Questions for Australians about voting

[Kotze]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_electoral_system

Australia was among the first countries in the world that introduced the secret ballot. They have compulsory voting and use ranked ballots (two-house Parliament with IRV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting) for one part and STV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote) for the other).

Do you consider the Australian electoral system to be better than the one in the US or UK or other countries? I especially like to hear from people who have actually lived in several countries.

Here is an alternative idea for electing a national parliament and I want to know whether you think that it would be better:
The national parliament is a single-house parliament. You get on a region's ballot through lottery among its adult inhabitants or by being an incumbent hailing from that area. Each candidate produces a ranking of all the candidates standing in the national election (giving the same rank to several candidates as well as putting candidates from outside the region above candidates from the region is allowed) and publishes it at a set date before the election. Then a streamlined STV election is used. Voters mark one candidate, each candidate's ranking gets multiplied by the number of votes received.

[Demogorgon]

Neither system is that good. The list and mixed member systems are superior.

I am not sure if I follow your system entirely. Sounds like a rather altered version of the Borda Count.

[Kotze]

Neither system is that good. The list and mixed member systems are superior.STV is a nice proportional method in theory, in reality it's either too much work for those who vote and count or the number of seats is small. The thing I have in mind has nothing to do with the Borda Count (which is a really shitty method), but is just a version of STV that is much easier to count because it gives the voter fewer options. The voter can't make her own ranking and only chooses one of the rankings proposed by the candidates in her region. That makes counting by hand possible even with a huge number of seats.

Mixed member systems are easy to explain in situations where the number of district seats won by members of each party is equal to its proportional share in the national party vote, but when these numbers diverge (which is to say just about always), you need some extra rules and encounter some problems. Suppose the rule for these cases is this: Give parties seats according to their proportional share, if a party wins more district seats than that...

a) we make an exception and give them more seats than their proportional share.
b) we increase the number of all seats so that all single-seat winners get their seat and the result is still proportional.
c) we tell that party it only gets seats according to its proportional share in the national vote.

Problem with a)
Aside from breaking proportionality, this rule has the consequence that whenever a party gets the same or more seats in the districts than what it should get according to the national party vote, all of its national votes received might as well have been abstentions. Therefore, a political current under such a system has an advantage if it runs as 2 separate parties, 1 for the district seats and 1 for the national proportional seats. So the system becomes in effect parallel voting.

Problem with b)
There could be extreme cases where you would have to increase the number of seats in the national parliament by a factor of 10 or more. So a rule like this isn't feasible as the sole fix. You would need to combine this with something else and then you would have a very intransparent system.

Problem with c)
I think this is better than a) or b), but communicating to voters in a region that the candidate who won the district actually doesn't get a seat won't be easy.

There is another option (as far as I know used nowhere in the world): We could allow disproportional seat distribution while giving the parliamentarians different voting weights (and speaking time etc.), so that parliamentarians of a party voting as a block hold votes in proportion to the national party votes received.

I expect all these Mixed Member variations to be more susceptible to power concentration than my proposal.

[Conquer or Die]

Don't vote.

[Ned Kelly]

I think the preferential system is one that I'd prefer to the UK first past the post system. However, a single legislature elected on a proportional basis would be better.
Or simply no bourgeois parliament at all..

[Kotze]

Don't vote. Oh my, what a rebel. I'm sure you have solid evidence for the success of that strategy. :rolleyes:

The right wing in Venezuela attempted such a boycott a couple of years ago.
Given that the right doesn't want to play with me anymore, I will now leave politics forever. :crying: Oh wait, he didn't say that.

The questions in this thread are about comparing voting systems. If you want to fight for a society that is less hierarchical, you have to inform yourself about group decision methods, because in a less hierarchical society disputes will be resolved less often with the argument because I am your boss. So what is your proposal, fisticuffs? Or is it maybe the idea of recallable delegates who vote for delegates who vote for delegates who vote for delegates? That is very popular on this forum. There is just the problem of gerrymanderlike distortions, accumulating at every single step of the process...

I said Borda is shitty, here are the reasons why I don't recommend it for anything:
1. Spam problems. It's the opposite of the vote splitting problem. If a specific current increases its number of candidates in a Borda election or suggests several similar voting options instead of one for a Borda referendum, the chance of a candidate/option proposed by the current winning increases. You would need a clone filter process applied before using Borda, eg. a lottery among the adult population to get candidates for an election, for suggesting options on a referendum question something like STV used by a representative body.
2. Failure to represent the voters' will. If you elect several candidates via Borda, there is no guarantee the result will proportionally represent what the voters indicated, unlike in STV. If you elect a single candidate via Borda, the method doesn't guarantee to elect a candidate from the Mutual Majority set (set of candidates that a voter group that is bigger than 50% of all voters ranked above the rest). Borda doesn't even guarantee to elect a candidate that received the best rank on more than half the ballots.
3. Massive vulnerability to voting strategies. Borda is among other things very vulnerable to a voting strategy called burial, that is putting a candidate/option insincerely below candidates/options that you actually like less in order to decrease its chance of winning. All deterministic methods have weak spots, but Borda is remarkably bad. It's vulnerability here is related to being so bad at respecting majorities. Deterministic methods that are good at respecting majorities put voters less often into situations where they have to contort themselves to get what they want.

@fuckrevision: Actually, my real favourite for the legislature is the most representative method, population lottery. But it weirds people out when I say that.

[RebelDog]

"The political arena leaves one no alternatives, one must be either a dunce or a rogue." Emma Goldman

[AK]

Oh my, what a rebel. I'm sure you have solid evidence for the success of that strategy. :rolleyes:
I've got to ask this, then: do you have solid evidence for the success of Bourgeois democracy?


The right wing in Venezuela attempted such a boycott a couple of years ago.
Protip: assosciating abstaining from Bourgeois elections with the right wing just makes you sound like a moron.

[Kotze]

What are the arguments for abstention? One frequent argument is that this would send a strong signal scaring the powers that be, but this doesn't happen. They don't give a shit, or they even want turnout to be low (heard that from a former US Republican strategist). Another argument against going to vote is that this act would somehow change your spirit for the worse, as if voting was as energy-draining as working for months in a mine and getting brainwashed by Scientologists during the breaks and not something that's done in minutes. I did not bring up Venezuela to associate anybody here with the right wing, but as an example from the real world (my preferred place for collecting evidence) where the abstaining strategy did not work in favour of the group that tried it.

Abstaining doesn't work. The electoral system isn't a scheme entirely concocted by the bourgeoisie to con the population, it is a part of the preliminary outcome of the struggle of the many (eg. the Chartists) against the privileged few. And it is also a means to an end in that struggle, which is why I'm trying to have a discussion here about better voting systems.

[AK]

What are the arguments for abstention? One frequent argument is that this would send a strong signal scaring the powers that be, but this doesn't happen. They don't give a shit, or they even want turnout to be low (heard that from a former US Republican strategist). Another argument against going to vote is that this act would somehow change your spirit for the worse, as if voting was as energy-draining as working for months in a mine and getting brainwashed by Scientologists during the breaks and not something that's done in minutes. I did not bring up Venezuela to associate anybody here with the right wing, but as an example from the real world (my preferred place for collecting evidence) where the abstaining strategy did not work in favour of the group that tried it.

Abstaining doesn't work. The electoral system isn't a scheme entirely concocted by the bourgeoisie to con the population, it is a part of the preliminary outcome of the struggle of the many (eg. the Chartists) against the privileged few. And it is also a means to an end in that struggle, which is why I'm trying to have a discussion here about better voting systems.
I'd rather abstain than think "eeny meeny miny mo" when voting.