Voting System Reform Commission: Part 2

[Bono]

I'm not a comission member, but may I sugest adding Range Voting to your shortlist?

[Bono]

Also Coombs' Method, Bucklin Voting and Supplementary Vote.

[Bono]

You know it would have been alot easier if you had just refered everyone to this page first:

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

Yes it would have been.
Yep, you're right.

Sure.

[Bono]

Would I be allowed to recommend that this Commission discuss another system of voting?  I'm not sure if this already exists by another name, but I've decided to call it 'scaled approval voting'.

The basic premise is a cross between preferential voting and simple approval voting.  Voters simply vote for the candidates they approve of, while also giving them a rating according to an arbitrary scale.

For example, let's say that an election has five candidates: A, B, C, D and E.  The rating scale would be out of 10, for argument's sake.  As a hypothetical voter, I consider Candidate C to be my favorite candidate, while Candidate D is my least favorite.  I consider Candidates B and E to be equally as good as each other, but only about half as good as C.  Candidate A is not considered a good candidate, but would still be preferred over Candidate D.  On my ballot, I list every candidate (including those I disapprove of), and give them a rating out of 10 (approve = 10; disapprove = 0).  So my hypothetical ballot would be as follows:

C: 10
B: 5
E: 5
A: 1
D: 0

These scores are then tallied up with other ballots, and we take it from there.  I haven't decided how we decide the result from those tallied scores yet, so I guess I'll leave that up to you guys.

That's range voting.

[Bono]

I oppose approval voting for use in national elections, especially Presidential.  I'm fine with it in the Southeast.

What's the difference?

[Bono]

Blah blah blah

That's range voting.

Ah yes.  That piece of knowledge could have saved me some time and typing.

Ah-ha don't worry. BTW, that's also my supported voting system.

[Bono]

Once again, Imust bump this, since it has become particulary relevant.

[Bono]

Once again, Imust bump this, since it has become particulary relevant.

Well, I think our mandate was to decide which electoral system to use, not how to reform the kinks of the present ones.

Also, I frankly got tired of doing this considering the first report which did obviously take an amount of work, got totally ignored.

The problem is this idiot voting system. All else can never change the basic problem.

[Bono]

Can I throw one thing out there on coting reform, considering that FPTP w/ runoff was considered, but the flaw was the fear that we'd have two extreme candidates in the final?

Why not have a runoff with the top three candidates?

We'd have our election, and the final three would run against each other in a runoff where plurality, not majority, is required.

Just a thought, there amy turn out to be perfectly good reasons not to do this.

I have another idea that I've been mulling over, although it certainly needs to be refined since it would make elections take a very long time in very close races between many candidates.

The basic idea is that, in a race with n candidates, anyone who gets a percent of the vote greater than 100/n proceeds to the runoff .  So, in a 3-candidate race, you'd need more than 33.3% of the vote, or in a 4-candidate race, you'd need more than 25% of the vote, etc.  The reason to do this is to make it so that we still have FPTP in the end, but so that candidates with a substantial amount of support who just fall a little short of the top two (or whatever) don't get excluded.  The percentage requirement is such that there must be at least one candidate eliminated in each round, unless there is an exact n-way tie, which I realize I haven't accounted for.

Ideally, to fully achieve the desire of the people, the new runoff would also go into a runoff if still no one receives a majority of the vote, but if we take it down that path we could have an awful lot of runoffs.

I still haven't quite figured out if this idea is worth pursuing, so I thought I'd get someone else's take on it.

That's how france's assembly elections work' (or is it regionals? or both?)

[Bono]

I still think it is a better idea to go with the existing regions and aportion EVs between them.