I think one of the most important things we can do to make politicians more accountable is to replace plurality voting with approval voting. Right now virtually everyone hates the Democrats and the Republicans, but because of vote splitting, they can't vote for anyone else because they fear it would be throwing their vote away. If we are ever going to get rid of our two party system and make elections competitive, we need to get rid of plurality voting and ensure that third party candidates don't act as spoilers.

I do not understand how most people cannot see this and it frustrates me to no end that Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks never talks about this. It is so clear that he is disgusted by the Democrats, but he will tell us that we still need to vote for them because the Republicans are much worse. And yet, he never talks about changing the system that makes it so hard to hold politicians accountable.

After the Canadian election, he used the vote splitting that lead to the conservative party victory as an example of why the US shouldn’t have multiple parties. His conclusion wasn't that we should change our voting system so there is no vote splitting – it was, we should just not have more than two parties.

Wednesday, Cenk is taking questions from facebook. I made this comment to ask him why he never talks about alternative voting systems. Please “like” it so it is rated up and it has a better chance of being read live. I am really curious why he never addresses the issue.

As long as the Electoral College exists voting is effectively broken in America as the people. Gore got the popular vote and should have won in 2000. This last decade could have been dramatically different from what we have today.

As long as the Electoral College exists voting is effectively broken in America as the people. Gore got the popular vote and should have won in 2000. This last decade could have been dramatically different from what we have today.

That is only for the President. Our strategy should be to get approval voting implemented state by state. That way we could elect better senators and representatives and each state victory will help build momentum. Once we are able to elect better candidates it will be a lot easier to change the electoral college. Ideally we'd have non-partisan open primaries with approval voting and the let the top two face of in the general.

Election reform is really really hard to do. It takes a long time, and every single politician in power has benefited from the current system in some way or another, especially those that belong to one of the two major parties.

Besides, while it's quite well established that people are disgusted with both major US parties at present, it's also well established that they tend to view their own representatives much more favorably. Also, I don't know that a different voting system would necessarily make politicians more accountable. They'll always have a huge incentive to try and slink out of responsibility, and most citizens are unsophisticated enough in at least one area of government controversy at any given time that they can be misled or otherwise distracted.

If people are less interested in the truth than sound bytes, or interested in a single issue (especially "values" issues) above all other considerations, then any voting system will serve to promote people who can deliver the latter and never mind the former. Other voting systems might make politics more accessible in that the two parties proper will have less of a death-grip on the process, but that only matters if the 3rd party candidates are better and also more persuasive to the public. I'm not sure that that's what the case would be.

I'm still in favor of systems like ranked choice voting (very much so, though on review the above may not make it seem like it). My state is trying to pass ranked-choice voting statewide, against fierce opposition. California has open primaries, now though it's too early for the full effects of that to be known. I would love to see elections reflect the will of the voters, and the current system is quite poor at that. But at the same time, I'm not confident that a better voting system will resolve most of the serious issues that we have.

Besides, while it's quite well established that people are disgusted with both major US parties at present, it's also well established that they tend to view their own representatives much more favorably. Also, I don't know that a different voting system would necessarily make politicians more accountable. They'll always have a huge incentive to try and slink out of responsibility, and most citizens are unsophisticated enough in at least one area of government controversy at any given time that they can be misled or otherwise distracted.

I think if they had more competition, the incumbents would have to work harder to stay elected. The incumbent very rarely gets challenged in a primary and he knows that his base is stuck with him. If we had an open primary with approval voting and a top two runoff for the Presidential election in 2012, I don't think there is any way Obama would get reelected.

And maybe for the most part a different voting system won't change the behavior of politicians. Getting rid of vote splitting though would at the very least help us get rid of incumbents that step too far out of line.

I'm still in favor of systems like ranked choice voting (very much so, though on review the above may not make it seem like it). My state is trying to pass ranked-choice voting statewide, against fierce opposition. California has open primaries, now though it's too early for the full effects of that to be known. I would love to see elections reflect the will of the voters, and the current system is quite poor at that. But at the same time, I'm not confident that a better voting system will resolve most of the serious issues that we have.
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RCV in the form of IRV is better than plurality, but it gives unintuitive results. Burlington, Vermont used it for a while and in the 2009 mayoral election it didn't produce the Condorcet winner. A bunch of people freaked out and they repealed it through referendum. The problem now is that they are going to be more resistant to try another voting system. Approval voting would be much easier to implement and explain to people. Ideally I think the ranked pairs form of the Condorcet method would be the best method, but it would be hard to explain that to people and get them to support it. Also, it would be a nightmare to implement.

I don't think the open primaries with plurality will help much because it doesn't stop the problems of vote splitting. Two candidates who are unpopular can make it into the general election.

You can only vote for two guys? Dictator1 and Dictator2:P. I like our system where there can be unlimited parties (in theory but they need a number of followers in order to join the elections). Then we have 150 chairs that can be occupied. We vote for the amount of chairs every party gets. Then they need more then half of the chairs to gain a majority to create a government. So there will most likely never be 1 party in a government. Of course there is also a big role playing game involving the queen in order to decide who is going to work with who. And it can take quite a while from elections to forming a actual government (good example would be Belgium). Two guys doesn't seem much, how are those two guys selected?

You can only vote for two guys? Dictator1 and Dictator2:P. I like our system where there can be unlimited parties (in theory but they need a number of followers in order to join the elections). Then we have 150 chairs that can be occupied. We vote for the amount of chairs every party gets. Then they need more then half of the chairs to gain a majority to create a government. So there will most likely never be 1 party in a government. Of course there is also a big role playing game involving the queen in order to decide who is going to work with who. And it can take quite a while from elections to forming a actual government (good example would be Belgium). Two guys doesn't seem much, how are those two guys selected?

The difference here is that the number of chairs is down to a bunch of 1v1 matchups. It isn't proportional to the percent of people that actually want representation in the country. It is proportional to the majorities in each district, which leaves a bunch of minorities completely unrepresented.

[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]The US electoral system is broken because it employs an almost pure version of First Past The Post voting. It's prone to gerrymandering by parties that want to divide the competition, and worse, it always stabilizes into two large parties in the long run. I guess a third party can rise up to be a viable contender, but only to replace one of the big two. It's almost like a mathematical proof can be made with FPTP that follows through regardless of the starting conditions. Something like instant runoff voting can correct this.[/font]
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If people are less interested in the truth than sound bytes, or interested in a single issue (especially "values" issues) above all other considerations, then any voting system will serve to promote people who can deliver the latter and never mind the former. Other voting systems might make politics more accessible in that the two parties proper will have less of a death-grip on the process, but that only matters if the 3rd party candidates are better and also more persuasive to the public. I'm not sure that that's what the case would be.

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[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]Someone had a more eccentric idea that politicians should not run to represent all pertinent issues. Rather, they should represent one category of issues and work on problems only related to those. In other words, in his idea, people would vote like "I'm choosing this guy because he agrees with my stance of abortion and family values, and this other guy on what he plans to do with education". Divide all executive decisions among a "cabinet" of equally ranked officials. [/font]
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[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"] [/font] [font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"] [/font] [font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]To me that still sounds like a pie in the sky idea, but I can see some logic in it.[/font] [font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]Let's face it, as this article clearly states, the average person uses crude heuristics to make legislative decisions. This is why our [/font]politicians tend to toe the line on everything they stand for in their party. Uninformed voters, in turn, adopt all their issue positions with them when they vote based on other issue positions. Splitting up the issues will encourage people to diversify their opinions a bit more.

[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]The US electoral system is broken because it employs an almost pure version of First Past The Post voting. It's prone to gerrymandering by parties that want to divide the competition, and worse, it always stabilizes into two large parties in the long run. I guess a third party can rise up to be a viable contender, but only to replace one of the big two. It's almost like a mathematical proof can be made with FPTP that follows through regardless of the starting conditions. Something like instant runoff voting can correct this.[/font]
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As I have recently been convinced, it is better to promote a Condorcet method instead. Since Condorcet might be too strange a name to people, you might want to promote the Schulze method specifically.

[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]Let's face it, as this article clearly states, the average person uses crude heuristics to make legislative decisions.[/font]
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Interesting article. The one thing it fails to discuss is the role that the media plays in all this. In a healthy media environment, politicians that play stupid games would be called out harshly.

Whilst there is no perfect system, I think FPTP/Plurality voting is the worst one out there. Good to see someone advocating Approval Voting - it seems that people often assume that Instant Runoff Voting (or Alternative Vote) is the only possible alternative. I think Condorcet Methods are the best ones, but Approval Voting has the advantage of being simple, as well as being compatible with the current voting systems (people still mark crosses, and you just count crosses).

It also has the advantage of being more natural - people often dislike the other voting systems, because they're so used to doing polls/surveys where you simply vote and then count up the totals. But there are many polls where voting more than one option is allowed, and quite sensible.

Whilst not perfect, I think primaries make FPTP a lot less worse than what we have in the UK - effectively you have a two round system, rather than FPTP.

In the UK, we recently had a failed referendum to change to Alternative Vote (IRV) for electing our MPs to Parliament. Unfortunately the campaign was fought on lies (e.g., the No campaigners claiming it would cost $250 million - a completely made up figure; in fact it was the No campaign themselves who caused most of the cost, using taxpayers' money to print their leaflets...) They also campaigned that people would be too stupid to understand AV - so I suspect we as a country are too stupid to ever even consider a Condorcet method...

Part of the problem is that it wouldn't have made much difference, and most people wanting reform want proportional representation - the main problem for electing MPs is the non-proportional system, which means the number of votes needed per seat can vary widely per party, and you even get odd results where the vote can increase, but seats are lost. The problem isn't simply that it's non-proportional, but there is the effect that a party whose votes are distributed more uniformly across the country will do worse. Although we do have a fairly sizeable 3rd party, the Lib Dems, they get far fewer seats compared to their vote share.

Interestingly, many elections in the UK do use other systems: e.g., the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Assembly use Additional Member System; the Northern Ireland Assembly, along with Scottish and NI local elections use Single Transferable Vote; Supplementary Vote; House of Lords bielections use Alternative Vote; all the main parties themselves use Alternative Vote or Multiround versions of it. Oh, and we have a hereditary monarchy.

Unfortunately a lot of people aren't aware of this, with FPTP supporters campaigning that anything other than FPTP voting "isn't British"...

One of the reasons changing is so hard is, aside from the tendancy of ignorant voters to stick with the current method, is there's so much disagreement over what to change to - and perversely, even if people may prefer any method to FPTP, they still vote for FPTP if the proposed alternative option isn't their ideal method! The fundamental problem is that the question of what voting system to use, also applies to how to choose a voting system... With new systems, it seems far more likely that those setting it up will just implement a sensible system from the start.

RCV in the form of IRV is better than plurality, but it gives unintuitive results. Burlington, Vermont used it for a while and in the 2009 mayoral election it didn't produce the Condorcet winner. A bunch of people freaked out and they repealed it through referendum.[/quote]

It's not clear to me if the problem most people had was that it didn't produce the Condorcet winner, or that it didn't produce the FPTP winner - given that they switched back to FPTP, and not to a Condorcet method, I fear it was the latter...