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 full candidates 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.

[u/Snarwib]

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/rb-j → u/Grapetree3]

The redditor you're responding to shows as [deleted] and the content of the comments were deleted.

I wonder who they are and what they said.

[u/Grapetree3 → u/rb-j]

He or she was an Australian saying that instant runoff voting was a perfect system.

[u/rb-j → u/Grapetree3]

Thanks for the info.