Illusionary Democracy

There’s a big problem with some of the more fashionable democracies.

StackSmith has written some nice posts about the problems with democracy, for example:

On Democracy

There’s so much to unpack here that I’ve been struggling to formulate a single coherent post on the topic, so I’m going to ignore 95% of the problem and just go for something about which I feel on thoroughly safe ground.

The Maths is Wrong

A “democracy” where voting doesn’t work is a democracy in name only.

This could be because of overt rigging of the system in various ways, but just as crucially it can be because of using the wrong system.

First Past the Post

The US and the UK both provide crystal clear examples of why “first past the post” voting systems—one choice per vote, one round, highest number of votes wins—don’t work.

The US has reached a seemingly-stable state where two parties roughly evenly split the vote. This means they both have to appeal to voters on their own extreme through to the middle. There’s no room for fresh ideas, little room for consensus, and most of the dialog and drama is about “the other side is wrong”.

The only outcome worse than this one is what happened in the UK: a two party system where one of the “sides” has splintered, splitting the vote. This guarantees that the one surviving large party will be in power for a long, long time. We’re at 13 years with no end in sight.

In the UK there was a referendum to fix the voting system; it was voted against by a huge margin, 68% to 32%. Apparently political support for the change was unclear, and I can only call that incredibly disappointing, for this story has a sting in the tail: since 1965 the Conservative party selects its leaders via a robust system with multiple voting rounds and elimination. The last three Prime Ministers were, in fact, selected using a mathematically sound voting system. It’s just not open to the public.

Which brings me to...

Broken Referenda

As any electrical engineer will tell you, it doesn’t work to have a sensor control something with the “on” and “off” threshold at the same point. You need some “hysteresis” to stop bad things happening when the sensor readings are near the threshold.

Re-shaping the entire political landscape of a country based on a 52% majority would be an insane thing to do. There is no need, at all, to know what the referendum is about for this argument to work.

Getting It Right

Switzerland seems to have all this very well worked out.

It has used a “proportional representation” voting system since 1919.

National referenda only pass if both a majority of people and a majority of regions vote “yes”.

It was a weird and humbling experience to move from a country where “okay, I get it, but this system is broken by design” was the default political experience, to a country where the systems seem to have been designed by person or persons with an eye for mathematics and with a desire to make every vote count.

Wrapup

As I said, there’s a lot about this topic to unpack, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

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