People overestimate how hard it would be to get California (for example) to change how it conducts elections for both state and federal positions. While changing the constitution of the US requires more than one supermajority in different arenas, changing the constitution of California requires simply a majority vote in a ballot proposition, which is much easier, and is done on a very regular basis. This is one (not the only) way that electoral change can be achieved in California, which can be a good starting point for moving the US as a whole to a better electoral system.
One particular criticism of the effort to change our electoral system that I have heard, is that since it will radically alter the source of power for our politicians, they will be opposed to it, and therefore will not allow it to happen. However, using a ballot proposition, the opinions of state legislators becomes irrelevant, and the question will come down to nothing other than the desires of the population at large, who are widely observed to be frustrated with the system that currently exists, on both sides of the aisle.
It is left to the states to decide how they elect their representatives in Congress and their Presidential Electors, so not only can California change how it selects its own government, but it can also decide how a substantial number of presidential electors and congressmen are elected.
My best current guess about which electoral system, for both federal and state positions, will be most beneficial for California to adopt through this path follows.
There are two main categories of elected positions: those for whom many are elected at once (importantly, the upper and lower houses of the state legislature, and the delegation to the federal House of Representatives), and those where only a single person takes office at a time (The state governor, and the federal Senators), and these two categories should be dealt with in different ways. I will be ignoring the delegation to the electoral college for now, since the topic of how to meaningfully impact the presidential election unilaterally for the better is a complicated subject.
For the state legislature and the delegation to the House of Representatives, Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP), as used in Scandinavia and Germany should be used. In this system, the seats are split into two groups—one group that is elected regionally, perhaps using the first-past-the-post system we currently use, or perhaps using a much better voting system, potentially with multiple representatives representing each district. The other half of the representatives will then be elected by asking voters which party they support, and appointing representatives to the least-well represented parties until the overall delegation (that is, counting both groups of seats) proportionally represents the parties as they are desired by the voters.
MMP empirically produces much better results, as I have observed in my time living in Denmark, and there are also good theoretical grounds to expect it will produce better results than our current system. Even if only the Californian delegation to Congress uses MMP, I expect this will substantially increase the quality of federal politics in the US, even before other states follow California’s lead.
As far as electing Senators and the state governor, which are elected one-at-a-time (there is obviously only one governor, and while there are two Senators for each state, they are elected in different years), I recommend using Score Voting (which is theoretically isometric to Approval Voting, which I also endorse, but in practice Score Voting should allow for slightly better results). In this system, voters are presented with a list of candidates, and rate each candidate on a 1-5 scale. The votes for each candidate are then all added up (with non-votes treated as a 3), and the candidate with the highest score wins.
Score Voting and Approval Voting both produce much better results than Instant Runoff Voting (a widely-known alternative voting method), which produces results that are barely any better than the current system, and is also much more chaotic (in not precisely, but roughly the mathematical sense) than either the current system or Score / Approval Voting. This inferiority is counter-intuitive to some, who view the ranking system used in IRV to be allow for more detail to be communicated than Approval Voting. However, for starters, Score Voting allows for a similar bandwidth to IRV (on paper at least), and while Approval Voting is in some sense lower-bandwidth, it focuses on the information that is most important (is this candidate acceptable), rather than the fairly irrelevant question of the precise preference ordering of each candidate (which obscures the point at which candidates stop being good and start being bad, which can vary from election to election and from voter to voter)
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Future topics I could post about:
Why MMP and Score / Approval Voting are better, both in comparison to FPTP (the current system widely in use in the US) and IRV (used in e.g. Australia)
The story of how IRV came about in Australia
The story of how MMP came to be used in Scandinavia & Germany, and also in New Zealand (I expect these are mostly two different stories; I don’t currently know the story for either)
Does there exist any unilateral action CA could take by changing its delegation to the Electoral College to substantially improve the state of presidential elections in the US? I’m not thinking of something along the lines of Napovointerco, which doesn’t change that the president is elected by FPTP, which is the worst system that passes the bare minimum requirements to be considered democratic.
Given the political culture of the US I doubt you could run the German system in the US without issues. For the German system to work as it’s supposed to, the politician’s who get elected via first-past-the-post actually have to be on the list of their respective parties. There’s an advantage to be gained by a political faction getting their voters to cast their first vote for party A and there second vote for party B but that’s not done in practice because it would be a norm violation.
I haven’t read up on the exact German discussion but given what was going on in the 19th century in Germany I would expect that MMP was a way to elect politicians in a way that gives less power to aristocrats. It’s easier for a local aristocrat to get a candidate in their territory elected in FPTP.
That is certainly an issue, one that I had thought about before. For one, even if everybody votes in a strategic / dishonest way, the end result will still be better than the current system, and will give voice to a wider variety of perspectives; for another, it seems to me that the culture we have in the US of voting strategically is an effect of the voting system we use, where one must vote strategically to prevent the worst outcome from happening.
If the voting system that is used does not so heavily punish strategic voting, then the culture of strategic voting will slowly fade away; of course, the nature of the presidential election will always loom large as long as it stays the same, and push in the direction of strategic voting.
As far as MMP in Germany, it looks like the system wasn’t put in place until the 20th century, with the Weimar Republic adopting 100% direct proportional elections after WWI, then with West Germany adopting MMP after the Second World War, to minimize some of the problems that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
People overestimate how hard it would be to get California (for example) to change how it conducts elections for both state and federal positions. While changing the constitution of the US requires more than one supermajority in different arenas, changing the constitution of California requires simply a majority vote in a ballot proposition, which is much easier, and is done on a very regular basis. This is one (not the only) way that electoral change can be achieved in California, which can be a good starting point for moving the US as a whole to a better electoral system.
One particular criticism of the effort to change our electoral system that I have heard, is that since it will radically alter the source of power for our politicians, they will be opposed to it, and therefore will not allow it to happen. However, using a ballot proposition, the opinions of state legislators becomes irrelevant, and the question will come down to nothing other than the desires of the population at large, who are widely observed to be frustrated with the system that currently exists, on both sides of the aisle.
It is left to the states to decide how they elect their representatives in Congress and their Presidential Electors, so not only can California change how it selects its own government, but it can also decide how a substantial number of presidential electors and congressmen are elected.
My best current guess about which electoral system, for both federal and state positions, will be most beneficial for California to adopt through this path follows.
There are two main categories of elected positions: those for whom many are elected at once (importantly, the upper and lower houses of the state legislature, and the delegation to the federal House of Representatives), and those where only a single person takes office at a time (The state governor, and the federal Senators), and these two categories should be dealt with in different ways. I will be ignoring the delegation to the electoral college for now, since the topic of how to meaningfully impact the presidential election unilaterally for the better is a complicated subject.
For the state legislature and the delegation to the House of Representatives, Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP), as used in Scandinavia and Germany should be used. In this system, the seats are split into two groups—one group that is elected regionally, perhaps using the first-past-the-post system we currently use, or perhaps using a much better voting system, potentially with multiple representatives representing each district. The other half of the representatives will then be elected by asking voters which party they support, and appointing representatives to the least-well represented parties until the overall delegation (that is, counting both groups of seats) proportionally represents the parties as they are desired by the voters.
MMP empirically produces much better results, as I have observed in my time living in Denmark, and there are also good theoretical grounds to expect it will produce better results than our current system. Even if only the Californian delegation to Congress uses MMP, I expect this will substantially increase the quality of federal politics in the US, even before other states follow California’s lead.
As far as electing Senators and the state governor, which are elected one-at-a-time (there is obviously only one governor, and while there are two Senators for each state, they are elected in different years), I recommend using Score Voting (which is theoretically isometric to Approval Voting, which I also endorse, but in practice Score Voting should allow for slightly better results). In this system, voters are presented with a list of candidates, and rate each candidate on a 1-5 scale. The votes for each candidate are then all added up (with non-votes treated as a 3), and the candidate with the highest score wins.
Score Voting and Approval Voting both produce much better results than Instant Runoff Voting (a widely-known alternative voting method), which produces results that are barely any better than the current system, and is also much more chaotic (in not precisely, but roughly the mathematical sense) than either the current system or Score / Approval Voting. This inferiority is counter-intuitive to some, who view the ranking system used in IRV to be allow for more detail to be communicated than Approval Voting. However, for starters, Score Voting allows for a similar bandwidth to IRV (on paper at least), and while Approval Voting is in some sense lower-bandwidth, it focuses on the information that is most important (is this candidate acceptable), rather than the fairly irrelevant question of the precise preference ordering of each candidate (which obscures the point at which candidates stop being good and start being bad, which can vary from election to election and from voter to voter)
--
Future topics I could post about:
Why MMP and Score / Approval Voting are better, both in comparison to FPTP (the current system widely in use in the US) and IRV (used in e.g. Australia)
The story of how IRV came about in Australia
The story of how MMP came to be used in Scandinavia & Germany, and also in New Zealand (I expect these are mostly two different stories; I don’t currently know the story for either)
Does there exist any unilateral action CA could take by changing its delegation to the Electoral College to substantially improve the state of presidential elections in the US? I’m not thinking of something along the lines of Napovointerco, which doesn’t change that the president is elected by FPTP, which is the worst system that passes the bare minimum requirements to be considered democratic.
Given the political culture of the US I doubt you could run the German system in the US without issues. For the German system to work as it’s supposed to, the politician’s who get elected via first-past-the-post actually have to be on the list of their respective parties. There’s an advantage to be gained by a political faction getting their voters to cast their first vote for party A and there second vote for party B but that’s not done in practice because it would be a norm violation.
I haven’t read up on the exact German discussion but given what was going on in the 19th century in Germany I would expect that MMP was a way to elect politicians in a way that gives less power to aristocrats. It’s easier for a local aristocrat to get a candidate in their territory elected in FPTP.
That is certainly an issue, one that I had thought about before. For one, even if everybody votes in a strategic / dishonest way, the end result will still be better than the current system, and will give voice to a wider variety of perspectives; for another, it seems to me that the culture we have in the US of voting strategically is an effect of the voting system we use, where one must vote strategically to prevent the worst outcome from happening.
If the voting system that is used does not so heavily punish strategic voting, then the culture of strategic voting will slowly fade away; of course, the nature of the presidential election will always loom large as long as it stays the same, and push in the direction of strategic voting.
As far as MMP in Germany, it looks like the system wasn’t put in place until the 20th century, with the Weimar Republic adopting 100% direct proportional elections after WWI, then with West Germany adopting MMP after the Second World War, to minimize some of the problems that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.