December 01, 2002

Why Do We Vote, Again?

So, here's where I'm at on the group-voting/social-choice thing.

  1. My own interest behind this is researching what it would take to have the government represent the people's views as closely as possible
  2. To fix the counting of single-winner elections, a stable counting method is required, which is what got me looking at IRV versus Condorcet versus Borda versus Approval, etc.
  3. Even if a a stable counting method is found, a vote can still be flawed if all participating voters do not equally feel they have an available candidate that represents their views. This begs the question of how to increase the pool of candidates.
  4. Even if the candidate pool is "perfect" as described in #3, there is a point where picking a single-winner to represent all people among a geographical district just doesn't make sense, which leads to my curiosity of multiple-winner elections and representation, such as direct representation (where people can just choose their assigned representative regardless of geography and assign their vote/pledge to them).
  5. Even if direct representatives are elected, there is the matter of how that body of representatives will come to decisions among themselves (which might take us right back through steps 1 through 4)
  6. And finally, even if we did end up having a government-counting solution that represented the public's views EXACTLY, it begs the question of if that is what we really even want? To a point I agree with the philosophy that a representative is actually a compromise between what the public thinks it wants, and what the representative knows the public needs due to inside knowledge the public wouldn't have the patience to learn! In other words, if we all had the power to actually assign where in the government expenditures all our tax dollars would go, I just can't help but believe we'd be in an extraordinarily huge mess.
So I guess I have gotten stuck because I can't actually identify what my actual objective is here - it's elusive. To a point it seems that reflecting the public's preferences too exactly would actually be counterproductive.

In terms of single-winner voting, I'm still mulling over the interface. There are a lot of things to consider, like whether to force users to rank every candidate, whether to let them specify a cut-off point, above which is only the candidates they would really like to win, and whether to let them specify another cut-off point, below which are the candidates they really hate... Posted by Curt at December 1, 2002 12:55 AM