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Topic: Alternative voting systems - page 2. (Read 1392 times)

legendary
Activity: 1540
Merit: 1000
February 28, 2013, 06:54:13 AM
#2
I'm a big fan of Direct Democracy myself, the type they have in Switzerland, not because of any math based argument but purely because in that system if a politician tries to pass a law a citizen doesn't like that citizen can start a petition, if the petition reaches the threshold set then by law the law petitioned against has to stop. It's also quite well safe guarded because of course if a dick politician tries to sneak around this system and change the threshold to make it higher or get rid of the petition system altogether then citizens can of course stop it.

This to me is a much better system than electing dictators every few years who can just do what they want, a lot of times in the first past the post system you have everyone voting a person in and then of course they turn out to be an arsehole but people have a way of stopping them from passing laws while they're in office instead of just shoving them through with the buddies they've brought into parliament etc.
sr. member
Activity: 354
Merit: 250
February 28, 2013, 03:09:39 AM
#1
I know some people here are against democracy altogether, but we can leave that talk for other threads.

The plurality/first-past-the-post voting system used in the US and many other countries is frankly terrible at representing the actual wishes of the voters.  It forces people to vote tactically, leading to two-party deadlock, and ensures

Of the alternatives that have been proposed, I used to support instant run-off voting, but someone on this forum convinced me that approval voting is better simply because of its simplicity.  That said, almost anything would be better than what we have.

Just for the heck of it, I created a petition on whitehouse.gov.  I'm not optimistic about getting the 100,000 signatures in time, but I figured why not try.  If we could at least get the 150 needed to make it publicly searchable, that would be a start.  Changing the voting system is pretty much the only chance we have of getting any "non-traditional" candidates in power.
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