Voting -- a better system

There are several things we could do to improve our voting system, and with the last year democrat primaries and the general election I think it may be time to have a national conversation on this topic. I'll start:There are three main facets: voter's rights, verifying voters and verifying vote counts. Voter's RightsWe need a voter bill of rights:

1. ALL citizens should be eligible to vote in ALL state and federal elections.
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2. Natural born citizens could be automatically registered NPP (no party preference) on their 18th birthday, with a photo ID (issued through post office similar to passports) much like draft cards used to be issued.
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3. ALL naturalized citizens automatically registered NPP when they earn their citizenship, and they receive a photo ID.
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4. NPP registered people eligible to vote in ALL primaries, and can change to the party of the primary at the time they vote.
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5. House of representative districts need to be apportioned by a rational metric removed from party bias, such as population density based on census data, and all candidates should be a resident of their district and have voted in it in the previous election. People have a right to proper equitable representation.
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6. Every citizen should be able to vote without question or restriction of any kind (the federal government could issue photo ID voter cards through the post office just as passports are issued, they can be issued on the 18th birthday for natural born citizens, and issued when naturalized citizens pass their citizenship requirements).
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7. Mail-in ballots should be available to everyone upon request.
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8. ALL ballots should be paper ballots, the same as mail-in ballots, that can be recounted.
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9. All ballots should be instant run-off ballots.
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10. ALL votes to be counted before ANY results announced.
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11. No more "winner take all" states for electoral college delegates: make delegates proportional to popular votes.
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12. Every primary, state and national election should be by verifiable paper ballots with ranked/instant runoff voting, so no candidate can be a "spoiler" in any race.
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13. The final primary ranked votes are not counted until the convention, and every state shall have counted and correlated all votes before the convention.
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14. The final ranked national elections are not counted until the electoral college and every state shall have counted and correlated all votes before the convention.

Use of the primaries and the electoral college as the final counting system for the ranked votes has three benefits: (a) it does not require amendment to the constitution, (b) it gives states time to resolve anomalies and even run another vote if necessary, and (c) this shifts the media circus from election night to the day of the convention or the electoral college. This shift allows states time to validate and recount the ballots. Verifying VotersVoter fraud is rare and usually insignificant to the elections, but this is the reason we have voter photo ID laws in some states, however the laws currently are more about suppression of votes than preventing voter fraud.The reason that we KNOW photo ID laws are not about double voting voter fraud, but about restricting votes is because:

1. There is no process to provide valid photo ID's at the polling stations at no cost to voters if you bring sufficient documents to qualify for one (eg -- what you need at other places to get one) and
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2. The states do not budget to provide ID's for existing registered voters and do not take any responsibility for providing valid ID's for people that are registered. There are no touring facilities to provide the photo ID's.
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3. There is no specified standard for the photo size or orientation, and there is no database collected of photos used.
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4. Allowable photo IDs show bias, allowing NRA membership cards but not university ID cards.
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5. Places (DMV etc) where you can get photo IDs are shut down in black neighborhoods.
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6. There is no program to scan photos at the polls and compare them to a digital database that can search for duplications.

This is voter suppression, ie election fraud, pure and simple.Thus the voter's rights for every citizen to get a federal photo citizen ID, and a federal requirement that any state that requires photo IDs should accept the citizen ID.Alternatively all paper ballots could have a cover sheet to verify the voter with address and thumbprint turned in when ballot picked up. Verifying the vote countsPeople have a right to know that their vote has been counted in the way they voted.The easiest way I see to accomplish this is to have a random code on every ballot with a copy for the voter to take home and look up on the tabulated votes and see their vote is correctly documented.The voting commissions also record the number of voters so that "votes" can't be added to the total. Getting ThereThis can be initiated through petitions to governments or through ballot initiatives: see Home Page - Ballot Initiative Strategy Center Enjoy

Thread copied here from the Voting -- a better system thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I always thought a slight variation on your system that would measure how strongly a person feels about a candidate would be helpful.In a weighted voting system each voter is allocated a number of votes, say three just to keep it related to your example.The voter could give all three to one candidate to show that only that one is acceptable to that voter, two to one and one to another to show that that voter prefers the first but the latter is also acceptable or one to each which would show any of the three would be equally acceptable.The weighted system adds the ability to show how strongly a given candidate is supported by the voter.

In Canada, at least, I don't think there's much appetitie for a more complex voting system - and your system is already a lot more complex than ours.

In many ways Canada seems far more mature than the US.The reason I prefer a weighted vote is to attempt to expand the US party system. As it stands only the candidate for the two major parties has any chance of winning any election no matter how qualified a third part candidate might be. It is even near impossible for a third part to gain enough votes to meet the threshold for funding or inclusion.A weighted vote though would allow voters to express degrees of approval and maybe let a third party reach above the threshold.

In practice, I wouldn't want to withhold votes from the candidate I liked most, for fear of letting in another guy whom I like less --- and whose supporters are capable of using that same line of reasoning.

Some comments.The voting method is similar to the "single transferable vote" method such as used in Australia. I'm not sure that "instant runoff" describes it well, because the counting is not instant.I would not insist on paper ballots. It should be possible to come up with cryptographic systems that avoid some of the risks of electronic voting.If there is something like a single transferable vote, there should not be any need for primaries. All candidates for all parties can be on the final ballot. And if we can eliminate primaries, that shortens the voting season.

There has to be a means to recount the ballots. During the primaries there were discrepancies between the votes and the exit polls mostly in districts with no paper trail. Votes were only countable once and there was no way to check they hadn't been hacked ... except by comparison to exit polls.Stanford Study Proves Election Fraud through Exit Poll Discrepancies | Snopes.com

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WHAT'S TRUE: Two researchers (presumably graduate students) from Stanford University and Tilburg University co-authored a paper asserting they uncovered information suggesting widespread primary election fraud favoring Hillary Clinton had occurred across multiple states.

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WHAT'S FALSE: The paper was not a "Stanford Study," and its authors acknowledged their claims and research methodology had not been subject to any form of peer review or academic scrutiny.

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Having a recountable paper trail removes doubts like those raised by the study. Your trust in electronic voting is wonderful, but the flaw is that any code that can be written can be hacked, and there are several points of data transfer that are open to hacking. This has been demonstrated.Enjoy

The problem isn't that its complicated. Any adult capable of finding the voting booth and reading it and correctly casting a single vote is capable of writing a list.Its that it can pick winners in a way that that seems odd, generating controversy.Take this example of an election with 5 named candidates:Kiss 2585
Wright 2951
Montroll 2063
Smith 1306
Simpson 35
Write-in 36This was a ranked preference type election, but it is clear that the plurality winner is Wright. Because it was ranked we can do some maths and create many hypothetical mini elections: We could say Kiss vs Wright who would win if it was just these two? Kiss vs Montroll? Etc. If we do this pairing off method, actually Montroll wins...this is the Condorcet method.People instinctively recoil at the Condorcet method. How can third place be the winner? Well if Kiss is left wing, Wright is right wing and Montroll is centrist it might be clearer. If the right wing candidate wasn't running, then a fair number of the voters here would vote for Montroll instead. In this sense, it picks the candidate that is on average, preferred. It tends towards the middle. This is nice if Hitler and Stalin are leading the polls because you might end up with an Obama or Blair instead. Someone who might be able to represent some interests of the left, and some of the right so nobody is completely disenfranchised, in theory.However, since it is ranked, we can also do IRV. Nobody has 4,500 votes - required for a 50% share of the vote so we run-off: Neither Smith or Simpson are capable of winning and are eliminated. It was fairly evenly split, but most of their secondary preferences went to Montroll, then Kiss, then Wright. We end up with:Kiss 2981 +396
Wright 3294 +343
Montroll 2554 +491
Exhausted: +147 {eliminated candidates with votes that had no second choice}Wright is still in the lead but Montroll now gets eliminatedKiss 4313 +1332
Wright 4061 +767
Exhausted: +606 {eliminated candidates with votes that had no second or third choice}Kiss wins.2009 Burlington mayoral election - WikipediaIRV was canned after a referendumRanked-choice voting in the United States - Wikipedia

And that's kind of why it is called 'instant run-off', since the run off isn't smeared over time. It's not the time it takes to count, its the fact that voter preferences don't change between votes. There is no period in which campaign managers can try to smear the opponent or change up the message or just opportunity for things to happen like terrorist attacks or school shootings which certain candidates may get a boost using information that the first round voters may not have like with the primaries {indeed, even the result of previous State's primaries influences future primary results}.

I agree with that. But it should not require paper ballots.By the way, "paper trail" is not the same as "paper ballots".It should also be possible to develop a cryptographic ballot system which allows recounting and auditing, but does not depend on dead trees.

STV and Instrant-Runoff voting are synonymous. There would still be primaries; but there would no longer be a need for the bloated, 'big-tent' parties that characterise American politics. The religious extremists, centrist conservatives and libertarians would no longer be required to share a party; and nor would the socialists be forced to be in the same party as liberals. The primaries would thus become a party's normal selection process and cease being seen as an integral part of the electoral system (along with inevitable complaints about how unfair they are).For all this to work, though, the House needs to be elected in a more proportional manner (the Senate need not be, as the primary justification of having two houses is to prevent 51% of the electorate from being able to dictate to the remaining 49%).This is what I think the US needs to create a genuine multiparty system; as it seems to me that the Democratic and Republican parties are bizarre entities that don't really represent US public opinion, but nevertheless engender a polarisation of society that seems even more extreme than what we see in politics here.

And Wright would have been the winner, but if Smith and Simpson had not been on the ballot the vote would have been ... And Wright would still have been the winner because the vote split between Kiss and Montroll. Without Montroll on the ballot the vote would have been: And Kiss would have been the winner. Because Montroll would not have had 'spoiler' votes taken from Kiss, which is what the system is designed to prevent/circumvent. This doesn't seem odd to me at all. That seems odd to me. You don't provide the numbers to show how that works out. Presumably the Kiss votes would split in favor of Montroll against Wright and the Wright votes would have split in favor of Montroll against Kiss, so you would have K>W, M>W and M>K -- but what do you do when K>W, W>M and M>K? From the bare link:

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The repeal reverted the system back to a 40% rule that requires a top-two runoff if no candidate exceeds 40% of the vote. Had the 2009 election occurred under these rules, Kiss and Wright would have advanced to the runoff. If the same voters had participated in the runoff as in the first election and not changed their preferences, Kiss would have won the runoff.[39] ...

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And the IRV saved them from running another election. Is it preferred? In our last election people preferred change over same-old same-old, and that is why Hillary lost badly, while Bernie stood a better chance of beating Trump (according to polls) and we would have been spared the e-mail regurgitation.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : .

Curiously I have always felt that choosing the representatives by artificial boundaries to be odd. They should be as compact as possible, and a computer program should be able to do it.OR we use some other metric than land geometry, like economic level or population density, that would group people by some non-partisan metric.OR we use a lottery to choose tax-paying citizens to represent their states people.Enjoy

That doesn't seem important. What's important is the way it seems to enough people. If the people don't trust the system, it destabilizes governance. Regardless of the superiority of the voting method, this effect may outweigh the benefits. See? K > W, W>M and M>K is logically impossible.If Karen is taller than William who is in turn taller than Michael then Michael cannot be taller than Karen as he is shorter than William who is shorter than Karen. But yes, it is possible to create a scenario so that the first round of IRV may not have a Condorcet winner. This is the voting paradox.Voter 1 K W M
Voter 2 M K W
Voter 3 W M KIn this edge case, different systems (if Condorcet method is used) are used to break a tie. IRV has trouble here, who gets eliminated from the first round?Clearly W wins right? After all W is preferred over M by two voters.
But then M is preferred over K by two voters.
And K is preferred over W by two voters.Let's look at the progression:K>W, W>M and M>KSo all candidates get 1,000 people's first choice. M voters prefer K so in a straight up between K and W we get
2000 K
1000 WIn a W vs K lineup we'd have to suppose that despite M voters liking K, it isn't reciprocal and K voters prefer W making the preferences cyclical
2000W
1000MThen M vs K, and now the W voters have to prefer M
2000M
1000KK voters K W
M voters M K
W voters W MIt is possible, mathematically, and there is an equation which describes the conditions it will arise. Oh come on, my entire post is about the election. You can hardly call a link verifying a claim I made in my post about the election, a 'bare link'. Yes it did. Although they *could* have done it instantly by using a variant of IRV that eliminates all but the top two in the first round. Yes, on average, on the typical simplified two dimensional plane of left / right. A person in the middle appeals to people on both sides considerably more than one side likes the other. ImagineTrump: 40
Hilary: 20
Bernie 40If 50% of Trump voters can 'live with' Hilary
If 75% of Bernie voters can 'live with' Hilary
And if the rest can't stand anybody else....Then a Hilary win might be preferred. She has like 2/3 of the people being able to tolerate her in some fashion. Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.