BLAH! Political Party, The Anti-Vote Is Here? Options

[alstan]

See, my problem with this whole idea is that the government and the legislature don't care about people not voting. You stop affecting the outcome of elections entirely, which means they no longer have to worry about you. If they get into power with a 20% voter turnout, they've got exactly as much power as they would with a 50% turnout. You're not sending them any kind of message by doing this. All you're doing is making them that little bit less representative.

If there was some mechanism for voting against the government and a majority of people did so, might it follow that the governing party should have its power limited, possibly by having to share power, perhaps by proportional representation or some other means of coalition?

[That_Guy]

Oh, if only the US had a better third party choice...I'd love it if there was a party that was socially liberal and fiscally conservative (or at least fiscally intelligent!)

You've just described the Libertarian Party.

[Witless]

I am at uni once again (I seem to do most of my matazoning while being idle at this place these days).

I ound out some odd strangenesses recently that related to this topic. I thought I'd share.

Lets say you had an election with three candidates, candidate A, B and C (their parents were harsh and didn't put much worth on their children so didn't name them well.) In this election you have to vote in order of preference. So you can vote for Candidate A as firt choice, followed by Candidate B and finally C if you so wished and believed in alphabetising everything to chronically OCD levels.

Ok so the stage is set the votes come in and miracously people voted in only 1 of 3 ways. The first third of people vote alphabetically, they vote A, B, the C. The second third of people vote B, C then A. The final third of the voters votes C, A then B. Sadly we've come to a rather curious situation here. It seems A has beaten B by 2 to 1, B has beaten C by to to one, and astonishingly C has beaten A by 2 to 1 as well.

Now here's the fun part. While the situation as I have outlined it seems unlikel, in the real world the situation is often worse. In the 1980 U senate elections of the 3 final leaders the results indicated that 'officially' Alphonse D'Amato had recieved 45% of the votes and won and the other two 44% (Elizabeth Holtzman) and 11% (Jacob Javits) Curiously however if you compare the results they get in a head to head exit poll, then Holtzman would have been D'Amato by 51% to 49% and head to head with Javitz would have beat him 66% to 34%. So Holtzman actually wins against both in a head to head situation.

It's weird how simply changing how the votes are handled changes the results. I am not saying the results were deliberately scewed. It's actually a well known situation that just because A is more popular than B and B more popular than C, it doesn't hold that A has to be more popular than C. For those who are interested the theorem is called the 'The arrow of impossibility theorum' (optimists call it 'the arrow of possibility theorem).

Infact this situation crops up a lot, and the more candidates or options you have the greater the possibility of contradictions occuring. With enough candidates the probability of a contradictions reaches 100%!

In addition it's also quite common that constantly voting for someone just to make sure the other guy doesn't win is often the cause of elections being so predictable. For example, if in one area everyone voted conservative, labour, then liberal democrat.. and then in another everyone else votes lib dem, then labour then conservative then labour win overall, with everyone wondering who voted them!

Perhaps a "vote against" system needs to be put in. From how I understand it, it would stop so many contradictions if people could actually vote against someone rather than just voting for someone else to stop the person they really don't want to get in, from geting into power.

[Radaga]

The third way was appointed by Thoureau.

Civil disobeyance. You dont vote, you dont use public services, you dont complain, you dont count yourself up among "the people". In the other hand, you refuse to pay taxes whatsoever.

[Moosh]

The third way was appointed by Thoureau.

Civil disobeyance. You dont vote, you dont use public services, you dont complain, you dont count yourself up among "the people". In the other hand, you refuse to pay taxes whatsoever.

How do you "not use public services"?

Unless you're going to live completely isolated from society, I would think this would be impossible.

[Daria]

Now's the time to build your own country, and start allll over again.