{"id":2624,"date":"2015-05-19T11:55:52","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T15:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=2624"},"modified":"2015-05-19T11:55:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T15:55:52","slug":"a-simple-restructuring-of-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=2624","title":{"rendered":"a simple restructuring of elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

In close follow-up with my desire to see political parties abolished<\/a>, we also need to rethink how voting is done.<\/p>\n

In the United States, you can only vote\u00a0for<\/em> a single candidate for most positions (town councils are an exception).<\/p>\n

You do not have the opportunity to say anything more than a binary yes|no to a given person for a given office.<\/p>\n

You can vote\u00a0for<\/em> Bob for mayor. But\u00a0not<\/em> voting for Mary, Quentin, and Zoe doesn’t really say anything about what you think of them – just that you liked Bob the best.<\/p>\n

And there is the\u00a0problem. There is an explicit elimination of\u00a0relative preference<\/em> when voting: all you can do is vote “yes” for a candidate.<\/p>\n

That is\u00a0very<\/em> different from voting “no” against a candidate.<\/p>\n

What should happen instead is you should vote for your favorite candidates in order of preference<\/a>, so Bob is number 1, Zoe number 2, Quentin number 3, and Mary number 4.<\/p>\n

Then when I vote, and rank them Mary 1, Zoe 2, Quentin 3, and Bob 4, we can get a picture of the relative preference of any given candidate running for the office.<\/p>\n

Do this across all voters in a given election, and assign the winner to the person with the lowest score (in the numbering shown above – flip the values to assign the winner to the person with the highest score).<\/p>\n

Perhaps even look at the top 3 or 4 after gestalt ranking, then vote again to determine the winner (this would be ideal for a Primary-then-General Election method).<\/p>\n

What research shows is that while you and I may wildly disagree<\/em> on “best” and “worst”, we’ll probably be pretty close on who we think is “good enough”.<\/p>\n

In the Bob-Mary-Quentin-Zoe example with two voters, Mary & Bob both got 5 points. Quentin received 6, but Zoe earned 4.<\/p>\n

The two voters, therefore, think Zoe is “good enough”, even though they part ways on “best” and “worst” (Bob & Mary).<\/p>\n

Combine such a ranking system with a fully-open Primary election (ie you go rank\u00a0every<\/em> candidate regardless of “party”), and we would see much more representative-of-the-citizenry candidates appear at final Election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In close follow-up with my desire to see political parties abolished, we also need to rethink how voting is done. In the United States, you can only vote\u00a0for a single candidate for most positions (town councils are an exception). You do not have the opportunity to say anything more than a binary yes|no to a …
Continue reading a simple restructuring of elections<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22,23,33],"tags":[270,584,827],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-2624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","category-insights","category-politics","tag-elections","tag-politics","tag-voting"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2624"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fkeyring_services&post=2624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}