A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Every now and then I think about what I would do IF I ruled the world. Today, I was thinking about voting reform for the US.

1. Get rid of the electoral college. It was a great idea in the beginning because travel was difficult and communications weren’t as swift. But in today’s world of instant communication, where the votes are tallied and counted within hours of the closing of the poles there’s no need to have it — it’s another way that the will of the people can be changed by a group that really, in many states, isn’t even obligated to vote inline with the popular vote for that state. So, get rid of it. The vote is the vote and that’s that.
2. Add two new categories to every slate of candidates. First, “None of the Above”. If “None of the Above” wins the office then none of the candidates who are running are allowed to run again for that office for at least 2 years. The office needs a new slate and another election. So, it costs a bit more to run a second election but finally the people might actually get a slate where they are not voting for the lesser of two evils but actually voting for someone. Second, “Don’t care”. This isn’t the same as “None of the Above” because it’s similar to leaving the ballot blank. What it provides is a measure of voter apathy. If “Don’t Care” wins, well, it’s an indication that this is a bad group running for office particularly if “None of the Above” comes in second.
3. Count votes with the “Australian Run-Off System”. This method has a lot of different names but that’s the one I’m familiar with. Basically, voters rank the candidates as first choice, second choice, and so forth. You don’t have to rank them all you could just have a first choice pick. However, if the first choice doesn’t win by a specified margin then the candidate with the lowest number of votes is thrown out and the votes are recalculated so that all the ballots that had the disqualified person in 1st place, now have their 2nd place person become their 1st place person, and all the ballots are counted again. You can read here for a more detailed explanation as it’s used in the Hugo voting. This would allow 3rd party candidates to actually have a shot at winning. Right now 3rd party candidates really don’t have a chance as so many voters are trying to make sure that the greater evil doesn’t win and don’t want to split votes to get who they want because they have to make sure the evil one doesn’t win. With this system, if your first candidate is eliminated, you get to automatically try again with your second place candidate and your vote isn’t “wasted” by voting for someone that “can’t win”.
4. Get rid of the proprietary and secret electronic voting machines. If we’re going to use electronic machines, then they should be open source. All the code should be available for anyone to inspect, and the certified code that is going to be used should be check-summed so that the polling places can verify that the certified code is, in fact, what’s being used. Furthermore, the raw vote counts should be made immediately available after the vote for review. Lastly, every voting machine should print out a record which is reviewed by the voter and then placed in a hopper for recounting purposes. A certain percentage of voting districts should be randomly selected and have recounts performed and compared to the electronic totals. Elections results in America should be the property of the American people and therefore be as open and transparent as it is possible to be.

That’s it for now. I really think that some of these should be instituted as a way to make sure the actual will of the people prevails, rather than the whole thing being to see that the lesser of several evils doesn’t win. I probably still won’t like the outcome but at least I’ll feel that every candidate had a fair shot at the office they wanted.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 3:40 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.