[EM] The Global Fight For Electoral Justice: A Primer

[Juho Laatu]

> On 02 Jan 2017, at 02:05, ElectionMethods <electionmethods at votefair.org> wrote:
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> On 1/1/2017 11:35 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>> I guess in many cases the rule is that those who have power want to stay in power.  ...
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> Here is an important pattern worth recognizing:
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> Politicians and political parties (under puppet-like control of the biggest campaign contributors) tend to adopt changes that HIDE the SYMPTOMS of the unfairness.  Yet hiding symptoms does not solve the underlying unfairness, which is the use of single-mark ballots (even in open-list PR).

The political financing problem is closely related to the power hungriness problem. Also money gives power (not only the used election method etc.), and people want to maintain that power (and increase it if possible).

Those that are in power always tend to explain the situation in nicest possible terms. That could be called "hiding". That doesn't necessarily mean that they would intentionally lie or bend the truth. It is also typical that people believe in what they want to believe and what is useful and pleasant for them to believe.

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> Here are examples of how unfairness symptoms are hidden:
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> * Term limits are sometimes considered as a way to kick out unpopular incumbents, without realizing that fair elections would be a better way to kick out unpopular incumbents -- without also kicking out popular incumbents.

Yes, fair elections would be the best approach. I can understand also use of limits in terms in selected places if that is justified e.g. by the need to get things moving, bring new ideas in and avoid stagnation.

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> * Primary elections in the U.S. hide vote splitting so that it occurs where the winner is never from the "wrong" political party.  (This is where the biggest unfairness occurs, through the use of money-based tactics such as funding "spoiler" candidates.)

Yes, one problem is that all decisions seem to be majority decisions made by the voters (with wide support).

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> * The U.S. two-party system (i.e. effectively blocking third-party candidates from general elections) prevents the vote splitting that used to occur in U.S. general elections.
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> * Using the "national popular vote" instead of the Electoral College (to choose a U.S. president) is a way to hide the unfair parts of the Electoral College -- but in a way that would fail the majority requirement if there were more than two main candidates.

The Electoral College approach may fail to respect the will of the majority also with two candidates.

One problem in the USA is that it is a federation where different states have agreed to participate in the union with the agreed terms, which may include e.g. disproportional amount of decision making power etc. But I guess those considerations are not the biggest show stopper when planning electoral reforms.

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> * Open primaries attempt to "solve" the problem of independent voters not being allowed to vote in primary elections, but the math does not work because the two candidates with the "most votes" are not necessarily the most popular.  Instead of voters abandoning the two dominant political parties, it would make more sense to use fairer voting methods so that voters can regain control of the two main parties (which are now heavily controlled through money tactics used by the biggest campaign contributors).

Open primaries have been used also elsewhere as a strategical trick, maybe to elect some specific candidate or to guarantee wide support also among voters of other parties.

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> * Unbiased (but not necessarily fair!) ways of choosing district boundaries are often recommended as "solutions" to gerrymandering, yet a fully fair voting method would produce roughly the same election results regardless of where the (equal-population) district boundaries are drawn.

In multiparty countries districts typically have multiple seats, which makes the gerrymandering problem much weaker (mostly below the horizon, but not totally).

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> * Public funding of election campaigns attempts to "solve" the problem that money can be used to influence election results.  The real solution is to ban single-mark ballots, because better voting methods are not easily vulnerable to funding influence.

I support public funding and limitations in funding as the main rule for most societies. With internet (and voluntary media participation) the costs of distributing all relevant information to the voters are not high, and it would not harm the democratic process to set some limits e.g. to money spent in advertising in the media. The idea is after all "one man - one vote" and not "one dollar - one vote". But each society should pick its own style, maybe trying to avoid the trap of money being a too dominant factor.

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> * Very importantly, proportional representation (PR) is used to hide the unfairness of using single-mark ballots and the unfairness of electing just one winner per district.  In other words, PR adjusts the number of winners from each party to hide the symptom of some parties winning too many seats and other parties winning too few seats.
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> The pattern is that, alas, most voters would rather try (without historic success) various "fixes" that deal with the SYMPTOMS, rather than learn how vote counting should be done (and then ban the use of single-mark ballots).

Note that many strong PR countries use single-mark ballots in some sense. For example so that you can vote only for one party (closed list) or only for one candidate (open list).

BR, Juho


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> In other words, political forces are only willing to adopt changes that HIDE the SYMPTOMS of unfairness, without abandoning the use of single-mark ballots.
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> As time permits I hope to create some videos that explain the above-listed concepts.
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> Please, if anyone else might be interested in creating such videos, please do!!  There is a need for more videos than I could ever create.  If video-creation software seems challenging, I suggest looking at the iPad app named Explain Everything, which is very easy to use.
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> I now realize that most people "don't read."  Instead most people learn about elections through internet videos (especially on YouTube) and graphics used in TV news broadcasts.  As an author of books this is discouraging, yet admittedly I, myself, sometimes prefer to learn from well-scripted videos.  Thank goodness you-all do read!
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> Reminder: Many Canadians are now learning about elections, but they are searching for "first past the post," not "plurality" or "elections" as a search term.  I saw that a YouTube video with the words "first past the post" had millions of views, whereas other videos on the same topic (but without those words) had far fewer views.
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> May 2017 bring greater awareness of how voting should be done. Happy new year!
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> 
> Richard Fobes
> 
> 
> On 1/1/2017 11:35 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>>> On 01 Jan 2017, at 21:16, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>>> On 01/01/2017 07:06 PM, ElectionMethods wrote:
>>>> (I presume closed-list PR is dominant in Europe because many members of
>>>> parliament would be unlikely to get re-elected under open-list PR.)
>>> If the "old parties heading off the socialist challenge" theory is correct, it would also explain why closed list PR is so common; the old parties weren't in it for egalitarian purposes, but rather as a necessary compromise. Open list would not have been required in such a scenario, just interparty PR. The only situation that would force open list would be if closed list would have led to too mediocre candidates within the old parties and thus to voters flocking to the socialists anyway.
>> I guess in many cases the rule is that those who have power want to stay in power. If there are two parties in power, they don't want to donate it to the third and fourth party. If there is some level of proportionality in the system, the incumbent parties don't want to distribute that power to parties that are smaller than themselves. If party officials can decide which candidates will be first on the party list, they don't like the idea of letting voters decide which candidates will be elected.
>> 
>> The main rule is that those who are in power want to concentrate more power to themselves. This applies also to civil servants and other interest groups. Democracy (the spirit of giving power to the people) takes steps forward occasionally. Small steps in the other direction are possible all the time. This means that if one wants to keep the status quo, there is a need to defend the system all the time in order to avoid those small steps in the opposite direction.
>> 
>> BR, Juho
>> 
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