As someone external to the US, I've had a look at some of your political
structures and I think I know where the bug is.
It's in the electoral
college.
Consider; each state seperately votes between two or more
parties. The winner of this election then gains ALL the votes from the state.
This is how a party can lose the popular vote yet win overall.
Now
consider the implications of this. If party A gets 51% of the votes in just
enough states to get 51% of the electoral college vote, then party A is in, even
if it gets no other votes. (I'm sure that, with care, one can find a voting
pattern that results in party A getting in despite having less than 25% of the
voters voting for them).
Therefore, if 51% of the people in a given
state vote for party A, then party A wins the state - no other votes in that
state matter, one way or another.
Now consider the behaviour of the
voter. Consider n parties (A, B, C, D...), ordered in decreasing order of the
expected number of votes. That is, the voter expects party A to win, party B to
come second, party C to come third, and so on down the list.
At this
point there are several options:
- The voter supports party A. In
this case, the voter will cast his ballot for party A.
- The voter
supports party B. In this case, the voter will cast his ballot for party B, in
the hope of defeating party A.
- The voter supports party C. Now it gets
tricky. If the voter votes for party C, he expects that his vote will not count.
Therefore, he has a choice; he can either vote for the least objectionable of (A
or B), in the hope of shutting the other one out; he can go with a burst of
optimism to vote for C; or he can give up on the whole mess and stay at home,
expecting that his vote will not count in any case.
The result of
this is great strength in parties A and B, with parties C, D, E etc. not even in
the running; at the same time, you get vast numbers of voters staying at home.
Note that this is independant of what parties A and B stand
for.
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Now, consider parties A and B. Party A knows
that party B is the only real competition they have; therefore, they must appear
better than party B to those people whose vote counts (i.e. those in
the 'swing states'). And vice-versa for party B.
Therefore, either
parties A or B can campaign equally well be building up their own leader or
bringing down the opposing candidate, leading to high levels of mudslinging in
political discourse.
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Now, recall that there are
only two parties. Unless both are diametrically opposed on every single issue,
there will be issues that they agree on. (In general, they will maintain an
artificial disagreement on one or more contentious issues, just to persuade
people to go to the polls to keep the other group out; these few issues will
form the majority of their rhetoric but the minority of their policies). On the
issues in which both parties are in perfect agreement, the voter has no choice.
If party A and party B agree that software patents are good, then software
patents will be there; the voter has no
choice.
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The fix to this bug is simple; remove the
electoral college step from the political process. Have elections run on a
nationwide popular vote instead.
A suitable temporary patch would be to
have each electoral college apply their votes in proportion to the voters in the
state; that is, if 50% of people vote for party A, then party A gets 50% of the
electoral college votes. This wouldn't be quite as good as the fix - in effect,
it adds a level of pixellation to the voting results - but it would be a lot
better than nothing.
The expected effects of this change include, but
are not limited to:
- Better voter turnout
- Lower barriers
to entry for new parties
- More parties to choose between, making it
more likely that a voter will find a party that represents his viewpoint
closely
- More campaign attention being paid to states that are not
swing states
- Very likely a change in the political power
structure
Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to apply this
fix; I don't have access to the source code of the American government system,
and I am not sure where to send it to someone who does. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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