This interactive essay by Nicky Case (2016) is an introduction to alternative voting systems and their pros and cons. Iām posting this here as a resource for those interested in learning about them.
This interactive essay by Nicky Case (2016) is an introduction to alternative voting systems and their pros and cons. Iām posting this here as a resource for those interested in learning about them.
If you havenāt wandered around the Nicky Case website, Iād recommend doing so. There are a lot of interesting educational games on there, covering a wide variety of concepts such as social contagion, prisonerās dilemmas, segregation, etc.
[Repost from my FB]
Iād like to introduce a setup thatās a little different from these arbitrary axes and feels truer to life...
To avoid object-level politics, Iāll use Scottās (or was it Nickās?) example:
* Party A wants to increase taxes and social services 5%, and to require everyone to electrocute themselves 8 hours a day.
* Party B wants to decrease taxes and social services 5%, and to require everyone to electrocute themselves 8 hours a day.
* Party C wants to leave taxes and social services as they are, and stop the electrocutions.
āEveryoneā knows that Party C isnāt serious. They get no media coverage, except as a punchline. Only people with no popularity to lose will come out openly as Party Cāers. And rather then break the dam, they make Party C association a mark of stigma.
Under FPTP, we need roughly a third of the people to *believe party C has a chance*, with no way to build momentum. Naturally, the electrocutions continue.
Under IRV (and I think any ordered ranking), we need roughly a third of people to pay attention. Then they can easily vote C>A>B or C>B>A and end the electrocutions. And if itās less than a third, it still shows a nice clear signal that Not Electrocuting Ourselves is an idea to be taken seriously.
Under Approval, people wonāt want to vote āCā because that gives up the chance to effect the taxes/āservices tradeoff which is the only thing they expect to be up for grabs. So they vote āA,Cā or āB,Cā. And feel bad about it, because they donāt actually *approve* of A or B. Which means theyāre voting against themselves. Now we need half of people to pay attention, and with a much weaker take-this-seriously signal. After all, āA,Cā could just be intented as a hardcore vote against B (some people take the A-B rivalry very seriously).