A truly simple election system

Election day is coming up, and you have received your ballot in the mail. (I live in Washington State, everyone has mail in voting here) You open your ballot and you see the following list of candidates:

1. Joe Schmo, (D, Centrist)
2. Tom Bob, (D, Progressive)
3. Grace Moon, (D, Progressive)
4. Mary Polly, (D, libertarian leaning)
5. Betsy Ford, (D, establishment)
6. Jackie Ronald, (R, Trumpist)
7. Andrew Todd, (R, establishment)
8. George Adams, (R, Tea Party)
9. Ronald John, (Libertarian)
10. Nick Verde, (Green)

What are you to do? With 10 choices you need to decide how to vote. Let's assume you are a heavily leaning Democratic voter with progressive tendencies. There are three basic ways at the voter end this could look, in increasing simplicity:

1. First Past The Post, Top Two Primary
You simply vote for the candidate you like the most and you are done. Sounds reasonable, right? But wait... who is my neighbor voting for? Is this a fringe candidate? I live in a district with about 55% Democrats and 45% Republicans. If we all vote equally for these candidates of our leaning we will have 11% for each Democrat and If the Republicans fall in line between their three candidates each will receive 15%, which will mean that we will have two candidates who the majority of voters don't like. I'm going to make my best shot based on who my neighbor is voting for so at least one candidate of my party gets to the generic ballot. Hopefully I will be right.

First Past the Post, Voter Primary
I will cast my ballot for the candidate in my party I like the most. If I am not registered as a member of the party then I cannot vote however, so I might get disenfranchised. But since I live in a State with an open primary I am going to vote for the candidate I like most. But I am a Progressive, so we might end up with our ballot being split in two, yielding a moderate, who I could live with, but I would rather have someone who more represents my values. I will have to guess whether Tom or Grace will attract more voters.

Party List
I don't have a choice of which individual represents me. I'll vote for the Democrats nominate, and hope we get enough seats so at least one progressive gets into office and that they are high enough on the list.

Ranked Voting
It doesn't really matter what my neighbors or the party think of the candidates, my vote is mine and it will get reallocated if the candidate I choose is not the top pick, so my vote counts as long as I finish filling out my ballot. I will vote for Grace, Tom, Joe, Mary, Betsy, Nick. Ronald, Andrew, George, and then Jackie as my least favorite candidate. Great, I'm done and my vote will count no matter what.

Ranked voting is the easiest election system for voters to understand. You don't have to be strategic, you vote for whoever you think is best, and your vote will count no matter what.The thought process is simple, you only have to worry about your personal preference, it doesn't matter how your neighbor votes as long as you fill out your ballot your vote will count.

Also, congratulations Maine on maintaining Ranked voting. Hopefully another state will follow in your footsteps soon.

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.)

The Most American Candidate, part 2, 2017 edition

If we were to design a candidate who could speak to the majority of Americans today, an interesting intellectual exercise could determine the political positions of a presidential candidate who could win their first election with ease. This candidate would not be a centrist but would adopt policy positions which the majority of Americans agree with. These are based on the most recent poll on the issues I can find.

Here is the platform:
Social:

• Employers must provide health insurance which covers birth control regardless of personal beliefs. Pew
• Transgender people should be required to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with. Pew
• Homosexual behavior, Same-Sex Marriage, abortion, and condoms are all appropriate. Pew
• Partisan Gerrymandering should be restricted. 71% of Americans agree

Economics

• Implement a $15 minimum wage. Pew
• We should increase spending for veterans benefits, education, and health care, we shouldn't reduce spending on anything. Pew
• The rich do not pay their fair share, and should see an increase in their tax rates. Pew
• Light Rail is essential to the building of a modern city. SJSU
• Global Warming is real and we need policies to reverse it. People say this in every single state. NY Times

Foreign

• ISIS is a major concern. Pew

This is a winning platform. What is most striking about this is that it is not "moderate", halfway between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, most Americans agree with several of the core policies of the Democratic Party and none of the policies of the Republican Party.

This says a few things,

1. The Republican Party is in danger if it is to survive as a party, with its main positions being unpopular when polled.
2. The Democratic Party needs to focus not on moving to the center (which is the effect of Median Voter Theorem) but to increase turnout among its natural voter base, which involves the majority of Americans.

The Democratic Strategy for 2018 needs to be to fight in every single district for every legislative and congressional seat. A winning candidate is going to be clear about their values and represent the majority of people, falling neatly in the progressive camp.

I do not know how many progressives are going to win next year, hopefully many. But if candidates stay reasonable, science focused, and honest to their values, they can win elections nationwide. The particular emphasis candidates have on their campaigns will change, but I do believe that with Congress sitting at 13% right now, Trump sitting at 40% approval, and both parties having less than 50% approval, our country needs some major political changes.

We have seen multiple elections in my life time where the Democratic Party running on the values most Americans share will win the majority of the vote, but still lose the House and Presidency. It is not because Americans are not voting or caring, its because we have a rigged election system. Gerrymandering combined with first past the post for the House and the Electoral College prevent us from having policies which the majority of us want.

This is where ranked voting comes in. We need to fight from the grassroots to help break the two party system. We need new voices which represent Americans accurately and have more incentives to be bold, or be forced to leave. Neither the Green Party or Libertarian Party fill this role. We need more candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren running for office nationwide. We need people like Kamala Harris and Martin O'Malley to rise as high as they can go, and we need these people in local politics right now.

Breaking the partisan duopoly will offer candidates the ability to be more true to their values and more responsive to voters. Ending single member districts and first past the post will allow more voices to be heard nationally, which will be a more healthy politic. Ending the presidential primary system and electing the President using IRV is the eventual goal.

I have been thinking about this issue for years (as this blog shows), and the only way I can see to break the partisan duopoly is to reform our entire election system. Getting money out of politics is more tricky because you have to be clear about the relationship between money and speech, but changing our election system is relatively easy. Washington State has already done it, though top two primaries do not allow third parties to have a real chance to form, neither does it guarantee results which represents the views of the majority. The top two primary in Seattle this year and Attorney General's race last year have made that abundantly obvious. It has not broken the toxic two party system in our state because it can't.

This is how we are going to get the most American candidate who represents the people elected. Right now it is clear to me that candidates who follow this message precisely still don't necessarily win because people have to be strategic about their voting, especially in crowded elections.

Some will say this is impossible to do, but I refer those people to the 12th amendment which radically changed how the Electoral College works. Most Americans do not remember this today, but before 1913 Senators were not elected by the people but appointed by State Legislatures. The 17th Amendment changed this completely, making the Senators directly elected by the people. Let us not also forget that Slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person in the House of Representatives until the 13th amendment. The Senate is directly elected by the people, The Electoral College works differently, the calculation method for how many representatives each states gets in the House of Representatives has changed as well. None of our original election system survives today.

Abolishing the Electoral College is no more radical than directly voting for Senators. We have already completely eliminated one indirect election method our government.

Ranked voting is a far simpler system to understand than what is written in the 12th amendment today.

Having multiple representatives in a district has historical precedence. We once had them in my home, Washington State.

For those places which require districting due to their size (looking at you, California) we should use algorithmic districting to prevent Gerrymandering. The Shortest splitline method combined with STV would be an unhackable system.

We need to do this work now, and then we can get the candidates we deserve, and the politics which the vast majority of Americans desire.

Together, we can do this.

Please get connected with Fairvote today. We deserve better elections.

Where do we go from here?

America is currently in the worst political position we have ever found ourselves in. The current President-elect is not supported by the majority of Americans before he even sets foot in the White House, which hasn't happened for the past three Presidencies. This could help us succeed if he moves forward to destroy our civil rights policies and our economy, which is what he as talked about doing since he started his campaign.

My biggest concern for next month is that there are currently 107 vacancies in our Federal Court System.

• 1 Supreme Court justice
• 2 on the Court of International Trade
• 3 on the DC circuit court (the most prestigious of all the Appellatte Courts, the source of more Supreme Court nominees than any other court)
• 6 on the Court of Federal Claims
• 95 from district courts across the country.

When Donald Trump appoints people to fill these vacancies, you can be sure they will not be moderate and be less willing to approve civil rights legislation. They are going to stay on these courts until they hit retirement age (with the exception of the Supreme Court), so you can expect that they will be younger judges in their 40s which will give him a guaranteed 20 years of influence when he enters the Presidency. No other President in history has walked into so many court appointments. This is due to Congress refusing to give Obama any appointees for over a year, and the American People did not punish them for violating the Constitution. In my own district court for the Western District of Washington, Obama was supposed to have three appointtees which were denied from him by Congress. We are going to have a 100% conservative court here in one of the most liberal parts of the country. This concerns me as much as the elimination of civil rights laws in this country, gerrymandering, and the terrible economic proposals by Trump, because these court appointments are going to make it much more difficult to get progressive policy passed after he leaves office.

The gerrymandering which currently exists is going to continue to be a massive barrier to getting progress done. Most of the gerrymandering has been done in states which do not have initiative laws. We can definitely make progress in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington, on eliminating gerrymandering and implementing ranked voting at the state level. In Illinois, we could implement ranked voting as a constitutional amendment via the initiative process. Implementing ranked voting in these states and putting in laws which eliminate gerrymandering, such as single-split line method, multiple members per district, eliminate voter discrimination, and of course Ranked Voting will make it much harder for Republicans to steal future elections. The states which are the mosdt important to get these passed in are Michigan, Ohio, and Florida given how their elections have been stolen through gerrymandering and voter discrimination will be a significant barrier against Trump getting a second term and eliminate a lot of his support in Congress. Making those legislatures competitive as well will be an important step forward in ensuring democracy lasts in our country. If we get just a few more states we will be on track to matching the progress we made with gay marriage a few years ago and protect our country from more foreign electoral attacks.

This is the first and easiest thing we can do in order to get back our freedoms and improve America for the future.

State governments are vital to getting influence on the national stage. The Democratic Party needs to work hard on locating and raising strong liberal leaders across the country who are ready to be strong leaders of our country at the state and local level. Huffington Post ran an article which listed every Governor from most to least liberal. We should work on replacing the most conservative governors in the country, in Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. These are not swing states, but if we put forward more centrist candidates from these states who will give them better government we could turn the country around quickly. Indiana and Wisconsin are swing states, so it could be possible to flip them. Kansas is bleeding economically and we could put a strong Democrat in office. If these are highly qualified governors who will focus on building strong economies and reducing corruption in these states the Republican Party could be weakened potentially. Social policies can be worked on at the federal level and work on more significant progress in states where citizens already support American values. We have easy gubernatorial pickups in Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Florida in the next cycle. We already picked up North Carolina and if everything goes as I expect, we could make North Carolina a solid blue state in 2020 which will be vital in defeating Trump.

2017 we will pick up New Jersey for a total of 17 governorships
2018 we will pick up 14 governorships in Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin for a total or 31 governorships and a majority.
2019 we might be able to pick up Kentucky (economy willing) and will need to retain Louisiana for 32 governorships.

Finally, state legislatures are extremely important for being able to test out policy and train strong leaders for Congress. There is a lot of work to be done here, which is where fighting gerrymandering and making elections fair is going to make the biggest impact, even more than getting a Congress which represents all Americans. There are a lot of state legislatures Democrats should have control of. Democrats only control 12 state governorships right now. Here are the legislatures we can gain:

1. Washington, a majority of both houses are held by Democrats, but a power sharing agreement prevents Democratic control.
2. Wisconsin
3. Michigan
4. Ohio
5. Pennsylvania
6. Virginia
7. North Carolina
8. Florida
9. Colorado
10. New Mexico
11. Minnesota
12. Iowa
13. New York
14. Maine
15. New Hampshire

This will give Democrats 27 state legislatures for a majority. This can be done by 2018. If we succeed in making elections fair it will be easy to give Americans the government we want.

Lebanon's Elections

Lebanon is currently undergoing what I consider a constitutional crisis, and has been since the 23rd of April. In order for a President to be elected he must be elected by a 2/3rds majority of Parliament, more like a Prime Minister in other countries. This however means if no one receives a 2/3rds majority there will be a second election and this continues on forever until someone is elected.

The Presidential election was supposed to happen in April and it is now September. This has taken a total of 5 months so far, and is showing no signs of stopping. This makes me think it is time for Lebanon to look at alternatives to electing their president and the only mechanism I can recommend is to make the President popularly elected using IRV which will prevent future problems and ensure that every vote counts with no wasted votes or spoilers.

Hopefully someone with influence in Lebanon gets the message that a better system is possible. 5 months is just too long to wait for an election to finish.

Opponents of IRV

Over the past few months I've seen a number of people who oppose instant runoff voting and they usually claim it is "too complicated".

The question I have for them is if they can answer this question:

I potentially have 5 flavors of ice cream in my freezer, chocolate, vanilla, neapolitan, strawberry, and caramel. Which is your favorite, and if that isn't there, which one is your second favorite? People do this automatically, we are natural rankers.

Just replace those five flavors of ice cream with five parties running for an office, Democrat, Republican, Green, Constitution, Libertarian, which one is your favorite and which is your second favourite, etc.? You then have a real election in the United States.

If someone over age 3 can't do this, than that person makes me sad, because this process is not complicated and is easy for people to do. It requires a little more time on election day, but freedom isn't free. Freedom takes the time and compassion of average Americans to defend against politicians that will sacrifice our constitution in acts like the PATRIOT ACT. In the cases where people have voted against IRV, maybe the ballots aren't written well, but that's not the fault of instant runoff voting, that's the fault of local government not hiring good advisers to select good election equipment, and easily fixed. Australians and Irishmen use this symptom and they have had no problems and they don't find it confusing (given how there are not massive campaigns to move to our system, which gave Canada Stephen Harper for a second term with 40% of the vote). Given the terrible situation of the last Canadian and British elections where the minority won a majority of seats, it is clearly better than first past the post.

I would even argue IRV is an easier system to use because when I vote in the primary elections in my state I have only one vote to give to only one candidate, and I find we frequently get some third party candidates who I really like but because I don't want to split the vote I have to pick between two or three completely qualified candidates, which is difficult. It would be easier for voters to have only one election and rank the candidates. It would also cost less because the government would only need one election which would save money on ballots, machines, and be better for our government's funds, assuming they have good equipment and use well-written ballots.

I also wish we could have a third party to challenge the Democrats, given that the Democrats routinely compromise the most important parts of their platform. They removed the most important parts of Obamacare and no Republicans voted for it, the majority voted for the PATRIOT ACT in 2001 and there was no massive movement to replace them. This is intolerable and they can't get away with abandoning their base like this with no punishment.

Just felt like I had to put this rebuttal on here after seeing so many poorly argued articles on the internet about IRV. It is not confusing, it is not complicated, and it gives more accurate results.

Changing to a Parliamentary System won't change enough.

One Law Professor made an interesting paper that claims that in order to solve our political disfunction we should move to a Parliamentary System. You can read a summary here. His three major points are that 1) our government is currently disfunctional, 2) our system could be fixed by moving to a parliamentary system aka a system where the executive is selected by the legislature, and 3) no other proposed change will fix the disfunction of not having a parliamentary system.

There are a few major problems with this paper however.

If we take the United Kingdom as our archetypal Parliamentary system wee need to analyze how well it works. the UK's House of Commons right now is 303 Conservatives, 57 Liberal Democrats, and 255 Labour, among other smaller parties. There are 650 members of the House of Commons total, which leaves 35 members of smaller parties. If the last election was proportional you would expect that the Conservatives had won 47% of the vote, the Liberal Democrats 9% of the vote and Labour 39% of the vote.

This is just plain not the case. In the last election the Conservatives won 36% of the vote (overrepresented by 11%), Liberal Democrats won 23% of the vote (underrepresented by 14%), and Labour won 29% of the vote (underrepresented by 10%).  The largest problem of the current American House of Representatives, a ruling minority, is also present under the British system. Last year we saw the results of gerrymandering where the Republicans lost the vote but won the seats, and looking at the key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and especially Florida, we see that there was clear gerrymandering going on that gave the Republicans a large advantage. Looking at the riding by riding results in the last UK election you find that Labour and the Liberal Democrats stole votes from each other which gave the Conservatives a majority (despite winning 52% of the votes nationwide together). This problem is very clear when one looks at the results.

Rick Hasen doesn't solve this major problem.

His third proposal is also wildly off base. By allowing people to use ranked voting and vote for third parties without wasting votes it will fix the disfunction of having a government with only two parties and no opposition on the left to the Democrats consistent pandering to Republican demands to move further and further right. a Parliamentary system alone won't fix this problem, ranked voting will. Just turning our President into a Prime Minister won't fix disfunction if the House can still be gerrymandered and the Senate still exists. No problem is really fixed with this solution.

Parliamentary or Presidential systems are both good, I see no major advantage that they have for each other, but ranked voting systems have a very clear advantage over First Past the Post, and when you compare the results of Australia's elections (where they use IRV) with Britain's elections (where they use First Past the Post) you find an enormous difference in how accurately the makeup of Parliament represents the national vote, and comparing Britain's elections with America's elections shows only a difference in how the head of government is selected, but no real difference in how the government represents the people. Also, I must say that comparing party list methods (like Germany) resemble the inaccuracies of Britain and America more than the more proportional representation of Australia.

Changing our election system won't be as difficult as many believe

One argument I have heard from people about how moving to a ranked voting system won't work is because they think it will take a constitutional amendment. They are right that the Presidential elections will take a constitutional amendment, but the House and Senate won't.

All the Constitution says about the election of Representatives is that the electors must have the same qualifications as for the most numerous branch of the State Legislature. That's it, nothing more.

For the Senate, it gives the same requirements to vote, and says that they must be elected so that roughly 1/3 of the Senate is elected every two years and each State elects its senators in different years.

All other laws governing elections of the House and Senate are mostly in the United State Code. These only take a passage of a normal bill to change. The rules for the House of Representatives is codified in United States Code Title 2 Chapter 1 Section 2c.

In each State entitled in the Ninety-first Congress or in any subsequent Congress thereafter to more than one Representative under an apportionment made pursuant to the provisions of section 2a (a) of this title, there shall be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of Representatives to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative (except that a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress).

The rules determining the law for the Senate is codified in United States Code Title 2 Chapter 1 Section 1 and it makes absolutely no mention as to how Senators are to be elected, or what system must be used beyond what is specified in the Constitution.

So, in order to change the laws regarding the election of Representatives in the United States all we have to do is change the law to something like this:

In each State no less than 5 and more than 7 Representatives will be elected from each district. The Representatives will be voted on in a ranked voting manner so that every Elector can rank all candidates in order. The candidates with the fewest votes will have their ballots be redistributed to their Electors next choice until the number of candidates standing is equal to the number of seats available. States with less than 5 representatives must form an interstate compact with neighboring states so that each Elector will have between 5 and 7 seats to vote on.

If we replaced Section 2c with that we will make all the changes necessary to insure a more accurate election system and give third parties a chance to get elected. It doesn't violate the 10th amendment any more than Obamacare, laws against child labor, or laws against segregated schools. In fact, according to Article 1 Section 4 of the Constitution the House and Senate have every right to change the laws for electing people to their chambers. This is 100% constitutional and only requires a regular bill.

Washington State used to have at large members of the House from 1889 to 1909, so having an at large district has been done before. If Congress receives enough pressure from their constituents, this can change. In terms of the Senate, all we have to do is pass a law requiring Senators to be elected using Instant Runoff Voting, which will be as easy as the last bill to pass.

How to fix America's election system

I have proposed a few ways to improve our election system in this country, and over the past few months I have further clarified my ideas and thinking about the issues have come to agree with almost everything FairVote proposes. They have a number of proposals to improve our country's system and I highly recommend them.

I am unhappy with my last post back in March on how to fix our election system and see one big issue with it which is that I proposed to continue to have a primary, which is bad because primaries tend to have lower turnout, having only one election increases turnout and increases the validity of the election. Voting twice is expensive and time consuming, which must be avoided.

Instead, I have a counter proposal with a better way, which is mostly similar to Fairvote's plan but not completely. I also want to put in some advantages I see with it.

Congressional election
Make Congress bigger. Eliminate the Senate. Make 600 seats in the House of Representatives and abolish the Senate to more accurately represent the views of the American people. The Senate unnecessarily bogs down the process to pass legislation which helps people who want to stop the status quo and makes it so that people who want to improve the country have an extra hurdle. With only 100 Senators it is easier for the same amount of money to have a much larger impact in lobbying (which saves money for lobbyists and hurts the people) and with the filibuster makes it so that minority rules. It makes the voices of people in Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, and Delaware far more important than people in California and Texas. The Senate is usually not representative of the American People, and if eliminated the House of Representatives could do exactly what their constituents tell them to do, which is the goal of Modern Democracy. Government of the People. It will make good legislation that the American people are behind easier to pass because it will need the majority of the Representatives to be passed and that is it. This will take a Constitutional Amendment, but so did the bill of rights, abolishing slavery, giving African Americans, women, and 18, 19, and 20 year olds the right to vote. Basically the biggest successes in our history. The Senate was created in the beginning to represent not the People but the State legislatures, the elite, so it must go! The Senate also will never fully represent the diversity of viewpoints in a state, and will never proportionally represent the views of Americans by any measure, and will never give the opportunity for third parties to get a voice. If we moved the Senate to an IRV system making that the only change we would find a very dull legislature with almost no diversity because there would be a lot of Libertarians. The Democrats and Republicans would both find a compromise in the Libertarian party with their votes, and because Democrats and Republicans would lose votes (how much each would lose to the Libertarians in initial votes is hard to say) it could be a very bland institution that is not representative of what the people want.

So we are left with a House of Representatives with 600 representatives, one per 500,000 on average, which is much better than today's one per 700,000. This will make every individual's vote go farther and have a larger impact. With more representatives it will be easier to get minority views represented accurately which will give a more accurate view on what the American People support, what Democracy is all about. I agree with Fairvote that there should be superdistricts where the candidates are elected by Single Transferable Vote. I support STV because it is about the candidates, people are not locked into one party or another, and it is easy to understand how to use. It is very similar to IRV which is already used in several cities in California. http://californiansforelectoralreform.blogspot.com/2012/08/2012-ranked-choice-elections-for-sf.html This is something Americans will understand. It also helps to hurt the impact of money from a few people in elections. Learn more about STV here in a Kiwi accent and then Learn where Ranked Voting systems are used.

By doing this it will substantially increase the possibility of third party viewpoints getting elected if the people agree with their policies and instead of voting against the party you like least which is necessary in First Past the Post voting you can vote for your favorite candidate regardless of how popular you think the person may be because if the person doesn't win your vote moves to your second favorite choice which is a great way to increase election turnout because votes will count. It will also make it harder to gerrymander, which is why the Republicans won the House in 2012 despite losing the popular vote. This will seriously improve our elections. Vice President Joe Biden,  Senator John McCain, when you both said you would support anything to increase voter turnout, this is what you are looking for.

Right now, if a third party were to develop in the United States it would create a spoiler effect for the party which comes closest to its views and the party that isn't split would win. I have already explained what happened in Canada in 2011. If it can happen in Canada's elections it can happen in ours.

Presidential election
For the same reason as Congressional election, we need a much simpler election to increase participation and make sure that every vote counts. This is Instant Runoff Voting, as Fairvote proposes. We will not need primaries and can make candidates run and since voters rank their candidates there is no spoiler effect. This will make elections much more efficient, allow third parties to run without spoiling the election and make every vote count.

One Canadian reason for Instant Runoff Voting, or at least Single Transferable Vote

I am looking at the last elections in Canada, which were in 2011 and they use First past the Post voting. Now, Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister, the Conservative Party's leader, and in the election he received 53.9% of the seats. The New Democrats under the late Jack Layton and the Liberals under Ignatieff both pulled the majority of the rest of the seats creating spoilers for each other across the country.

Wikipedia has really good information about the results in Canada in 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_by_riding_of_the_Canadian_federal_election,_2011 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Canadian_federal_election,_2011 and I recommend looking at the elections where no party received over 50% of the vote. Here is a summary table of the votes received in each of the provinces from there to see the clear change in representation with FPP as opposed to what the people want. I understand this isn't as detailed, but the link above gives detailed information, this is meant as a quick overview.

Across Canada, the Conservative Party received 39.6% of the vote, yet they received 53.9% of the seats.

Province	Conservative	NDP/Liberal/Green	Conservative Seats	NLG seats
Alberta	66.8	33.2	96	4
British Columbia	45.5	54.5	58	42
Manitoba	53.5	46.5	79	21
New Brunswick	43.9	56.1	80	20
Newfoundland	28.4	71.6	14	86
Northwest Territories	32.1	67.9	0	100
Nova Scotia	36.7	63.3	36	64
Nunavut	49.9	50.1	100	0
Ontario	44.4	55.6	69	31
Prince Edward Island	41.2	58.8	25	75
Quebec	16.5	43.5	7	93
Saskatchewan	56.3	43.7	93	7
Yukon	33.8	66.2	100	0

All of these are percentages from the links above.

Looking at a lot of ridings we get a similar picture on a fine scale. The majority of Canadians voted for either the Liberals or the New Democrats, but since they could choose only one candidate their votes were split and Canadians are stuck with Stephen Harper, even though 60.4% of Canadians voted for left-wing parties. The American election that just happened saw a similar result where 51% of Americans voted for their Democratic Representative candidate yet the Republicans are in full control of the House of Representatives due to Gerrymandering. In Britain which also uses FPP the Conservative Party received only 36.05% of the vote but received 47.08% of the seats. The list of British elections that year again shows a large number of seats with the majority of voters voting for either the Liberal Democrats or Labour but still the Conservative gets elected, in many cases the winner won less than 40% of the vote, with the majority going liberal. In the cases where the Liberal Democrats or Labour won, or the one case where the Green candidate was elected if there was redistribution with IRV nothing would change because they would receive the votes from the other left-wing party which means that there would probably be no difference in victor assuming people vote for the same first choice and fill their ballots out correctly which is usually not a problem in the democracies that use proportional representation.

This is an inherent flaw with First Past the Post Voting. It does not represent the majority. America, Canada, and Britain need to adopt Instant Runoff Voting or Single Transferable Vote for our elections so that we can have an accurate representation of what the people want in our democracies and see third party participation with neglected issues rise to give Democracy back to the people! A better choice would be to choose Single Transferable Vote though, which would make it so that third parties would more likely be represented which would increase the possibility that minority views could be heard in our legislatures. This is why even though there should be 17 or 18 Greens in Australia's parliament despite using the alternative vote there is only one Green in parliament. By making large districts with multiple winners as Fairvote proposes we could have third parties represented and vote for the candidates we want without having either a) a very long ballot or b) vote for the party instead of the individual which locks voters into boxes for which party they prefer regardless of candidate.

This is not just western nations too. Malaysia in 2008 saw again the same pattern of a large difference between the votes received and the seats attained between their two large coalitions in 2008 where the right wing got 50% of the vote but 63% of the seats and they also use FPP. India saw their largest coalition receive 37% of the vote and 48% of the seats, and their third largest coalition received 21% of the vote but only 7% of their seats still with the same system. In my opinion a difference over 10% between votes and representation represents a system failure. In the United States in 2012 the Republicans received 48% of the vote and 54% of the seats, while not as extreme as these other countries is also worth noting because it is across the 50% mark.

But is it really that much better with ranked voting? The data says yes. In 2010 the Labor Party received 50% of the vote and 55% of the seats in Australia. In 2009 in Germany the CDU received 33% of the vote and received 40% of the seats while competing against 4 other major parties all of whom received seats. In 2010 in Sweden the Social Democrats received 30.7% of the vote and received 32% of the seats. Australia, Germany and Sweden are just three examples of the larger trend where proportional representation more accurately represents the views of the People and are much better systems. This is why I think we need to move to Fairvote's plan after looking at how India, Malaysia, Britain and Canada's elections reflect our own so much in minority rule with the same inherently broken election system while Australia, Germany, and Sweden have very accurate representation of what the people ask for in their parliaments. To quote CGPGrey from youtube, would anyone accept a sport where there was a 10% chance that the loser could win? Of course not, and we shouldn't accept it in our elections.

Learn more at www.fairvote.org and CGPGrey's channel on youtube.

Here is a map of where different systems are used: http://www.idea.int/esd/upload/ESD%20map-english.pdf