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(WEEKLY) Voting Systems (infosec.pub)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by AceTKen@lemmy.ca to c/actual_discussion@lemmy.ca

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Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I've had some discussions in real life about what the best options would be for replacing the Canadian "First Past The Post" (and also the more-broken American system of course) system of voting and there are a ton of ideas.

Shout out to !fairvote@lemmy.world for inspiring this post.

Some examples are:

STAR

Single Transferable Vote

I also have come to find that different systems work better for different sizes of vote. For example, local elections vs. federal elections.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

What systems do you feel would work better for local, provincial, and federal elections?
Do you even think about how it could be made better?
Could you be convinced to vote for a single-issue party that would implement better systems and then abscond? This has been a serious topic of discussion within my local group of mayoral and city council members. Since it would benefit those on all sides, do you think people could be convinced?
Is there a perfect system, or is every system you've seen lacking in some way?

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[–] randy@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I'd like to get into an even broader discussion. I've noticed discussions about voting systems tend to assume a single winner, because most of our political systems are set up to require a single winner. Most commonly, this is the people in an area choosing a single representative. But if we're flexible with our political systems, we can expand the possibility space in all sorts of interesting ways.

A simple example: the city of Guelph elects two councillors per ward, with each voter choosing two of the candidates and the winners being the top two (see 2022 election results for details). This is almost like a blend of plurality (aka first-past-the-post) and approval voting systems. Anecdotally, I feel that this creates a better political climate in Guelph, because candidates can't be at each others' throats when they will end up sharing voters and eventually sharing power.

Some other examples:

BC-STV would have created multi-member ridings with an instant-runoff-style voting system (proposed but rejected for BC provincial elections).
MMP (Mixed-Member Proportional) creates two categories of representative to create proportionality by party (used in a number of countries, was proposed but rejected for Ontario provincial elections).
Or completely rewrite the concept of representatives and do direct representation and have an unlimited number of representatives independent of ridings with varying voting power in the house (and then we can argue about voting systems for legislatures).