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HelpfulAnimals wrote (edited )

If we are to vote for elections we need to learn from the mistakes others have made. Many others here have made very good points, but one thing I haven't seen anyone bring up is the flaws of first past the post voting.

FPTP only allows each person to vote for a single candidate. This works well when there is only 2 candidates, but after that it suffers from the spoiler effect. This makes it more likely to elect a candidate who does not best represent the people's views.

Luckily, other easy to use vote systems exist; two easy alternatives are score voting and approval voting.

Approval voting allows for each person to vote for whatever candidates they approve of. So if someone approves of candidates A, B, but not F (cause F is for fascist :P ), then they can vote for both A and B. This results in the candidate winning that best represents the people/that the most people are happy with (more so the latter). I personally like this system most as it is simple, hard to vote strategically, and results in a well accepted winner.

Score voting allows each person to score each candidate (from 1-10 for example, plus abstain) based upon how much they like that candidate. This helps to ensure that the person who best represents the values of the people is elected. But I dislike this system as it can both get cumbersome for a number of candidates and it is simpler for people to vote strategically (ie give candidate A 10 points while giving everyone else [regardless of how much they like them] 1 in order to make candidate A more likely to win).

Video that explains the flaws of FPTP voting well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo


TLDR: First past the post voting (FPTP) is really shitty at electing people. Approval voting is much better.


Also ranked voting is okay, but still can potentially have the issues of the spoiler effect in certain circumstances so it is generally preferable to choose ranked or score if given the opportunity. wiki

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surreal wrote

there is also instant-runoff voting which seems close to approval voting but i may be totally wrong.

I realised i haven't done any research at all about alternatives to FPTP, the time has come.

We can also try different paradigms and see what works best and which one ppl prefer (or even vote for the voting system? inception)

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HelpfulAnimals wrote

The issue with instant runoff voting is that you can still suffer from the spoiler effect in some situations, it's more complicated, and in terms of parties it still encourages the two party system. The wiki page goes into it a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Spoiler_effect

It's not a huge issue in IRV but if we are implementing a voting system from the ground up I think it is better to choose approval voting because it doesn't suffer from the issues of IRV in general.

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ziq OP admin wrote

Great points, we should certainly take the weaknesses of FPTP into consideration when designing the vote system.

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