Voting methods

From ratings system

Traditional voting

We took a look at voting systems [last time](Brainstorming_2), primarily the difference between ordinal and cardinal systems in the context of creating social choices from competing priorities. Let's back up a little and comment on the standard way to elect representatives in the US (and other English speaking countries), ["first past the post" or plurality voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting). This system designates the winner as the candidate receiving the most votes. Usually there is only one winner (aka "winner take all") for an entire district.

This system has the virtue of simplicity but comes with serious drawbacks. One is the basic problem, which is that winners can easily emerge who have not received majority support. This problem is usually paired with the fact that there is rarely a runoff election to force a majority. As a consequence, it is easy to have a 3rd party spoiler in a system like this. Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election because he won over 100,000 votes in Florida while the vote difference between Bush and Gore was 537. Jill Stein, it can be argued, did the same thing in the 2016 election (by a smaller margin). The [No Labels](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/no-labels-2024-election/677570/) movement today threatens to cost Joe Biden the election in 2024.

This system has the interesting effect of producing two dominant parties. Third parties, if they're even on the ballot, tend to run way behind. Why is this? For 3 parties you would need to consistently have a situation where all three were fairly close, around 33% of the vote, and any one of these could thereby go slightly above it and win. This could theoretically be true but there are many more ways for it not be true on simple probabilistic grounds. Furthermore most voters, knowing the rules of the game, are not inclined to throw their vote away on a party perceived to be weak.

Perhaps a more fundamental reason is that the two major parties represent the two major ideological differences we have, right and left. There doesn't appear to be a third ideological option although many have argued for a third party that, for instance, is conservative on economic issues but liberal on social issues. If we could establish such a party and it could consistently compete at around the 33% mark we could have some type of rotating three party system.

So why does this never happen? Probably because the fiscal conservative/social liberal ideology doesn't really exist in practical electoral terms. Those who feel this way end up voting for one of the two parties because they feel their conservative economic position is more important than their liberal social position, or vice versa. Indeed in many cases the traditional two parties are savvy enough to throw a bone to the hesitant voter and convince them. Pre Dobbs, economic conservatives/social liberals have tended to vote Republican because the party convinced them that their abortion restrictions would be modest and hinted that they wouldn't be pursuing them vigorously anyway. Even today we are seeing a majority of Republicans uniting behind Trump despite their misgivings about his undemocratic behavior. Indeed, no anti-Trump conservative party ever emerged.

How can a system like ours counter the two-party problem? Clearly a bipolar political alignment is completely at odds with what we are trying to achieve. If anything we want a multi-dimensional approach to politics and ideas that transcend our banal left-right scale. Our system cannot, obviously, take over the government or its election system. But it can exist as an alternate election platform and, as we've discussed before, an alternative form of government. Elections can be held, policies debated, and the effects of policies can be analyzed. For elections, the system can consistently show the result of alternate approaches to voting, like having runoff elections, proportional representation, cardinal systems, etc. Our system could even have political parties through its community involvement features. With enough participation our software will reach a critical point where, de facto, it will begin displacing existing institutions.