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draft-intro.html
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<!doctype html>
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<title>To Build an Even Better Ballot?</title>
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INTRODUCTION:
THE SPOILER EFFECT
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<p>My name is Jameson Quinn. If spending 10,000 hours on something makes you an expert, then I'm easily an expert on voting methods. And right here in your browser, I want to give you a tool that can help you think like an expert on this in a whole lot less than 10,000 hours. If you read all the way through this page, you'll be well on your way. You'll know a lot about voting methods, and you'll understand in a very intuitive way how much this knowledge could be used to make politics healthier.</p>
<p>I think this tool is a lot of fun and I'm really excited to share it with you. But before I do, I should acknowledge the people who have made this possible. Nicky Case made the first version; Pareto Man did most of the work on the current one; and some of the key ideas come from Ka-Ping Yee and Warren Smith. There's more acknowledgements at the bottom. If you want to be part of this chain of awesomeness, this is all open source, so you're free to make it even better. You can also support Electology.org, aka the Center for Election Science, a nonprofit that works on these issues.</p>
<p>So, let's get started.</p>
<p>If you live in the US (or Canada or the UK, for that matter), you've probably read plenty of depressing or scary articles about politics recently. There are a lot of problems in politics, and it can seem hopeless. How can we possibly fix it all?</p>
<p>I want to show you how democracy itself can be fixed. Doing that wouldn't immediately fix all the other problems. But it would make fixing everything else substantially easier.</p>
<p>In order to see how to fix democracy, you have to understand how it's broken, right at its root: we're doing voting wrong. Choose-one plurality voting, the voting method we have in most big English-speaking countries, is just about the worst voting method ever used. It's easy to see why other methods are better. It doesn't take complicated rules to improve on choose-one plurality; approval voting is arguably even simpler, and better in every way.</p>
<p>Once I've shown you that, I'll move on to <a href="#partII">part II</a>, where I'll get into some of the more complex elements of voting theory (aka social choice theory; a subfield of game theory). I'll discuss strategic voting, and show you several other voting methods, such as score voting, IRV, Condorcet, Star, and 3-2-1. I'll discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, and let you play with the examples that have convinced me which methods are better for which situations — approval for simplicity, 3-2-1 or Star for a balance betwen expressiveness and robustness against strategy, and score for situations where the voters share common end goals and are merely voting on the best means to those goals — and which are usually worse — plurality worst of all, but IRV not too much better.</p>
<p>Imagine your town is planning to buy one fire truck of a fancy new kind, and they're having a vote to decide which firehouse to keep it at. Every voter wants it kept as close to their home as possible, so it can arrive quickly in case of a fire.</p>
<p>How would you vote? It's a trick question. How you'd vote depends on what voting method is being used. Let's start with choose-one plurality voting, where you're only allowed to, um, choose one. Here's a simple example, so you can play around with it; drag the shapes/candidates/firehouses and the voter/home representing you and see what happens to the ballot.</p>
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<p>Say that everyone votes like that; a simple, honest assesment of which candidate is closest, without strategizing about other voters. Here's how it might come out:</p>
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<p>This is an easy voting situation to visualize, because all that matters is where the candidates (firehouses) and voters (homes) are physically. In real life, of course, it's not so much your physical location that matters, but your "location" on ideology and/or issues; and that's hard to even define or know, much less draw on a neat 2-dimensional map. But these 2D let us show pretty much all the interesting kinds of things that can happen. So now I'll stop saying "firehouse" and "home" and just say "candidate" and "voter".</p>
<p>So what's wrong with this voting method? Well, anyone who doesn't vote for one of the two frontrunners has no say in which of them wins; their vote is essentially wasted. So if two candidates are similar, they "split the vote" and "spoil the election" so that neither one of them wins. For instance, in the election above, reset and then try moving the hexagon close to the square. Hexagon steals votes from Square and so Triangle wins!</p>
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