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.

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

We won, we have work to do

Today, as everybody knows, the Supreme Court overturned DOMA and Proposition 8 as unconsitutional. Today will be remembered for the rest of American history and will be written in textbooks for decades to come, but the battle for freedom including and beyond gay rights is just getting started for this century.

On DOMA it is relieving to see that the Federal government will now recognize gay marriages, and this is a major step forward for freedom in our country. DOMA had no legal standing in the first place, for the reasons I outlined here: United States v. Windsor

I am pleased and disappointed with the decision on Proposition 8. I recommend reading Joanna Brooks' article on the issue because she is such an eloquent writer and Mormon. I am delighted that gay marriage has returned to California, and that it now opens opportunities to open district court challenges to anti-marriage laws in states across the country.

We saw the Supreme Court effectively overturn the Voting Rights Act yesterday in Shelby County v. Holder, one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of America. I would have agreed with a decision to extend Department of Justice approval to all changes , but they instead went the other way. Get ready for major bills restricting voting rights to people in the South through large requirements for voter identification and other ineffective and immoral changes to their laws. We need a Right to Vote amendment now to make such proposals harder to defend in court, because we are going down the rabbit hole. We need major voting reform now, and this is just one more tragedy that will convince more people of the desperate need to improve our democracy.

The past 24 hours have been a 67% success rate, hopefully we can change this set of decisions around before the next census... though I am not completely confident if enough people are mobilized it can be done.

State Legislatures

First, a summary of how state legislatures do elections because it is detailed. 49 out of 50 states in the United States have a bicameral legislature currently (all but Nebraska). The way that these chambers are run differs state to state, but there are big similarities across state lines. There are three systems currently in use in state legislatures. 39 states (except Arizona, Idaho, Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia) have a simple yet ineffective system of having one representative per district, and two sets of districts, one for their upper house and one for the lower house. Every state has one representative per district in their upper (smaller) house. However, 11 states break this trend. I haven't done the analysis yet on the efficacy of each election and how many are accurate to the statewide voter choice, but hopefully I will someday. 5 states (Arizona, Idaho, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Washington) have one representative per district for their upper house (as normal) but two representatives per district for their lower house. How they vote for them varies, some are block voting (where people vote for as many candidates as there are seats and the two candidates with the most votes win) and some have separate elections for the two seats.

Before I describe the other districts, both methods present a problem. If you have the same population voting for these candidates and they can't rank their choices, you run into the spoiler effect and wasted votes. What ends up happening is you don't have a representation proportional to the choices of the district and you have usually one party win all the seats in a single district. Except for an example (Vermont) most states have only Democrats and Republicans in their state legislatures. The districts are regularly redrawn and you run into the problem of Gerrymandering.

South Dakota and Vermont residents could have either one or two representatives in their district. This doesn't solve the spoiler effect. They are all proportional in population per representative, but has all the problems of first past the post.

The remaining three states (Maryland, New Hampshire, Virginia, and West Virginia) have block voting, which is when you have a list of your candidates and you vote for as many candidates as there are seats, but what makes them different is that there is a large range between how many representatives you might vote on. You could represented by as few as one, or for some people in New Hampshire could have as many as 11 representatives. The population per representative(s) is all proportional, but since it is block voting, it doesn't increase the chance of third parties being represented and doesn't solve the spoiler effect, which means votes are wasted. They are on the right track, but block voting is not good enough to have a truly fair election system.

One question I have struggled with is why we have two state houses in all but one state. The disadvantages I can see is it takes legislation longer to get through government,  and the upper house always has the spoiler effect because it is a one representative per district. This is a historical leftover. In New York, the two houses were similar to Parliament and (at the time) our Congress in that the Senate was elected by owners of land, and the House of Representatives represented everybody. In Washington State the House was elected every two years and the Senate every four. So, depending on when the different states entered the Union changes the reason why all but one has two houses.

I see no particular advantage today in maintaining having two houses, and see a few disadvantages  It takes legislation longer to get through (which takes money, because they get paid to be there, and many states have time limits as to how many days they may be in session) and this can put good legislation on the back burner in order to pass a budget or some other duty that is routine and forgettable. If the representatives really represented the opinions of their constituents than there is no reason why it should take longer than reasonable to pass legislation that the people want to be passed.

The history of bicameralism goes back to the history of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. England's Parliament was established on 15 June 1215, and consisted of lords only as described by the Magna Carta which seriously limited the King's power. They evolved out of the Feudal system as members of the higher levels yet below nobility desired to have more power, and councils were formed which gave them more power. Parliament's main power was to levy taxes, among other powers. King Edward I was trying to unite the British Isles and parliament's power grew considerably. The House of Commons became an independent house from the House of Lords in 1341 under King Edward III. As the United Kingdom took over the British Isles over the next hundred years Parliament grew as an institution and bicameralism took shape. I will do another post on this someday... it's complicated.

Then when we get to the United States founding we have the famous Grand Compromise which created our form of bicameralism, with a Senate which was originally voted on by State Legislatures, and the House of Representatives was voted into power by whoever the State Legislature deems fit to vote (and still is). The New York example demonstrates how the two houses were set up similar to Congress and Parliament. Each state has a different story, so to generalize would be inaccurate. But what is important is that all but one state today has a state legislature.

Should we move to unicameral legislatures? From the point of view of making sure that all views are represented it would make sense to have only one chamber and have the members be elected using the Single Transferable Vote method which is the most accurate way to set up a legislature. Having only one representative per district for the upper house has no advantage in terms of the majority criterion of elections and hurts the possibility that a third party could be represented. This would be easily remedied by having both houses be elected using Single Transferable Vote, but then what would the point of having two houses be? Arizona, Washington and other states that have two representatives per district in one house and one in the other house don't see an increase in representation of minorities and see the same two parties again and again. With only two seats it is difficult to get more than two parties represented, and having one seat makes it practically impossible in most cases.  It would make sense to have multiple representatives for each district and have them be elected by Single Transferable Vote which is the best way to guarantee that they will represent the people.

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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