In my opinion, the goodness of a system seems only weakly related to its structure and more strongly related to its people navigating that structure. This makes me distrust these types of proposals that seek to fix the goodness of a political system through adjusting its structure.
In addition, I cannot ever advocate for more complexity in our political system in favor of more bells and whistles. Complexity is a daemon when it’s comes to diagnosis. When I am trying to figure out what has made the system become operated by bad men, the last thing I want is to contend is the dynamics of thousands of pages of law and dissertations on game theory. Make it simple, make it good!
Yes, you are correct, but allow me to better hone in the point I wanted to make.
Within a simple democratic election, you have two candidates: A and B. If A is an 8/10 in goodness and B is a 7/10, the process of selecting them is weak compared to an alternative election wherein we have candidates: C and D, who are 2/10 and 3/10.
In this case, The goodness of the system is weakly related to it’s ‘election’ structure and more strongly related to the candidates that are able to run.
My mistake was failing to mention that if we have an election system that filters out some candidates from running (I.e. A and B can’t run) then there is a decrease in goodness.
What I meant to get at was that I am generally distrusting of system change that seeks to increase the goodness by adding complexity to the structure of the selection process, because I believe it adds more opportunities to filter out an A or B.
In the case of our current two-filter system, interested primary voters select between similar options, A and C, and, B and D, then they select between the winner of that contest. Voters are given a simple understanding of what they are doing, select the best candidate to represent your cluster of interests and then we select who is best overall. C and D only get through if cluster voters cannot recognize them as worse.
In ranked choice, I am asked as an individual voter to rank who I want in order and then be unable to understand why certain people won because of the complexity in tabulating. In this case, I might select A, B, D, and C and when the results come out that D and C got through anyway, I am confused in my analysis of why.
I can more easily recognize the reason C and D got selected in the first system compared to the second one meaning that the problem is more easily addressable: It is a problem in the clusters ability to determine goodness or a mismatch between my understanding of goodness and the clusters. Both can be simply understood.
I hope my point is a bit more clear. Thank you for your response.
Thanks for the follow-up. I think that an Independent primary increases the chances that Candidates A and B make it to the general election without being forced to change their policy stands.
Yes, ranked-choice is a bit more complicated, but nothing that typical voters cannot handle after getting used to the system. The conversion to ranked-choice is essential for ensuring that Candidates A and B are competitive in the general election with the Democratic and Republican candidates.
I think virtually all voters understand what a "second-favorite candidate" is, and pollsters already regularly ask that question. It is also easy to publish the final results in an understandable way.
Once the Democratic and Republican primaries no longer have a veto power over all candidates, then the chance of Candidates A and B deciding to run and actually win increases dramatically.
In our current system, typical voters do not even vote in the primaries and 80+% live in districts where only one party is competitive. So they cannot choose between Candidates A, B, C and D.
I still do not think the increase in complexity is worth the abstract benefits. Complexity tends to devolve into much, much larger problems. I am very sensitive to it based on my experience with computer systems, wherein people have added small amounts of complexity into systems to obtain theoretical results which dramatically made the system unworkable.
However, your discussion on veto power is real. I would like to suggest a design that I consider simpler and does not have this characteristic: Jethro elections.
The idea is that a group of ten people form a minyan (group of ten voters) and select a leader. The leaders come together based on geographic locality to form a council and they elect a council leader. The council leaders select a regional leader and so on, up until they select a president. At any time, each group with a big enough majority can ‘deselect’.
In this view, so long that a group of people at each level can recognize A and B as better than C and D, they will still be promoted.
This is just a quick thought, but I consider it rather simple to understand and lacking that veto quality. I believe a third-party candidate in this system, so long as they can convince at each level, would be able to succeed.
To scale up from a group of 10 people to 300 million would require either:
1) an enormous number of rounds, or
2) much larger groups than 10
With each round, the original intentions of the first group of 10 of citizens would get diluted by political activists with very different preferences.
And I believe that it would inevitably drift towards a Totalitarian society. What you describe is in theory exactly how the Communist parties are supposed to function, although in practice the results are the opposite of democracy. The final group of 10 (if that is what you are proposing) would become a de facto Politburo with enormous power.
When I consider complexity, I am considerate towards what an individual operator of the system experiences in terms of analysis. I.E. I do this and this occurs and here is what others think. I would not say that is more complex from that view.
To illustrate this, imagine what actually happens when you send text on sub-stack. I know that the text has to be encrypted, transcribed into a packet, made sure that it actually arrived at the server, properly put into the database, notify the respondent to have them download the text, etc…
All you had to do was type and click a button and it arrived. This is extremely simple for you. It is incredible that our markets were able to make that happen! You put in what you want to say and get your voice out to people, easy and simple.
(Also, the idea that this is somehow related to communism is quite weird, no? it is very, very pro-hierarchical, something that communism is explicitly not.)
(As far as drifting towards totalitarian, that is under the assumption that the people will select local leaders who will select national leaders who will select a president who will advocate for totalizing policy. As far as authoritarian, you can imagine this existing with other checks and balances that already exist.)
(The idea is mostly inspired by the electoral college and the senate, which were thrashed by the 17th amendment. I believe the 17th amendment was the wrong solution to a real problem: local legislatures focusing more on national politics than local ones. And the 17th amendment did not cure this problem at all.)
How about finally ratifying the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (CRA)? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment ) At this time, there are 435 US representatives, so with a US population of roughly 330 million, there is one representative for approximately 760,000 US constituents. If the CRA is enacted, requiring one representative for every 50,000 constituents, then the US House requires a lot more offices and chairs for its new population of 6,600 representatives.
Imagine the chaos! How would the US benefit? First, who would have the time to gerrymander all the voting districts? More important: the Two Party stranglehold would be weakened with a (more) unmanageable representative population. Even if the new 6,600-member house was mostly composed of Democrats or Republicans, members should find it easier to caucus with like-minded members per individual bill. Ideally, the result would be more interaction based on issues rather than based on strict party lines.
I think the reason why it has not been ratified is exactly because of the chaos that you mention. It might have a small impact on increasing the number of parties in Congress, but I do not think that it would have a sizeable impact on increasing party competition. Most viable third parties do not have the geographical concentration to get plurality support in any district, no matter how small it is.
Plus amending the US Constitution is much harder than passing state-level initiatives (which is what I propose).
I know that in general, the US Constitution leaves electoral rules up to the states. And many states have those rules written in their constitution. Many of those same states enable voters to amend the state constitution via initiative and referenda, which make them far more easily changed than the US Constitution.
I have never learned exactly how or why the Founders settled on a district size of around 30,000 as suitable (and that included nonvoting women and slaves, right?). That seems kind of large for a society with at most 6 mph transport and communications. What might be a suitable level given our current state of email and internet communications, plus next day air transport, etc.? My own guess is something like 150,000 would be large enough to give us a about 2000 districts, so enough reps to make it more difficult to corrupt them, but small enough to still permit citizen feedback to and from the rep to be manageable and credible.
Michael's critique below might still apply at this level of reps, too.
I do not know how the size of districts was arrived at.
My guess is that the Founders looked at the size of colonial legislatures in Colonial British America and then said "that seems like a reasonable number" and then just did the math.
I also wonder how they arrived at 2 Senators per state, instead of 1 or 3. I would think 3 would make more sense, as it would allow for a Senate election in each state every 2 years.
As for who counts, the US Constitution is vague on that point, except for the 3/5 clauses which reduced the representation of slave-owning states. Currently, legal and illegal immigrants count towards US House representation (and state as well?), but I do not think that the US Supreme Court has ever been asked to make a ruling on the issue.
> The Democratic party has moved progressively to the Left, so that now it better represents a very small ideological minority composed of about 10-15% of Americans. The Republican party has done the same in the opposite direction.
No it hasn't. The Republican Party has also moved to the left, just not as fast as the Democrats.
Thanks for the comment. Obviously, this is subject to interpretation and varies greatly by issue, but I believe that:
1) Democrats have moved leftward since the mid-1960s, and they have moved particularly fast since 2010. This is true on almost every issue.
2) Republicans have moved rightward from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.
Since then I do not see a clear drift although many Republicans have changed stands on foreign policy, foreign trade, and immigration. It is not clear to me whether this should be considered a drift towards the Left or towards the Right.
I would say the Newt Gingrich Republicans of the 1990s are no more or less conservative than MAGA Republicans of 2020s.
The current Republican stance on immigration, or gay marriage, or nearly any other issue is the same as Obama's during the beginning of his first term.
In my opinion, the goodness of a system seems only weakly related to its structure and more strongly related to its people navigating that structure. This makes me distrust these types of proposals that seek to fix the goodness of a political system through adjusting its structure.
In addition, I cannot ever advocate for more complexity in our political system in favor of more bells and whistles. Complexity is a daemon when it’s comes to diagnosis. When I am trying to figure out what has made the system become operated by bad men, the last thing I want is to contend is the dynamics of thousands of pages of law and dissertations on game theory. Make it simple, make it good!
Thanks for the comment.
The electoral system plays a large role in determining the type of person that wins the election.
Yes, you are correct, but allow me to better hone in the point I wanted to make.
Within a simple democratic election, you have two candidates: A and B. If A is an 8/10 in goodness and B is a 7/10, the process of selecting them is weak compared to an alternative election wherein we have candidates: C and D, who are 2/10 and 3/10.
In this case, The goodness of the system is weakly related to it’s ‘election’ structure and more strongly related to the candidates that are able to run.
My mistake was failing to mention that if we have an election system that filters out some candidates from running (I.e. A and B can’t run) then there is a decrease in goodness.
What I meant to get at was that I am generally distrusting of system change that seeks to increase the goodness by adding complexity to the structure of the selection process, because I believe it adds more opportunities to filter out an A or B.
In the case of our current two-filter system, interested primary voters select between similar options, A and C, and, B and D, then they select between the winner of that contest. Voters are given a simple understanding of what they are doing, select the best candidate to represent your cluster of interests and then we select who is best overall. C and D only get through if cluster voters cannot recognize them as worse.
In ranked choice, I am asked as an individual voter to rank who I want in order and then be unable to understand why certain people won because of the complexity in tabulating. In this case, I might select A, B, D, and C and when the results come out that D and C got through anyway, I am confused in my analysis of why.
I can more easily recognize the reason C and D got selected in the first system compared to the second one meaning that the problem is more easily addressable: It is a problem in the clusters ability to determine goodness or a mismatch between my understanding of goodness and the clusters. Both can be simply understood.
I hope my point is a bit more clear. Thank you for your response.
Thanks for the follow-up. I think that an Independent primary increases the chances that Candidates A and B make it to the general election without being forced to change their policy stands.
Yes, ranked-choice is a bit more complicated, but nothing that typical voters cannot handle after getting used to the system. The conversion to ranked-choice is essential for ensuring that Candidates A and B are competitive in the general election with the Democratic and Republican candidates.
I think virtually all voters understand what a "second-favorite candidate" is, and pollsters already regularly ask that question. It is also easy to publish the final results in an understandable way.
Once the Democratic and Republican primaries no longer have a veto power over all candidates, then the chance of Candidates A and B deciding to run and actually win increases dramatically.
In our current system, typical voters do not even vote in the primaries and 80+% live in districts where only one party is competitive. So they cannot choose between Candidates A, B, C and D.
Thank you for your response.
I still do not think the increase in complexity is worth the abstract benefits. Complexity tends to devolve into much, much larger problems. I am very sensitive to it based on my experience with computer systems, wherein people have added small amounts of complexity into systems to obtain theoretical results which dramatically made the system unworkable.
However, your discussion on veto power is real. I would like to suggest a design that I consider simpler and does not have this characteristic: Jethro elections.
The idea is that a group of ten people form a minyan (group of ten voters) and select a leader. The leaders come together based on geographic locality to form a council and they elect a council leader. The council leaders select a regional leader and so on, up until they select a president. At any time, each group with a big enough majority can ‘deselect’.
In this view, so long that a group of people at each level can recognize A and B as better than C and D, they will still be promoted.
This is just a quick thought, but I consider it rather simple to understand and lacking that veto quality. I believe a third-party candidate in this system, so long as they can convince at each level, would be able to succeed.
Once again, thank you for your time.
Your proposal is far more complex than mine.
To scale up from a group of 10 people to 300 million would require either:
1) an enormous number of rounds, or
2) much larger groups than 10
With each round, the original intentions of the first group of 10 of citizens would get diluted by political activists with very different preferences.
And I believe that it would inevitably drift towards a Totalitarian society. What you describe is in theory exactly how the Communist parties are supposed to function, although in practice the results are the opposite of democracy. The final group of 10 (if that is what you are proposing) would become a de facto Politburo with enormous power.
When I consider complexity, I am considerate towards what an individual operator of the system experiences in terms of analysis. I.E. I do this and this occurs and here is what others think. I would not say that is more complex from that view.
To illustrate this, imagine what actually happens when you send text on sub-stack. I know that the text has to be encrypted, transcribed into a packet, made sure that it actually arrived at the server, properly put into the database, notify the respondent to have them download the text, etc…
All you had to do was type and click a button and it arrived. This is extremely simple for you. It is incredible that our markets were able to make that happen! You put in what you want to say and get your voice out to people, easy and simple.
(Also, the idea that this is somehow related to communism is quite weird, no? it is very, very pro-hierarchical, something that communism is explicitly not.)
(As far as drifting towards totalitarian, that is under the assumption that the people will select local leaders who will select national leaders who will select a president who will advocate for totalizing policy. As far as authoritarian, you can imagine this existing with other checks and balances that already exist.)
(The idea is mostly inspired by the electoral college and the senate, which were thrashed by the 17th amendment. I believe the 17th amendment was the wrong solution to a real problem: local legislatures focusing more on national politics than local ones. And the 17th amendment did not cure this problem at all.)
How about finally ratifying the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (CRA)? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment ) At this time, there are 435 US representatives, so with a US population of roughly 330 million, there is one representative for approximately 760,000 US constituents. If the CRA is enacted, requiring one representative for every 50,000 constituents, then the US House requires a lot more offices and chairs for its new population of 6,600 representatives.
Imagine the chaos! How would the US benefit? First, who would have the time to gerrymander all the voting districts? More important: the Two Party stranglehold would be weakened with a (more) unmanageable representative population. Even if the new 6,600-member house was mostly composed of Democrats or Republicans, members should find it easier to caucus with like-minded members per individual bill. Ideally, the result would be more interaction based on issues rather than based on strict party lines.
Thanks for the comment.
I think the reason why it has not been ratified is exactly because of the chaos that you mention. It might have a small impact on increasing the number of parties in Congress, but I do not think that it would have a sizeable impact on increasing party competition. Most viable third parties do not have the geographical concentration to get plurality support in any district, no matter how small it is.
Plus amending the US Constitution is much harder than passing state-level initiatives (which is what I propose).
Given your deeper study of the topic, are there states that would also require state constitutional changes?
I do not know the answer to that question.
I know that in general, the US Constitution leaves electoral rules up to the states. And many states have those rules written in their constitution. Many of those same states enable voters to amend the state constitution via initiative and referenda, which make them far more easily changed than the US Constitution.
I have never learned exactly how or why the Founders settled on a district size of around 30,000 as suitable (and that included nonvoting women and slaves, right?). That seems kind of large for a society with at most 6 mph transport and communications. What might be a suitable level given our current state of email and internet communications, plus next day air transport, etc.? My own guess is something like 150,000 would be large enough to give us a about 2000 districts, so enough reps to make it more difficult to corrupt them, but small enough to still permit citizen feedback to and from the rep to be manageable and credible.
Michael's critique below might still apply at this level of reps, too.
I do not know how the size of districts was arrived at.
My guess is that the Founders looked at the size of colonial legislatures in Colonial British America and then said "that seems like a reasonable number" and then just did the math.
I also wonder how they arrived at 2 Senators per state, instead of 1 or 3. I would think 3 would make more sense, as it would allow for a Senate election in each state every 2 years.
As for who counts, the US Constitution is vague on that point, except for the 3/5 clauses which reduced the representation of slave-owning states. Currently, legal and illegal immigrants count towards US House representation (and state as well?), but I do not think that the US Supreme Court has ever been asked to make a ruling on the issue.
> The Democratic party has moved progressively to the Left, so that now it better represents a very small ideological minority composed of about 10-15% of Americans. The Republican party has done the same in the opposite direction.
No it hasn't. The Republican Party has also moved to the left, just not as fast as the Democrats.
Thanks for the comment. Obviously, this is subject to interpretation and varies greatly by issue, but I believe that:
1) Democrats have moved leftward since the mid-1960s, and they have moved particularly fast since 2010. This is true on almost every issue.
2) Republicans have moved rightward from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.
Since then I do not see a clear drift although many Republicans have changed stands on foreign policy, foreign trade, and immigration. It is not clear to me whether this should be considered a drift towards the Left or towards the Right.
I would say the Newt Gingrich Republicans of the 1990s are no more or less conservative than MAGA Republicans of 2020s.
The current Republican stance on immigration, or gay marriage, or nearly any other issue is the same as Obama's during the beginning of his first term.