helps, Natapoff found, depends on just how close a contest is. Take as an illustration our model nation of 135, divided into, say, three states of 45 citizens each. When the race is dead even, of course, no districting scheme helps: voting power starts off at 6.9 percent in a direct election versus 6.0 percent in a districted election. But when candidate A jumps ahead with a lead of 54.5 percent, individual voting power is roughly the same whether the nation uses districts or not. And as the contest becomes more lopsided, voting power shrinks faster in the direct-voting nation than it does in the districted nation. If candidate A grabs a 61.1 percent share of voter preference, voters in the districted nation have twice as much power as those in the direct-voting nation. If A’s share reaches 64.8 percent, voters in the districted nation have four times as much power, and so on. The advantage of districting over direct voting keeps growing quickly as the contest becomes more lopsided.Even further:
For very small electorates--nine people, say--he found that the gap between candidates must be very large, at least 66.6 to 33.3 percent, before districting will help. That’s why raw voting works well at town meetings, where electorates are so small. As the number of voters gets larger, the crossover point moves closer to 50-50. For a nation of 135, voters are better off with districting in any race more lopsided than 55- 45. For a nation with millions of voters, the gap between candidates must be razor-thin for districting not to help. In the real world of large nations and uneven contests, voters get more bang for their ballot when they set up a districted, Madisonian electoral system--usually a lot more.This is not set up to provide for exciting elections. This is set up to ensure that the views of the minority nevertheless must be taken into account in the election of the president, by forcing candidates to solicit votes outside of their core majority. This neatly serves to moderate popular extremists, and avoids the "tyranny of the majority." James Madison said it himself: "Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction." (Federalist Papers #10).
A well-designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. Under raw voting, a candidate has every incentive to woo only the largest bloc-- say, Serbs in Yugoslavia. If a Serb party wins national power, minorities have no prospect of throwing them out; 49 percent will never beat 51 percent. Knowing this, the majority can do as it pleases (lacking other effective checks and balances). But in a districted election, no one becomes president without winning a large number of districts, or "states"- -say, two of the following three: Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Candidates thus have an incentive to campaign for non-Serb votes in at least some of those states and to tone down extreme positions--in short, to make elections less risky events for the losers. The result, as George Wallace used to say, may often be a race without "a dime’s worth of difference" between two main candidates, which he viewed as a weakness but others view as a strength of our system.Interestingly, Natapoff continues on to show that the ideal district size varies depending on the proportion of preference. Close races give more "power" to large states; blowouts, to smaller states. It's obviously impractical to redistrict each election, so while there remains this flaw in the EC system, the variable sizes of our states provides some mitigation.
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In Canada we have a first-past-the-post system and it has degenerated into region-based parties, with the Liberals, who control the biggest region, Ontario, being the de facto governing party.
Of course, with a 2 party system like they have in the US, it really doesn't matter how the voting is structured if both parties engineer themselves to get 50% plus 1 of the votes / seats.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:40 AM on November 5, 2002