Elections are the crucial mechanism by which citizens hope to maintain control over their governments. Lots of countries hold elections, but the degree to which citizens actually do control their government varies widely. In Russia, as in quite a few other countries, people have elections, but no control. Not only is it important to hold regular elections, but it really matters how elections are done. Elections are democracy; without elections that citizens can implicitly trust, there is no democracy.
Most people lightheartedly think we do a good job of elections here in the US, the modern “cradle of democracy.” Unfortunately, there are serious, potentially fatal, problems.
Perhaps the most serious symptom is that large numbers of citizens no longer implicitly trust the integrity of our elections. The following “Roadmap” strongly recommends five important election reforms; the first two have become quite urgent.
“Roadmap To Ensuring Election Integrity”
A painfully obvious symptom of problems is the increasingly divisive polarization of both politicians and voters, which has reached unhealthy levels. In the 2016 presidential election, more than half of voters voted for a candidate they didn’t like because they liked the other major candidate even less. It was “vote for the lesser evil” on steroids.
Most experts agree that the Plurality voting method we use (the candidate receiving the most votes is the winner) is a significant cause of our increasing polarization. More than 240 years ago, it was understood that Plurality is fundamentally awful. It allows voters to indicate only their first choice of all the options, which is not enough information to enable choosing the correct winner in many elections. That information often is bogus because of Plurality’s vulnerability to strategic or insincere voting. Thus, a critical election fix needed is to switch to a much better voting method.
Hundreds of assorted voting methods have been proposed and debated for the past 250 years, but no solid consensus has emerged. IRV (Instant Runoff Voting), one of about fifty ranked-choice methods, has been tried in some locales, but provides only a very small improvement over Plurality. A large improvement is needed.
Early in 2020, a comprehensive election simulation project was completed. Many voting methods were evaluated in millions of election scenarios of all possible kinds. Each method was measured on the basis of it being able to consistently choose the correct winner while also avoiding any of the terrible blunders that Plurality and IRV can make. The results strongly indicated that a voting method, called AADV (Approve/Approve/Disapprove Voting) can make the large improvement that we have been searching for. AADV is easy to understand, so it’s hard to think of any good reason to delay changing to it. Here is a good overview of the situation:
“On Designing Very Good Voting Methods”
Here are two short non-technical articles on BAWV:
“Stop Electing Politicians Disliked By A Majority Of Voters”
“To Elect Better Politicians, Voters Need a Better Voting Method”
The following “Instruction Sheet” provides detailed instructions for voters (both for AADV and BAWV) and instructions for election officials defining exactly how to tally the ballots.
AADV (and BAWV) Instructions
A comprehensive course on voting methods can be found here:
https://home4liberty.org/courses/elections-voting-methods/
For those hardy souls who want all the details, the below link is to the paper which explains and reports on the entire election simulation project.
“Follow-on Election Simulation Leads to Definitive Proposal”
And the original (2019) simulation referred to in the above paper can be found at the link below.
“Election Simulation Sheds New Light on Voting Methods”
Another well-known problem is the practice of gerrymandering — defining electoral districts in a way which makes it easy for an incumbent to win re-election, or which favors the election of candidates from a certain political party. Most proposals for reform revolve around attempting to form an “unbiased” commission, which then figures out how to draw the boundaries. However, there is a much better, simpler, faster and lower cost solution which is laid out in the following short article.
“How Best to Impartially Draw Electoral Districts”
At a hearing on redistricting held by the PA House State Government Committee, the below compelling testimony was delivered recommending the use of an impartial procedure to draw electoral districts. Below that is a map for Pennsylvania’s 17 Congressional districts as drawn by the recommended “Precinct-Preserving Splitline Procedure.”
Hearing Testimony
PA’s 17 Congressional Districts Drawn By PPS Procedure
A comprehensive course on gerrymandering can be found here:
https://home4liberty.org/courses/gerrymandering/
A third serious problem with elections is “ballot access.” Like gerrymandering, this is a way that career politicians have engineered to help keep themselves in office. They have erected unnecessarily high barriers to keep competing candidates off the ballot. These barriers are less visible to the general public, but any would-be candidate not a member of the two old declining parties quickly discovers that it is very hard to get on the general election ballot. Frequently, there is the need for an inordinate number of nominating petition signatures, but other procedural hurdles usually also exist. There are too many races where only one name appears on the ballot. That’s no choice at all!
In addition to the “big three” issues above, there are other improvements needed. The overview below attempts to highlight some of these considerations.
“How To Run An Election”
Also, see the page on Election Manager software.
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