For the longest time in my life, I have consistenly voted third party. My vote has always gone traditionally to the Green or Liberatarian party (anybody but the 2 dominant parties). More and more, I am disgruntled, and particularly after the bush-gore elections I am forced to concede, that with exceptions, generally a vote for the third party, particularly in this day and age of rampant vote fraud, is a vote for the republicans. That's a bummer.
So who should I vote for this election? Camejo the green? Or should I place a vote against Arnie by swallowing all my radical beleifs and voting for Bustamante?
Along side with my disillusionment has paradoxically come revelations about my, and quite a few people's idea about the mathetmatics of representative democracy which may one day overcome my skepticism that consensual politics works: Everything you know about the vote is wrong.
I'm going to take this time to back a small but growing movement for Preferential Voting.
What is Preferential Voting (a variant endorsed by Camejo called Instant Runoff Voting was just voted into place in San Francisco)? Let's take the last presidential election, with 3 candidates in our current system:
- Bush
- Gore
- Nader
Let's say the majority of your voting populace- 60% - is progressive in nature. Your organic crusty weekend hippy crusty self and likeminded signifant other have convinced yourselves that living under a demagouge like Nader is better than the other 2 bastards. Your progressive neighbors, however is terrified of bush, and is willing to live some major compromises in life. A vote split has occured. Republicans, being christian or sellouts, are stupid. Stupidity, in the form of republican/christian dogma has one thing going for it, which is that they are UNIFIED. They are so willing to follow the party line, that they make DAMN sure a vote split doesn't occur on their side. So we have the following outcome:
- Bush: 40%
- Gore: 30%
- Nader: 30%
OOPS Bush won, even though a majority of people don't want him in!! And that is exactly what will probably get arnie and his anti-immigrant, pro-prison, anti-small business, native american treaty breaking ass into into office tomorrow (I'm hoping that by the day AFTER tomorrow I get to retract all my statements about this.
There are only 2 solutions to this.
1) Vote split the other side(s). Ross Perot did this in the 92 presidential elections. To split the vote, you need to set up another dummy candidate that will appeal to the walmart going masses. Since the "right" seems to like status quo, I would guess someone who has a common man bible belt kind of appeal to siphon off votes from the republican favorite. Under the current American electoral landscape, this seems to be the ONLY way the progressive vote will win.
2) throw out our election system. In comes preferential voting. This time, when you go to the ballots, you see the following:
Rank order the candidates with 1 being the most favored, and
3 being the least favored.
- Bush
- Gore
- Nader
Well, this is an easy choice:
- Bush (3)
- Gore (2)
- Nader (1)
Your more conservative neighbor who still detests republicans may vote:
- Bush (3)
- Gore(1)
- Nader (2)
Now when the votes are tallied, instead of a purely addtive tally, we get a matrix of preferential combinations. At this point, there are actually many methods of tallying the matrix. If we were to follow my personal favortie, pairwise selection, we would compare every candidate against each other and do a global rank order.
What this means for the end user of the voting system, that even if they want Nader to win, their vote won't be wasted and will be effectively transfered to Gore if Bush starts winning.
Indeed, there has been research indicating that current voting system is basically mathematically guaranteed at best to elect in the most mediocre candidate, and at worst vote in the least preferred candidate overall.
Why hasn't this been used before in democracy? Unless we have computers, the matrix tallying becomes too computationally intense to do by hand, and it wasn't until recently that we have the capability to make such decisions.
FairVote and AccurateDemocracy are 2 great resources uncovering a fascinating amount of information about the mathematics and social systems behind electoral politics and consensus making.
So what does this mean to you and I? It will take a long time for governments to adopt. However, we as actors inside of our own organizations can start beating our own deadlocks by the use of Pref Voting, Condercet, and IRV tools. Debian is currently deploying devotee - a preferentially voting system for their own internal politics. Rob Lamphier published his own overhaul of the voting system in perl.
The next step is to put Diebold
and their Unamerican ass out of business. We as a digital community
need to get the crypto and security, and as importantly,
the deployment and adoption of the voting alternatives developed
and out there! I'm putting on long list of "to do"
long term project for a voting system for shareholder meetings
and activst groups possibly based off of devotee if
anyone has any input or wants to join in reinventing consensus.
Posted by Da Mystik Homeboy at October 6, 2003 10:12 PM