In the News Election Systems Debate

Recently, I did a research paper about voting systems. I’d like to share my thoughts and learn what you guys think about it.

Instead of just showing you boring charts and numbers, here are a few videos explaining the basics with animals:

Problems With First-Past-the-Post


Gerrymandering Explained


Alternate Vote


Mixed-Member Proportional


Single Transferable Vote


So the question is: Do legislative elections need reform and if so, do any of these systems solve the problems? Should every or most governments use that system? Vote for which one is the best and tell me why. If there are any questions I’ll happily answer them and edit the thread to clarify.

 

Never ever use FPtP is a good start. Then abolish the electoral college and stop lobbying and politics would be almost ok.

 

I was against the electoral college, but I’ve grown to not care about it so much. In 93% of all presidential elections, the president won both the popular and electoral vote, so in the long term it’s not probable that the president will win by the electoral vote. The whole minority vs. majority debate is kinda iffy. I think that it’s not that big of a deal to base it on popular vote since the U.S. has the Senate for small states. However, the biggest downside is that it might polarize highly Republican and Democrat states since the vote would be hinged on a small moderate group.

Plus, some states like New York are pledging to give all of their electoral votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote, so it may be resolved anyway without abolishing the electoral college.

 

I don't know too much about us politics so I'll just talk about Dutch politics. Over here, we have a popular vote system which makes it so we have 12(?) parties in our parlement, the biggest one is the vvd. They have 33 out of 150 seats. I don't remember exactly but I there was an article about how our elections would be with electoral votes. With electoral votes vvd would have a majority in parlement making it so they would represent over half the population and that they could do almost anything they want. But not half of the population supports them, not even everyone who voted for them supports them.
An electoral votes system also blocks parties other than Republicans and Democrats.

 

So do you mean that candidates would be elected like they are in the electoral college? In the US the EC is only for the president. And while it is a good discussion, the voting systems I listed here are primarily for legislative positions, which is what I think you are describing. Is it mandated that there are 12 parties or does the Dutch use a system other than FPTP?

 

There are far more than 12 parties, last election there were like 30, only 12 have seats in parlement.

 

Does your country use a proportional system like STV or MMP?

 

A Unitary parliamentary republic works rather well

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Israel had 25 parties run last election, 10 got to the parliament.
The biggest party gets to assemble the coalition with other parties to make up the majority and the other parties will become the opposition

 

Is there a lot of partisanship then?

 

Yea, the system does have some problems bit it seems better than others

 

Do you use a proportional system or FPTP?

 

Neither, you vote once for the party you want.
The parties have to get a certain number of votes to get into the parliament (this is to prevent parties into splitting into a lot of tiny parties)
The party that gets the most sits in the parliament (the head of the party will become the prime minister) will assemble the coalition with other parties.

 

Oh, I gotcha. Do you know what the quota is for the party to get elected?

 

You have to get more than 3.25% to get a sit right now.
We have 120 sits in parliament.

 

I think we have the same system but you have to get less votes and there's 150 seats, one of the mayor problems is forming a coalition. We now have a 4 party coalition which barely has a majority in parlement so if 2 people leave their party the majority is lost. Also making the coalition took really fucking long, they got a record with 225 days.

 

Right now the coalition is made up from 6 parties and 66 sits

 

In the US we’ve had a few government shut-downs in the last few years. The reason why I thought third-parties would be better was that a lot of people were tired with the two main parties (especially the candidates) We felt like we had no viable options to shake up the two main parties. I figured that bigger third parties would force Democrats and Republicans to cooperate across party lines to reach a majority, instead of just hinging on a few individual moderates.

Though, idk how fair it is to compare the US to the Dutch given the different structure, diversity, and large population size. So it might be good for the US, but not for smaller, homogeneous, unicameral governments.

 

Bump........

 

Why not have elections per state where you have to make a coalition with the other parties and then each country has representatives in a state union (like the EU)

 

Yes and no. Why? Federalism. For our legislature we have the Senate (which is 2 MPs per state) and the House of Representatives (Based on population). The problem is with FPTP and single member districts. Like the video said, it makes it impossible for third parties and multiple candidates of the same party to be elected, so third parties don’t run at all in most elections or aren’t even on the ballot. By switching to STV, third parties could run and therefore the other major parties would have to form a coalition like you said in order to have a majority.