Monday, October 31, 2005

Another Slice of Bread

     I entered another idea in the Since Sliced Bread contest.

Americans use the most primitive imaginable voting system. Each voter gets a single mark, a lone check, a solitary scratch, for each race before them.

Lost in the Dark Ages, the mathematics of voting was reformulated by a dear, close friend of Thomas Jefferson's, the Marquis de Condorcet. Condorcet's system was based on the idea of a ballot where each voter would get to rank, 1st through last, each candidate. Here are the requirements of the ideal voting system:

Condorcet: If a candidate is preferred to every other candidate, one-on-one, that candidate should win.

Cloneproof: If a party runs 10 identical candidates, it should not increase their chances.

Monotonic: Increasing a candidate's ranking can't cause them to lose, decreasing can't cause them to win.

The Schulze and Tideman systems meet all these criteria.

For the voter, this system is less complicated than the system currently in place in Australia(STV).

We get one chance, every other year, to let our voices be heard. Don't limit the expression of the voter with our dark ages system.

     My earlier idea is here.  It is about "right to work" laws.

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