[Winona Online Democracy]
Hello Everyone,
For a moment, let's look beyond this election mess and discuss ways we
could possibly avoid these problems in the future and/or improve our
current voting system.
At the bottom of this message, there is a copy of an article that appeared
in today's (Nov. 22nd) Pioneer Press. It talks about differant and
possibly more accurate ways to vote.
The ideas are interesting to me for many reasons:
1. It helps us realizen that there are other, and some would argue...more
accurate, ways of voting.
2. It helps us think about the advantages and disadvantages of our current
system.
3. It helps us realize it's possible to create new ways of voting that
would eliminate the danger of "spoiler" or "wasted" votes.
4. It helps us wonder, what if....?
:->
It's a subject that Greens have discussed in many countries for many years
because certain voting rules and traditions seem to make it impossible for
a wider range of ideas and views to be discussed and "counted".
Look the article over and let me know what you think?
What do you think about the last paragraph? It qoutes a person who said
there is no perfect system. I agree. But that isn't the point is it?
Shouldn't we be trying to create the best possible system?
What would it take to make possible changes to our local elections?
Dwayne Voegeli
===================
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Title of Article: Mathematicians Say There Are Better Ways To Pick a President
Writer: Faye Flam KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE, PHILADELPHIA
Published: Wednesday, November 22, 2000
To a mathematician, the outcome of the presidential election cannot be
determined. It has come down to a matter of chance. With the country's
and Florida's imperfect method of recording and counting votes, there's no
way any amount of recounting or haggling over hanging chads will ever
reveal the true winner.
``They could determine the winner by flipping a coin, or by a poker hand.
We're doing
something like that in Florida now,'' said Frank Morgan, a mathematician at
Williams
College, who suggests that lesser known voting systems would better reflect
the preference of the voters. ``Mathematically, what we have is a dead
heat,'' said Keith Devlin, a mathematician at St. Mary's College in
California. ``The difference between them, we'd call noise.''
But what really gets the mathematicians excited is that it didn't have to
be this way. There are other methods of voting that would have produced a
decisive outcome. ``If we used a procedure that could better reflect
people's preferences then we wouldn't
have all this chad chatter,'' said Donald Saari, author of ``The Geometry
of Voting'' and a mathematician at UC-Irvine.
He's not talking about the difference between a voting machine and a
butterfly ballot. He means a whole different system. The system we use now
is called ``plurality voting.'' People simply choose their favorite. One
downside of such a system is that a ``spoiler'' -- a third party candidate,
like Ralph Nader -- could tip the balance to allow the less popular of two
major candidates to win.
A voting method called ``single transferable vote,'' now used in Australia
and parts of
Ireland, would have avoided the problem. Rather than give each voter one
choice, each voter gets to rank the candidates in his order of preference.
The first choices are counted, and the candidate in last place is knocked
out of the race. So, anyone who listed the last-place finisher as his first
choice will have his second-choice vote counted instead.
Say, for simplicity, that the race is down to Gore, Bush, Nader and
Buchanan. Buchanan gets knocked out first, and the second choices of his
voters, probably Bush, get added to the tally. Then Nader gets knocked out
and the second choice of his voters gets counted. If, as polls showed, most
Nader voters would have voted for Gore over Bush, then most of those
voters' second choices would have become votes for Gore. Under this
``single transferable vote'' system, Gore would have won.
The other problem the mathematicians note with our present system is that
even if the
majority of the public despises a given candidate, he or she can still win.
Devlin uses Jesse Ventura to explain the system's pitfalls. Ventura won the
governorship of Minnesota with 37 percent of the vote, while, according to
exit polls,
most of the other 63 percent of the voters were firmly against him.
One system that would protect people from getting a widely despised leader
is the
``Borda count,'' invented by Jean Charles de Borda in 1781. Under this
system, voters
again rank the candidates by preference, but here the candidates get points
for their
ranking. With four candidates, say, a voter's first choice would get 4
points, 3 for second, 2 for third and 1 for last.
Under such a system a candidate loved by a substantial following but hated
by the majority couldn't win. Instead, most people's second choice might
win. With the Borda method, ``you could come up with a reasonable scenario
in which Nader wins,'' Devlin said.
Another method, ``approval voting,'' asks voters to choose all the
candidates they
approve. You could vote for one, two or more. Such a system could also pull
a Nader-type underdog into first place.
But in our system it makes no difference whether voters like a candidate
second best or actively despise him. Either way he loses. For what it's
worth, approval voting is used by both the American Mathematical Society
and the Mathematical Association of America.
In a column published online for the Mathematical Association, Devlin
constructed a
hypothetical voting scenario for California: Six million California voters
rank Bush first, Nader second and Gore third. Five million people rank
Gore first, then Nader, then Bush. Four million people rank Nader first,
then Gore, then Bush. Under our current system, Bush would clearly win,
even though two-thirds of the voting public put him in last place.
With runoff voting, Nader is knocked out of the race, but his 4 million
voters get their
second choice, Gore, counted. Gore wins easily. With Borda, however, the
fact that nobody puts Nader last catapults him into a landslide with 34
million points next to Gore's 29 million and Bush's 27 million.
Which system is best? None, according to a theorem devised in the 1950s by
Stanford University economist Kenneth Arrow. They all have drawbacks and
advantages. None can perfectly reflect the will of the people.
----------------
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