MMP for me. Produces results which are broadly regarded as fair and easily to understand, but does not result in an excessively long ballot paper or confuse voters.
My city recently implemented single transferrable vote for local council elections. It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.
Many people gave up and just marked a single candidate or got confused and didn’t bother voting at all. This was for an election where each ward returned three councillors. CGP Grey actually criticised implementations if STV where each constituency returns only three representatives, insisting it should be five, or more. In a world of short attention spans, we have to accept that asking people to research potentially 20 candidates and even just pick their top five will result in a large number of people getting frustrated and giving up.
It’s all well and good to have a system which is mathematically optimal in your view, but the problem is that elections also have to retain the confidence of the voters to be effective, and if voters cannot understand a highly-complex system then they will not have confidence in its fairness and will be easily tricked by people with ulterior motives who tell them it’s actually rigged against them.
It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.
I doubt that was really the public speaking. It’ll be politically active people who fear the change. People just need it explained to them a couple of times.
Ranking 12 people is well within most people’s grasp when parties are also involved. Most know their preference of paries, so that gives you gross blocking and then if you have particular knowledge of individuals you can apply it. The main thing is to make it clear they are voting for N winners.
You need to have randomised ballot order though. If somebody is just voting along party lines they will write 1-2-3 down the page for that party. If everyone does this it skews things.
MMP for me. Produces results which are broadly regarded as fair and easily to understand, but does not result in an excessively long ballot paper or confuse voters.
My city recently implemented single transferrable vote for local council elections. It resulted in voters receiving a ballot paper asking them to rank over a dozen candidates and the response to this by voters was quite negative because they felt that the process of intelligently researching and comparing that many candidates was unnecessarily laborious and people found the electoral system confusing.
Many people gave up and just marked a single candidate or got confused and didn’t bother voting at all. This was for an election where each ward returned three councillors. CGP Grey actually criticised implementations if STV where each constituency returns only three representatives, insisting it should be five, or more. In a world of short attention spans, we have to accept that asking people to research potentially 20 candidates and even just pick their top five will result in a large number of people getting frustrated and giving up.
It’s all well and good to have a system which is mathematically optimal in your view, but the problem is that elections also have to retain the confidence of the voters to be effective, and if voters cannot understand a highly-complex system then they will not have confidence in its fairness and will be easily tricked by people with ulterior motives who tell them it’s actually rigged against them.
I doubt that was really the public speaking. It’ll be politically active people who fear the change. People just need it explained to them a couple of times.
Ranking 12 people is well within most people’s grasp when parties are also involved. Most know their preference of paries, so that gives you gross blocking and then if you have particular knowledge of individuals you can apply it. The main thing is to make it clear they are voting for N winners.
You need to have randomised ballot order though. If somebody is just voting along party lines they will write 1-2-3 down the page for that party. If everyone does this it skews things.