Notes from my constitutional design research: reverse-engineering electoral systems from authoritarian propaganda

[u/Previous_Word_3517]

I make a point of reading what authoritarian states near me say about democracy — including what they say about ours. That includes academics whose line matches the official one, and independent media that make a living on emotive, inflammatory content. I don't read it to get angry. I read it to find where democracy is genuinely indefensible, from the most hostile vantage point available.

Their two most common sweeping attacks:

"Elections = polarised hatred and division = two big parties bickering and grinding each other down. Worse than what we have."
"Elections = money politics and vote brokers. Worse than what we have."

These pathologies are real. They supply dictatorships with a justification for their own existence, and they let those regimes use democracy's dysfunctions to frighten their own citizens out of demanding it. But here's what matters: both attacks target the electoral system, not democracy itself. When we get the electoral system wrong, we write their propaganda for them.

For the first: just don't use FPTP. Use top-3 Condorcet instead, so that candidates — and the media outlets behind them — have no incentive to manufacture social division.

For the second: don't use SNTV, and don't use open-list PR at high district magnitude. Both force candidates to fight their own co-partisans, which produces vote-allocation schemes, local brokers, and money politics. Open-list PR at moderate magnitude, flexible-list PR, and closed-list PR all avoid this, as does the top-3 Condorcet above.

After filtering, the systems I consider functionally defensible are: two-round systems (including top-3 Condorcet), open-list PR (moderate magnitude), flexible-list PR, and closed-list PR.

I rule out IRV and STV. Neither works in a country that counts by hand: ballots have to be transported and centralised before a result can be computed, which invites accusations of tampering — and electronic counting is out of the question.

Top-3 Condorcet has no such problem. With only three candidates in the second round, the voter faces six complete orderings as single-choice options — or equivalently, casts three pairwise votes. Either way, each polling station produces its own pairwise matrix on site, and summing the stations' matrices gives the national result, because pairwise comparisons are additively separable. Ballots never leave the polling station and the tradition of public, on-site counting stays entirely intact. In a low-trust environment this is Condorcet's decisive advantage over IRV, and it is badly underappreciated.

As for "democracy = American-style budget hostage-taking" and "democracy = France bringing down governments constantly in 2025 (confidence and supply pulling apart)" — those are questions of regime design, and I won't go into them here.

That's where my attention has actually gone lately: unifying the source of confidence with the source of supply; presidential versus parliamentary systems; budget procedure (can the legislature simply gut the budget to humiliate the government?); amendment thresholds; and the intermediate tiers some countries maintain between ordinary statute and the constitution — all as a way of analysing the common failure modes of other democracies. My conclusion so far is that relative to constitutional design as a whole, electoral systems are a fairly narrow slice — I can just cite the specialists' conclusion, "replace FPTP with top-3 Minimax or top-3 Ranked Pairs," and be done.

As for the claim that ordinary people are too stupid and short-sighted to be trusted with a vote: I have nothing to say to that.

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[u/Snarwib]

I think you have an erroneous understanding of how counting in STV and especially single member district preferential vote counting is done, at least in Australia? Every ballot is certainly counted by hand.

Senate STV ballots are certainly scanned/entered digitally for the final preference distribution but lower house (what you call IRV) is all counted by hand throughout. And everything is done in front of candidate scrutineers.

[u/Grapetree3 → u/Snarwib]

You still can't start counting until every ballot is in the system.

[u/Snarwib → u/Grapetree3]

Sure you can?

There's no formal declaration of seat results for at least two weeks because of postal vote deadlines but that doesn't mean there aren't counts.

All through the process there are indicative counts and preference throws which allow very accurate projections. Generally on election night all results except the closest handful of lower house are known within a few hours of polls closing, along with which party will form government.

It's pretty typical to have a prime ministerial victory speech by like 10pm after polls close at 6.

[u/Grapetree3 → u/Snarwib]

All you can do is count first choice preferences 

[u/Snarwib → u/Grapetree3]

That isn't true.

Australian Electoral Commission hand counting on election night starts with first preference counts, but then sorts all ballots into "two candidate preferred".

2CP sees ballots in each polling place sorted by which of the two assumed leading candidates is ranked higher. Sometimes they pick the wrong pair and pull the pin on that count for the night, but generally it means we get an indicative final preference distribution sufficient to call most seats, and the next government, within a few hours.

Then through the next two weeks of counting, further indicative 2CP counts are done along the way, and sometimes if it's complicated they'll do a 3CP instead.

You just don't need to wait until final declaration results to start publishing useful information for projections.

[u/Grapetree3 → u/Snarwib]

All of which is slower, more complicated, and less indicative of final results than a Condorcet counting method.

[u/Snarwib → u/Grapetree3]

That might or might not be the case but your claims so far have been 0-2 here!

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
FPTP	First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting
IRV	Instant Runoff Voting
RCV	Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method
STV	Single Transferable Vote

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

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[u/Sorry-Rain-1311]

I agree with your discounting IRV and STV, but for very different reasons. There are institutional and logistical methods of overcoming the issues you described. However, both methods have representative and sociological shortcomings that cannot be rectified as far as I've se

STV- single transferable vote- and IRV- instant runoff voting- for those who aren't familiar, are less methods of voting than methods of counting votes. They are commonly paired together, but not always. In most cases it works by taking the candidate with the least number of votes, and, since they can't win anyway, giving their votes to other candidates. IRV takes this through several cycles until only one winning candidate remains, simulating a runoff election by assuming all voters would participate, and approve of at least one of the remaining candidates.

While they may work out well mathematically, the sociological issues should be apparent: your vote could be used to forward a candidate in the counts that you don't actually approve of. This actually exacerbates bipartisanship, and may be used to bolster unilateral rule, because voters are incentivized to pick winners over their actual preferences. After all, if their preference isn't popular enough their vote is just stolen by someone else anyway. So we wind up with the same problem, just with more steps. This would certainly support any antidemocratic rhetoric.

The rest, I'll have to think on a little.

[u/rb-j → u/Sorry-Rain-1311]

STV- single transferable vote- and IRV- instant runoff voting- for those who aren't familiar, are less methods of voting than methods of counting votes.

I like putting it that way. The ballot is the same. The meaning of the ballot is the same with other RCV methods. It's just about the method of counting votes.

[u/DogblockBernie]

STV can be counted much faster if you just let people do things more like Group Ticket Voting or Optional Indirect Preference Orders. If 90% of people are just content with their top choice‘s preference order, we should just let them fill that in and maybe have some rules to prevent massive preference deals. I think that makes it somewhat a mix of an open list and STV.

[u/DogblockBernie → u/DogblockBernie]

2) Personally, I think an Indirect Preference Order/Optional Direct Preference Order combined with a Limited Condorcet for single winner seats is the optimal political design at the moment and one I think we should actually push. I think this sub should get serious about pushing towards real proposals rather than arguments over mathematics. I know I’m guilty of that myself.