These are the 10 things people don't realize about elections

George Washington

1. First Past the Post comes with several major flaws. It creates the spoiler effect which means that with more than two candidates no candidate can win a majority, and this can lead to politicians getting elected who most of the voters oppose.

2. The only system that is worse for people than First Past the Post is a delegate system. This is what we use for the Electoral College and Presidential Primaries. Delegates are worse because they make the minority vote in states have no say in the general election outside of Nebraska and Maine. Even within Nebraska, if you are in the minority in your congressional district, your vote has no impact on the national result. This is contrary to the idea of one person one vote, which is the fundamental principal our democracy is based on.

3. There have been 4 times in American history where the next President lost the popular vote. The first time was with John Quincy Adams versus the genocidal maniac who had an unhealthy addiction to duels, Andrew Jackson. The second time was Rutherford B. Hayes being defeated by Samuel J. Tilden in 1876. The third time was when Al Gore beat George W. Bush. The 4th time was when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to win the popular vote, in 2016. To date, no woman who has been nominated to their party has lost the popular vote for President

4. The Electoral College was formed to defend slavery. If slaves had not been counted as 3/5 of a person, than abolitionist President John Adams would have been elected over known rapist slaveholder Thomas Jefferson in 1800. The Electoral College defended slavery again in 1824, and millions of people were held in bondage for 60 more years because of that most peculiar of American Institutions.

5. The American Primary System was completely reformed in 1972. Before then, most States didn't have a popular vote for the Presidency at all, and the Presidential candidates were selected by party insiders. In 1972 that changed and soon everyone had the opportunity to vote for the Presidential Primary.

6. The Presidential Primary drives down turnout. The Presidential Primary is detrimental to American democracy in several ways. Combined with the peculiar institution of the Electoral College it fully shuts out third party voices and gives significant power to those who are already well connected. It starts in two of the whitest states in the United States, and by the time most people have voted, many candidates have already dropped out. It makes America's election season last over a year, unlike any other country. This draws on the American psyche, distracting from what our government is currently doing, distracts from local races, and is bad for Democracy.

7. America's original system was more similar to the Parliamentary systems of Europe. The first thing that people forget is that Electors weren't originally locked into the votes of the People. Similar to a Parliamentary system where the ordinary person has almost no say at all on who their head of government will be. Whereas in the UK the Prime Minister is elected by Parliament, our Electoral College is equal in size to Congress (until the 23rd amendment which granted the District of Columbia 3 electoral college votes) and the electors were decided on a state by state basis. The Marshall Court in the early years of the United States significantly moved us towards a more centralized government, particularly with multiple decisions that moved power from the States to the Federal government.

John Marshall

8. America didn't vote for our Senators until 1913. Until then they were elected by our State Legislatures. In the early days you had to own land to vote at all in most states. Suffrage in the United States has been constantly expanding ever since independence, and the movement now for universal absentee voting and ranked voting, is just continuing that American tradition of constantly expanding freedom further. Being the first modern democracy with the oldest extant Constitution in the world gives us a unique standing among the world's democracies in terms of what has been tested and tried here first, or has been adopted from abroad.

9. In 2004 Howard Dean broke against tradition by focusing on small donors and extending his social media as a major campaigning tool. Until this time, Democrats had focused substantially on bigger donors. Howard Dean soon became the Chair of the DNC after his failed Presidential bid. As chair his leadership gave Democrats the Senate, then the house, and then Barack Obama used the same strategy to win the primary and then win the general election in a historic landslide, becoming only one of two men since 1960 to win a majority of the popular vote twice. Politics has taken a long time to adopt content marketing. Politics has taken a long time to adopt content marketing. There is a huge opening to become a dominant player in this subsection of the market this November with legislative and congressional races happening across the United States, and also in other democracies. This could be the year that this changes. Since Howard Dean focused on smaller donors in 2004, this led to Barack Obama leading a successful grassroots campaign in 2008 which led him to win the Presidency. Content marketing could be the next major political innovation in politics which determines who wins and loses campaigns. HieroFlux is ready to be the company which leads the way in this sector. Focus on legislative and local races has significantly increased over the last 10 years, and out of 7,383 state legislators in the country, there is a lot of room for an increase in marketing in this area which will determine winners and losers in the election this November.

10. America is right now going through a significant shift in our election system. For the first time in history, multiple states used ranked voting in the Democratic Primary and 2020 will be the first Presidential election in history where one state will use ranked voting. Ranked voting ensures that every vote counts as long as the voter fills out their ballot properly. Many other states have growing FairVote movements today to continue to improve our elections, so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this Earth.

Published using Hieroflux

How to make a fair election in the United States

List of Presidential elections in my lifetime Democrats have won: 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016.

List of Presidential elections in my lifetime Republicans have won: 2004.

Despite this fact that Clinton won by over 2 million votes last year, and that the Democratic party consistently wins more votes than the Republicans in nationwide elections, the only way to give the Democrats a real chance of this being reflected in the house using our current election method is to gerrymander in their favor. This is because of how Americans are split geographically.

It is impossible to make First Past the Post Single Member District (FPTP SMD) a truly proportional system no matter how you gerrymander. You will always end up with wasted votes, particularly in urban cores where you can get candidates winning by over 80% of the vote, and places where parties simply decide to not run a candidate due to there being no chance of winning.

What this does is it denies Americans a real choice in who elects us. Every vote past the 50% mark in an election is a wasted vote, because the election outcome would not have changed if that person had changed their vote or abstained. The FPTP SMD system inevitably increases the number of wasted votes in the country. Five Thirty Eight has shown we will never be able to make a system which accurately represents the desires of America with this system in their current project analyzing gerrymandering. It is not possible.

There are several solutions of course, mixed-member proportional, party-list, and single transferable vote are the most commonly used in the world today which work better to accurately represent the will of the people.

Party list is used in a large number of countries. Instead of voting for candidates directly, voters vote for the party they like the most, usually with only one vote. There are multiple ways of apportioning seats. There are many countries which use this system and end up with multiple competing parties, none of which has too much power, keeping them all in check and relatively responsive to the people. As long as a party is allowed to get into power if they win one seat this system can function extremely well, which is seen in Argentina, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, and many more. This also minimizes wasted votes. In a 435 seat legislature (to pick a semi-random number) under party list the number of wasted votes in this system is limited to 0.23% of total votes passed.

Mixed-Member Proportional is used in Germany, Bolivia, Lesotho, and New Zealand. This keeps the FPTP SMD at the local level, but then has a party list on top of that. There is a fixed number of districts and representatives coming from that level, on top of which you add members from the party list system as described above. Usually this is done until the percentage of seats each party has is as close as possible to the percentage they received on the party list which usually uses FPTP. You still usually end up with two main parties and smaller parties needed to form a coalition in the long run if you have a high threshold like Germany has which prevents smaller parties from gaining influence. That is one reform I believe Germany needs to do in order to make their system work better. You can still end up with large numbers of wasted votes at the district level, but having a flexible size of your legislature can fix this problem. The percent of votes which can be wasted is again limited to 1 divided by the number of total seats which are done by party list. The limit of wasted first mark votes is still 50% of votes passed in every district, assuming the district level uses FPTP.

The third option is used in Australia and Ireland, and that is the Single Transferable Vote. Candidates run in districts, and there are multiple winners for each district. As a ranked voting system, the candidate with the lowest vote count is eliminated and their votes are redistributed until the number of candidates who have reached the threshold required to be elected (usually number of votes / (number of seats + 1) + 1) is equal to the number of seats available. This is the Droop Quota and it gives the right answer all of the time for how many votes are required to be elected. Candidates represent their area and every district is competitive. You could theoretically use STV instead of FPTP in an MMP system, but this is unlikely.

With STV the biggest question is how you are going to redistrict, and there are several good ways to do this, you can focus on single split line or making districts which are as round as possible, you can try to follow existing boundaries. But the biggest point of all is that as long as you do not specifically gerrymander to favor one party or another your number of wasted votes is very low. You strike a balance between local representatives, so people who are out of the political mainstream can get elected which is one potential disadvantage to a party list system, and voters can vote for whoever they want for their first choice without their vote being wasted if their candidate is less popular the other candidates. In a 5 person race the number of votes wasted is limited to less than 20% of total ballots cast.

A fair election in the United States would use one of these three systems. I personally favor STV because I don't like giving political parties power (which I know is a very American sentiment) but I also like the extremely small number of wasted votes party list provides.

We need election reform as soon as possible. We have three main options which are tried and true across the world. Now we need to implement one of them. It doesn't matter what issue you care about, health care, education, infrastructure, foreign relations, environment, tax policy, economic regulation, scientific investment, if you don't have a good government you will not be able to reliably get good policy on any other issue and corruption will increase.

Appendix A: Maine has already voted to allow ranked voting for state elections, on Wikipedia there is a phrase which I believe needs translating to English:
Bullshit: "On October 23, 2017, the Legislature voted to delay implementation of the RCV law for all races until 2021, to allow for time to pass a state constitutional amendment to allow it.
English: "On October 23, 2017, the Legislature voted to delay implementation of the RCV law for all races until 2021, to allow one more reelection before all the motherfuckers are kicked out of office because if they really wanted it to happen they already would have passed a constitutional amendment."

Appendix B: Glossary
FPTP: First Past the Post, the system used by the United States for Congressional Elections
MMD: Multi-member district
MMP: Mixed-Member Proportional
SMD: Single-member district
STV: Single Transferable Vote
Trifecta: when one party has control of the Executive and Legislative branches of a bicameral Presidential system (eg. The United States except Nebraska)

Appendix C, news update:
Putin is the first President in American history to have a government shutdown when his party has a trifecta. (Oh, it's Trump? Silly me, a small typo, I got into the habit of substituting the Premier of the USSR with their satellite states when studying the Cold War. Wait, Russi is no longer the USSR? I couldn't tell the difference.)

India 2014 shows the faults of FPTP

The largest election in the history of the world just finished in India, with a turnout of over 800 million people. The election saw a landslide victory in terms of seats for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been criticized as being too far right by America's Republican Party, so that is not a good thng.

I'm analyzing the details of the election by vote count and party share in the Lok Sabha and this is like the most recent elections in Canada and the UK which saw an immense difference between vote share and seat share by party in the election. Here is a basic summary table for the largest winners of the vote and seats:

Party	Vote share	Seat share	Election error (Seat share-Vote Share
BJP (right-wing)	31.3%	51.9%	+20.6%
Indian national congress (center-left) (INC)	19.4%	8.1%	-10.7%
Bahujan Samaj Party (center-left) (BSP)	4.2%	0	-4.2%
All India Trinamool Congress (center-left)	3.9%	6.3%	+2.4%
Samajwadi Party (SP) (center-left)	3.4%	1%	-2.4%
All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam	3.3%	6.8%	+3.5%
Communist Party of India (far-left)	3.3%	0.1%	-3.2%
Independents	3.0%	0.6%	-2.4%

Needless to say it is obvious that India is not doing well with First Past the Post given the extreme swing in vote share and seat share. This is not healthy for democracy and they clearly need to reform their system so that their elections can be more fair. Looking a the previous year at breakdown state by state shows that this huge swing which is almost certainly due to vote splitting goes down to the local constituency level which creates huge imbalances with over 500 seats in the Lok Sabha. The only solution that will guarantee local representation along with proportionality is the single transferable vote.

References:
Official website
2014 Wikipedia
2009 Wikipedia