Electoral reform

Electoral reform

• Elections outside of the United States
  • Tanzania: elections upcoming. Multiple domestic and international observers. In past years, there was a electoral commission, but this year there was a popular demand for an independent electoral commission.
  • Mexico: More multi-party than the United States. However, there are many regional parties.
• American elections
  • The United States has regional parties, like in Vermont where the VT Progressives sometimes win elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Progressive_Party
  • We spoke about Alameda County's use of ranked choice.
  • Folks generally agreed that the Electoral College is bad.
• Organizations in the United States that promote alternatives
  • FairVote (https://fairvote.org) was founded in 1993, and promoted Australia's "preferential voting" as well as "single-trasferable voting" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote) since it was formed. It has many celebrites involved, including 1980 U.S. Presdiential Candidate John Anderson, Nirvana bassist Krist Noveselic. They promote "RCV", which is discussed more later in these notes.
  • Center for Election Science (https://electionscience.org) was founded in 2011, and promotes approval voting, and used to promote "score voting". They helped variations of approval voting to get enacted to select the mayors of Fargo (North Dakota) and St. Louis (Missouri). They tried to get it enacted in Seattle in 2022, but that ballot measure was defeated, because a city council member added RCV to the ballot.
  • Equal Vote Coalition (https://equal.vote) was founded in 2014, and gained some momentum after the "Equal Vote Conference" held in Eugene that year. STAR voting was invented at that conference. The city of Eugene voted on whether to use STAR voting in 2024 (https://www.starvoting.org/eugene), but that measure was defeated.
• Meta issues:
  • What's the theory of change?
  • How should we discuss options, and select the best one?
  • How do we switch systems?
• Alternatives with traction:
  • Most of the discussion focused on ranked-choice voting (or "RCV") and approval voting.
  • RCV has had many names, including "preferential voting" in Australia since the 1890s (at least, when the Australian constitution was written) and "instant-runoff voting" ("IRV"), which was FairVote's favorite name between 1998 and 2011 or so.
    • How RCV works: Everyone gets to rank. Count up all the 1st choice votes. Candidate with the least 1st choice votes is removed. Etc...
  • Approval voting has been actively promoted since the 1970s thanks to Stephen Brams' advocacy work. Promoted by the Center for Election Science.
• Comparing the methods
  • Ka-Ping Yee at UC Berkeley wrote their PhD thesis about comparing Approval, IRV, Condorcet, and FPTP (or "first-past-the-post", also known as choose-one plurality or usually "voting" in the United States)
    • https://electowiki.org/wiki/Yee_diagram
    • https://ncase.me/ballot/
  • We could make different voting mechanisms, but without reforms in the education, mental environment, and sensemaking in general. We need a election holiday.
  • One big problem with IRV: the "center-squeeze" failure mode:
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze
    • Examples of center squeeze
      • 2009 mayoral race in Burlington, VT
        • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election
      • 2022 Alaska U.S. House of Reps election
        • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congressional_district_special_election
        • https://rcvchangedalaska.com/
  • Another alternative: Condorcet voting. Simulate pairwise races between all the different candidates. This is extrapolated from the ranks.
  • Criticism of approval voting: allocation of equal boolean "approval" votes
  • STAR allows for nuance of preferences on ballots. Fairvote torpedoed it in Eugene in 2024.
• Theories of change
  • The conventional wisdom is to start at the municipal level.
  • We don't have a lot of data on approval voting (partly because Fairvote has been so good at blocking it, like in Seattle).
  • St. Louis. has had one mayoral race with approval voting
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_St._Louis_mayoral_election
    • An important opponent to approval voting got caught accepting an $18,500 bribe
      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_E._Reed#Mayoral_campaigns
  • Are there examples of approval voting outside the US.
  • According to Wikipedia, the UN uses it to select the Secretrary General. Many organizations use it for boards of directors:
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
  • Discussing elections in Mexico. There are often many new parties, and they actually have a chance of winning.
  • Mexico used to basically have one party, didn't it?
    • Yes and no. Federally yes, and locally many parties.
  • We also have local parties here.
    • Libertarian organized to "invade" New Hampshire, with many people moving there after they used a Condorcet election to select which state they would move to:
      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
      • Live Free or Die!
  • Many electoral reforma advocates have a weekly video call
    • https://electowiki.org/wiki/Sass_Open_Democracy_Discussion
    • The conversations frequently come around to geography. E.g. Wyoming, "Gets 2 Senators".
  • Some believe we should abolish the Senate. It's our House of Lords, there to defend moneyed interests against democracy.
  • Should we build parallel systems? Show us what outcomes we would get another system.
  • We could build an open-source tool. Blockchain?
  • Should we use phones to vote instead of paper ballots?
    • XKCD (fantastic comic(s) about digital democracy).
      • https://xkcd.com/2030/
      • https://xkcd.com/463/
  • Current ballot systems are closed-source private IP, not auditable.(like Dominion's).
  • There is an open source system in use in Alabama (correction: Mississippi):
    • https://www.voting.works/
• Theory of change part II
  • How do we make this happen? Get rid of lobbyists.
  • Slip over into our cozy web encrypted channels and plan the revolution. We have agency, we are responsible for civilizational co-design (referencing David Graeber - The Dawn of Everything). Bioregionalism.
  • I'd like to learn more about the sociotech salon later tonight.
  • Scope creep in discussion of repairing election systems is off the charts.
  • That term is from waterfall. But I think you mean it's complex and entangled.
  • We have so much tech debt in our Constitution. Some say we need to rewrite it from scratch.
  • We need to find aggregate result of all our preferences (like OKCupid profiles at a handwave).
• IETF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Engineering_Task_Force)
  • Do we have the room to give an opinion sees the US system? If so how?
  • We should be listening to other countries' criticisms.
  • IETF Governance Research. For example,
    • https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7282
  • Humming is very gendered.
  • Rumor has it that the IETF isn't really using humming anymore.
• Other links
  • https://electorama.com/abiftool/