Politics in the Animal Kingdom: Single Transferable Vote
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EXTRA: STV Election Example • Extra: STV Election Wa...
Footnote * from STV: Proportional Systems vs STV • Footnote * from STV: P...
Footnote † from STV: Switch To STV • Bonus: How to Switch T...
Footnote ‡ from STV: Hare Vs Droop • ‡ STV: Hare Vs Droop
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All the video is true, except for the last part where the government decides to switch to STV
The Australian senate already uses it :0
@CS O As does Spain
as does the majority of the developed world (with some minor exclusions)
@@montfx3237 itd be nice if i didnt live in a parliamentary dicatorship, yes it sounds ridiculous, but the whole parliament is corrupt and abusing power.
Indian presidential elections and upper house uses it too
"Council is full of monkeys." Thats actually very realistic
Haha lol
I guess it's somewhat true. Humans don't really evolve from monkeys but they share a common ancestor and are an ape just like monkeys.
@@formerunsecretarygeneralba9536 thats an actual r/woosh ngl you missed the joke hard.
@@thewingedhussar3407 I know what the joke is. Anyone who has watches cgp grey knows what that joke is considering how often he uses it.
@@formerunsecretarygeneralba9536 then play along with the joke please
This is just tiger propaganda, the current system works completely, and the monkeys always have the best interests of the whole jungle in mind.
Most things that sound too good to be true often are. Unfortunately there are a lot of legitimate concerns, some that have born out in real world experimentation with this kind of voting system, but they aren't presented here and he only goes over ideal situations, and even then he doesn't go into enough detail to explain things like how the "excess" votes are determined. As presented one would imagine that it would discourage early voting because if you were one of the "excess" votes, then you would have a disproportionate influence on the election to those that comprised the initial 33%, effectively getting 2 votes. In reality voting blocks are not nearly as homogeneous as he makes them out to be and not all of the excess votes would go towards a single candidate in the way he depicts.
@@femsplainer can't be worse than today's voting systems
@@godparticle3295 Yeah, no it can actually be far far worse than what we have. This kind of system is extremely complex and thus incredibly opaque. You think people are calling election integrity into question now? Just wait until we implement a system like this where essentially no one can properly tally the votes by hand and wherein a person who was actually more popular overall than another candidate can still end up losing to them based on the timing of when a voter's next tier of voting actually comes into play. You think people complain about the electoral college now, just wait until people perform analyses post election that will eventually show that an unpopular candidate won a seat simply because of how the votes aligned at one convenient stage in the voting. Also if you look at France and other countries that have Runoff Elections and you'll see the great many problems a Majoritarian election faces in reality, rather than these idealized and contrived examples presented in this video. Reality is much messier than what was presented. After all I could easily make a similar video showing how FPTP is an ideal voting solution because it's simple, never disenfranchises an individual like Majoritarian elections invariably do, and any individual can verify the reported election results by tallying up the votes. Obviously there are problems with FPTP, but if I don't present them, then it seems like a perfect solution doesn't it? I would recommend research "Majoritarianism critiques" on Google. You will find tons of articles and surveys around the various issues with various types of runoff elections and each one has it's own unique and terrible problems.
@@femsplainer I live in a country where this type of system is in place and everyone’s pretty okay with it, they’re all more pissed about having to vote
@@femsplainer Ok what about candidates in FPTP system who end up winning 24% of the vote but since other candidates won less votes than them they would win despit almost 3/4th people not wanting them to win like what happened in the 2015 UK election. FPTP encourages two party system because people know if they vote for a third party there vote would just go to waste. This is like 2000s propganda in favour of FPTP. STV has no effect on when you vote.
I see that Turtle’s extremism has been eliminated from the jungle.
Lol all you sheeple didn’t comment L 417 likes 0 comments smh
The joke's on the rest of the Jungle Council, turtle will outlive them all...
The issue was that Turtle chose Stalinism as its ideological reference, like out of all the communist and socialist options why would you chose Stalinism, what are you, a Dictortoise?
Luke MoonWalker yes and then the Tortoises chose Nazism like why choose nazism out of all the conservative policies
Luke MoonWalker yes and then the Tortoises chose Nazism like why choose nazism out of all the conservative policies
The monkeys know full well this would be better for us. But it wouldn't be better for them, and right now they're in charge.
Ouch.
Dustin Calhoun lol
That does seem to be the predicament....
I thought she was secretly a shapeshifting alien lizard?
I couldn't agree more. Sounds like a fantastic system, but how do you convince the ones in power to change the system to one which isn't in their own interests. However we did have a referendum in the UK on this topic a couple of years ago. But getting the whole population to fully understanding all of the voting systems is a tall order. So they voted to stay with the status quo - First Past the Post. Peoples understanding of politics is a major issue and needs to be addressed. But that wouldn't be in monkeys best interest would it? :D
The problem is when the council has to say yes to the changing of the vote system.
Not really, I would assume the queen has absolute power.
@@PouLS The real problem is that that would never realistically happen in reality, and if it did, the ruler in her position would likely not be so benevolent. In order for this to be implemented in pretty much any existing democratic country, it would have to go through some variety of "council" composed of people incentivized to keep the FPTP system, which makes it more likely for them to stay in power.
Quick question: In the White Tiger scenario, how do you decide which citizens' votes are the 'extra' ones? Realistically, not all of White Tiger voters would have the same second choice, so which votes you're counting matters. The solution I can think of would be to add partial votes of everyone's second choice. 32/65 of White Tiger's votes are extra, so every White Tiger voter's second choice gets 32/65 (about half) of a vote. What would actually happen though?
As far as I know, the 2nd and 3rd place votes are distributed based on each voter's individual ballot, not in chunks based on the party candidate. This is just a simplified version for the video
Good question. Maybe a random draw, if the numbers are large enough to even it out. Or even just calculating the average?
That is precisely the Australian system, subsequent numbers like 2, 3, 4 don't hold the same unit value as 1. It's complex but the kangaroo's count the votes anyway.
@@owengallagher5779 sure, but who decides which votes are the one that need redistribution, if 33% of white Tiger voters took the other one as their 2nd choice, and the rest the Lion, are all 2nd votes transferred to the lion, becouse the first 33% are enought to get the white Tiger into office. Maybe its resplit represntetivly like ine 33% of the redistributed votes go to Tiger an the rest to lion. Good video btw!
Each implementation of STV could handle this differently, but your last idea is essentially correct. The modern implementation takes a proportion of every second vote. So if one candidate got 60% and needed only 33%, the 27% spillover is not a random selection of specific ballots' second choices. You instead look at all second choices from all ballots in the 60%, and weight them to represent 27%. So if half of the 60% had one second choice, and half had a different second choice, each of those second choices would receive an extra 13.5% (half of the 27% spillover). With a large electorate, this basically necessitates digital voting, or automatic tallying of analog votes, because the votes need to end up in a digital space where these relatively complex maths can be performed.
The UK is in desperate need of a system like this.
How would you count these votes? As a software engineer, I hope the answer is not "by computer" for reasons you'll see well-explained if you google [Tom Scott electronic voting]. Electronic voting is insecure.
Or does "counting" the votes just become "typing the votes into a spreadsheet everyone can see"?
@@armorsmith43 I must be experiencing deja vu, because I swear I have seen these comments before.
Hey, a fellow Tom Scott fan! I would count it in base 7 just to mess with people.
@@armorsmith43 Australia manages to use this system without voting machines; even if it were to take longer for humans to count the vote than the current system takes, surely the extra few hours (or longer if necessary) is worth it, considering how brilliantly and simply CGP Grey has illustrated the advantages of such a voting system, in this video.
I would vote for anyone named White Tiger.
He's so cool!
White Tiger polls very favorably among striped cats age 18-33.
I prefer Dragonzord, myself.
wcr4 was going to make a joke about that.
lol
They could've just fought to the death smh.
but your representative cant do their job if they are still fatally bleeding
@@JohnnyBooi r/woooosh
@@guardian8118 yeah no
@@JohnnyBooi r/wooooooooosh
@@guardian8118 r/woooooooooooooooosh
If you're wondering why this isn't immediately implemented in [insert election here], it's because it benefits the people, not politicians. Politicians make the election rules.
This is the election system we have in the Republic of Ireland 🇮🇪
The potato famine wasn't a genocide Now time to turn off notifications and watch the fireworks
@@thefrenchareharlequins2743 Pfff
My inner drunkard just got very patriotic
P.S. you know for a fact he didn't turn off notifications!
This just simply proves we’re a better democracy than Britain.
Queen Lion is awesome. A leader who wants to do the right thing, is willing to listen, and change her opinion based on new information. Lion: Right on Voting, Right for America. Vote Lion 2018.
CanadaMMA I would rather vote for White Tiger.............because he´s so cool!
It's called a Benevolent Dictator, an absolute ruler who does what's right and fair.
CanadaMMA I vote for wolf, an ambitious leader with great plans for this country! Or... just because wolves are cool =D. If I were to vote for an animal (by personality, party symbols ignored) that best represented my interests, I would probably have to think about that for a while. Maybe a cat.
101jir I'd vote for a human. Cuz, Y'know, humans can communicate, think critically, sympathise, feel modesty and do pretty much anything an animal can't (except for flying).
GlitchyShadow13 Ahh, but what's the fun in including humans? Supposing that there were no humans, who would you pick?
Question: Is Queen Lion playing with lives, constantly changing the rules in each binding election cycle over several years, or has she chosen a population to torment, forcing them to show up to vote every few weeks??
several years
My guess would be alternate timelines where every timeline is a different voting system
A small price to pay for salvation
Well, lions (and mostly every other animal) live shorter than humans. So they have elections more often.
no listen to the video. TEST REGION. Which means she takes one small region and tests the system there. Meaning that it impacts a very small population. We do the same thing in the real world with socioeconomic models. It's done more in cananda than in america, though.
It's ridiculous that this isn't common practice in western industrial nations already. The only reason you'd be against ranked voting is a desire to hold power as opposed to designing the system for maximum democracy.
'Course, the people who'd have to approve this are the folks who got elected under the current system.
You westerners always under the delusion you live in a democracy lmao. At best you live in an olicarghy. At worst a monopoly
You think the system was designed for maximum democracy?
And I see now you’ve run into the reason why the system does not exist yet
it's genuinely just that, it's harder to politically play around in STV than in FPTP, and countries are not eager to adopt it, you don't need true democracy for people to be 'satisfied' (or at least complacent), just an apparent democracy
It just looks so clean, intuitive and perfect tbh. Is there a hidden flaw or something? Im confused
(i posted this in other comments, but here is part of the explanation why it is flawed, basically it doesn't account for representatives agency) the problem with this system is that it promotes intraparty competition. given that you can't win representing the ideas of your party, because people won't differentiate you from other candidates of your own party (and the more powerful and popular candidates will win) you start to deviate from the core ideas and start to emphasize more extreme ideas (so you can stand out), so you end up with winners that represent minoritarian ideas or simply dont represent the core voters of their party. this produces two main problems: one, you end up with many extremists; two, parties lose power over candidates (when this happen you end up with personalistic democracies and populism). This is probably an oversimplified explanation, but the main ideas are present.
@@Itachi0567 what if you used ranking and stv? Say 60% of white tigers voters rank silverback gorilla as their 2nd choice, 20% rank purple tiger as 2nd, and 10% vote the other gorilla. The votes would be proportionately representive then, no?
@@Itachi0567 Wouldn't that party get less popular if the representative of that party doesn't represent the core ideas of that party anymore? Isn't it self balancing?
@@Itachi0567 The problem is that democracy is inherently flawed
@@IVIagicful Probably no, because partyes can change (remeber, Trump was the representative of the same party Abraham Lincoln once was), and that would easily make the popularity as normal
Just recently, a couple kids from my school got our school to use STV voting for our student government elections, as far as I know it went great.
Congrats! My school is next.
Mines next
5:02 How does your school manage situations like at the time stamp, in which one candidate gets more than the required votes? Do they have a way of automating it or do they have someone that does the math?
Bigger-army diplomacy is simpler
That's called the "Vladimir Putin 'democracy'".
I prefer faster coronation diplomacy.
Bigger my ass. STRONGER is better, though more complicated.
I don't know about that. Look at world war 2 Russia.
@@johnoshei5768 best comment haha
That is precisely the Australian system, except subsequent numbers like 2, 3, 4 don't hold the same unit value as 1. It's complex but the kangaroo's count the votes anyway.
How does this work? The wikipedia article doesn't mention this
@@Septimus_ii You number the candidates for your area say 1-6, and the Senate is around 20 parties. If the person u voted 1 for doesn't recieve enough 1 votes to win, ur 2 choice becomes ur vote, and so forth. U can also just put 1 and leave it at that.
I think you made a mistake here, you said the "person u voted" , when i think you meant koalas you voted for. Its an easy mistake to make.
@@imluvinyourmum No, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. votes still hold the same value and "not enough votes to win" isn't accurate. It's if after each round no-one has 50% of the votes the person with the least number of votes is eliminated and all votes for that person are redistributed to each votes next non-eliminated preference. In the event someone doesn't label past a certain number (a minimum of 6 is required to be a valid vote) the vote exhausts and is removed.
The problem is nobody seems to understand the system so we’re still stuck with a two party system
Ireland and Malta are currently the only countries to use STV for all National elections. One interesting difference is how both countries deal with a seat being vacated in the course of a parliamentary session (eg when a politician resigns or dies in office). In Ireland, a fresh election is held only in the constituencies with an empty seat, usually with only 1 seat on offer (normally there would be 3 - 5 seats per constituency). These often take place on the same day as referendums so can happen months after the seat becomes empty. As far as I'm aware in Malta, the person who lost the election but who would have been next in line for a seat automatically gets elected. In other words, a candidate that comes in 5th where only 4 seats were available in the previous election.
In Ireland's case, that only happens with Dail/Seanad (parliament/senate) seats - for local council seats or Irish seats on the European Parliament, parties co-opt replacements for their resigning councillors/MEPs instead without an election.
What about Australia?
@@LittleJimmyR My understanding is Australia uses STV for a lot of elections, but not all. Unless it's changed, I think the national Parliament uses AV rather than STV. The Senate and many regional parliaments use STV.
@@cclr3574 Idk, I live in Australia, but I am not of voting age yet.
I actually thought this would be a video on ecology
I thought it would be a video on the best guitarist of all time...
+Brandon Ottinger (Jaqen H'ghar80) Brian may
same
i thought it was porn
@@editsonimovie8681 no you didn't.
Of course, in the real world the ones making the rules would be the monkeys, and they care about their fellow monkeys, not the populace as a whole. So they keep the old system.
Unless there's a system where the executive office (Queen Lion) can make executive orders. But then there's the risk of that being abused (Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is a good fictional example of that).
wait until someone comes to mess with the monkeys we'll see how quick to change they are then
In this scenario, the rules of election aren't made by the elected. The Queen keeps her position no matter what, and is *only* in charge of the election and making sure that people are fairly represented.
TheEarthdeity a banana in every hand then
@@VestedUTuber Well there could be a rearrangement of ranges on species lines which lowers the monkeys influence
Plot twist: Grey takes power in a coup.
Grey is top chicken
This is exactly the Irish system of voting!
🚫🧢
Yes it is
didnt know politicians in ireland were animals
CGP GREY YOU ARE MY FAVORITE CHANNEL. I'M NOT EVEN JOKING. You've inspired me to make my own Geography-based channel incorporating profiles on every single internationally recognized sovereign nation of the world (despite some of them being disputed states with partial recognition yet full autonomy). I'M YOUR BIGGEST FAN!
damn this is old
And now he has over 2 million subscribers, congrats man
And look at you 5 years later. Amazing
Hey there Paul
Damn this was so long ago
I'm amazed, impressed, and extremely happy with the amount of intelligent and/or thoughtful comments on this video. Way to go Grey, you may have one of the only KZhead communities that doesn't suck.
lol noob get rekt m8
dorito choclat buns
DAMN YOU KZhead!
Neon God You just HAD to say something. Way to jinx it, fart maggot >:
Ivana Dostya I'm sorry! I... I just thought... I forgot that Internet T^T
In Chile we used to have something like the system described at 4:30 called the "binominal system". It worked like absolute shit because it applied to all elections, not just the ones with 2 (lists of) candidates. So in the end that guaranteed that absolutely hated candidates that got like 1 vote, still got a place on Congress, while people would have voted even for another party to avoid that one candidate.
You just explained politics better then school could teach me.
This is what is used in the Australian senate. With each state electing 6 representatives. It works well!
The great take away from this is that politics is all a big zoo.
nice
Congratulations, you got the metaphor
Anakin when he is not given the rank of master: 0:13
0:14
This is truly one of my favorite videos of all time. This should be taught in schools. Period. I share this video with everyone i possibly can. Thank you @cgpgrey for making this and for making it so understandable.
The Australian senate actually uses STV! Each original state gets to send 12 senators, and the territories each get 2. 18 out of 33 (55%) senators are crossbenchers, which is more diverse than our House of Representatives, elected through preferential voting and having 5 out of 20 (6%) representatives as crossbenchers. The only problem with STV (and most forms of preferential voting) in practice is that, without proper qualification guidelines, the list of candidates can become unmanageably long. Last election, we had 110 candidates running for senate. The ballot paper was long enough to wipe your arse with for days. While a few people chose to number each of those boxes from 1 to 110, most people ended up voting above the line, letting parties decide how residual votes were to be divided up, and leading to lots of strange parties rising to the senate (including the Motor Enthusiast Party and the Australian Sports Party, which lost its seat in a half-Senate election). For better or for worse, the popular senate vote usually lines up fairly well with the seat allocation, which makes STV work pretty well in that regard.
+Stablefree The other problem is corruption. Preference deals can (and are being) purchased and sold between minor parties and independents. This leads to radicals/minor parties such as Jackie Lambie or the Motoring Enthusiasts Party getting seats when they wouldn't normally if they hadn't made backroom deals with other candidates.
+Steven Stone the US has actually borrowed a few Australian voting strategies, such as private voting. But, from here, the Australian voting system of "you have to vote no matter what" seems awfully strange, and I didn't even know why that was. That's actually a really good explanation, and would have made it better all around for us, too.
+Stablefree Then double dissolution out of nowhere. To be fair I doubt the current senate represented the true intentions of the voters, still I think it was good to keep the government in check.
+AussieFreekickerz Not anymore. The new Senate voting changes have made it so only voters get to decide their preferences, not parties.
One part of our system you are yet to mention is that if you want to be elected or be the government you need 50%+1 votes to win. This creates an odd situation where if nobody gets that sweet sweet absolute majority, you have to convince independents and minor parties to be a part of your government, which creates the (in my own words) Everybody Hates Labor situation. Why do I call it that? Because the most recent instance of this happened when Labor needed just a few more seats to become the government, and in convincing independents and minor parties won, even though the majority of voters who didn't donkey or informally vote didn't want them in office, creating a minority government, which is the real name, by the way.
This seems substantially better than the system we have now. It opens two questions. First, can anyone find a flaw with this system that does not also exist in the current system? Second, how can we fight for this to happen in the United States when both parties are going to be opposed to it because it weakens them and strengthens the actual voters?
Crazy things happen when parties/candidates get to redirect preference flow www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/sport-and-motoring-enthusiasts-to-join-senate-in-new-hung-parliament-20130908-2tdqm.html
HesderOleh I am sorry but you lost me.
Aaron Reichert how to redirect the extra votes, it can be fixed (kind of) by sending the latest voters 2nd preference the votes
William Ladine I thought the extra votes are redirected by what the individual voters put down as their next choice?
Aaron Reichert how do you figure out who gets redirected though? my 2nd choice might be tiger and yours might be kiwi
This is probably one of your best. As always, simple, well explained, and entertaining. Thank you cgp grey
Question: in the example with the White tigre and the runoff votes going to the pink one (theoretically same party) how do they choose which of the white tigre votes are the "extra" ones to be passed on. After all, say the second preferences are split in the white tigre vote, does that give luck a factor in deciding whose second preference votes get called upon?
When a popular candidate receives far more votes than needed to pass that threshold level, how is it decided WHICH voters get their votes switched to their second-choice?
everyones is distributed, but at a reduced value that depends on how far that they overshot the required quote
From another comment: "He talks about this in another video. Check, in percentage, how many voted for each candidate as their number 2, and give the votes away proportionately"
Count the amount of different no. 2 votes, and multiply this by the proportion that are extra.
@Gavin Mai Gavin Mai but what if 2nd place votes for a candidate are exact 50/50 but there is an uneven number of excess votes?
@@sebastianhaslinger4307 i assume they would get half a vote each then
If the United States adopted this, we'd have nothing but independents winning elections, which I would be VERY happy with.
+Shawn Ravenfire nah, independents would still be the minority, but that minority would start to grow pretty quick. I think R and D would always be the big fish but the independents would get enough seats to be a serious force.
+override367 True. Not to mention Libertarians, Greens, and other minor parties.
+Shawn Ravenfire THANK YOU! Someone who acknowledges the U.S.A's voting is broken, but isn't a stupid commenter about it!
+override367 I agree, the only thing is the D and R know this so getting voting reform in the US would be next to impossible. Unless we backdoor it with a Constitutional amendment drafted by the states, but that's just as unlikely.
+Sedsibi IT needs to be done though.
@CGP Grey Would you ever consider doing a video on the german election system? They use a hybrid local/proportional representation system for the bundestag, with a variable number of representatives. I'm curious how the pros and cons stack up according to you.
I just heard Nevada is proposing to switch to this system (or something similar). This could be interesting and I'm hoping to see more people flock to this video for better understanding.
It passed! Due to their constitution, it will need to be approved in the voter referendum a second time in 2024 for it to go into effect. That would make it the third state to adopt RCV (after Maine and Alaska).
respect, at least some are doing the right thing
BC (Canada) is having a referendum on a new voting system. I've used this a few times to help people make sense of STV. Thanks Grey!
subject to Duverger's Law (mathematically enforced Two-Party System), gerrymanderable, Fails Favorite Betrayal Criterion (aka, the Spoiler Effect on steroids). Fails Monotonicity Criterion (ranking candates out of order of your true preference HELPS your favorite candidate). Fails Participation Criteria (you can literally harm your favorite candidate just by showing up to the polls), no Condorcet.
As someone who cannot stand politics and voting. This made this INCREDIBLY easy to understand, and showed why the system works for everyone involved. Why the FUCK is this not the basis for all voting?!
+Ch1l1C0nCarnag3 I think it's because the guys in power (Republicans and Democrats) know they wouldn't win.
+Ch1l1C0nCarnag3 Most countries that were not heavily influenzed by the UK like USA or UK itself use Largest Remainder or D'hondt systems which basically accomplish the same, in a different way.
That doesn't make sense either. They already control who gets put up for election so they would simply rig the new system in some fashion. If we can't control eligible candidates then we always lose.
Funnily enough, you'd expect the Democrats to be voting to change the system. Because on 3 occasions (1876, 1888 and 2000), the Presidential candidate with the popular vote didn't win because of how the Electoral College is set out. And the losing candidate was from the Democrats ALL 3 TIMES.
To be brutally honest, with the way the last US election has gone down, it's quite possible that people will have to seek refuge *from the US* before too much longer.
Just wanted to say Thank you so much for these videos ❤🙏🏼
The production jump from the last animal politics video to this one gave me whiplash. Nicely done 👍
if a candidate gets more than the proportionally needed share (in your example 33% when sending 3 representatives) then all the extra votes are counted towards the voter's's second choice, makes perfect sense. but here is my question: who decides which of the voters counted towards the initial 33% adn which ones are the overflow counted towards their second choice, because not all who vote for one candidate as their first choice will have the same second choice
I guess, you look at every second choice and then take a proportion of it according to how much it was over.
It's done on a voter-by-voter basis.
Lucas Keune i guess that makes the most sense and is the most fair. thanks for the quick answer
An excellent question... there are several variations of STV, see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_single_transferable_votes#Surplus_allocation One answer is "at random". Or... take the next preference of all people who voted for the surplus candidate, and transfer them at a reduced weighting, thus proportionally representing them (this is the "Gregory" system)
I was trying to answer the question, but I'm not sure I fully have a grasp of it. Perhaps someone can help. Would a STV election for N candidates be equivalent to N IRV elections, with each run as if the previous winners hadn't run? (in the video's example, N=3) Edit: I think it would be different from N IRV elections with a standard 50% cutoff. However, would it be equivalent to one where the cutoff is 1/N?
Wait, okay, so... when you're talking about giving representation to the second, less popular tiger, you take the second preference of those who backed the big tiger candidate. But, how do you know which of white tiger's 65% voters to take? You took the ones that pushed him from 33% to 65% but couldn't you also take the ones between 17% and 50%? They could have had a different 2nd choice. Help appreciated :)
Very good question!!! I want to know the answer as well! All of my guesses or ideas seem flawed so far. I can't think of a good answer here.
Okay, I hope I'm explaining this correctly: basically, they don't move actual physical extra votes, but they 'move' virtual votes of the average second choices for the entire party. (more) ↓ ↓ Let's say 100 people voted for white tiger, 80 voted for purple tiger as second choice & 20 for gorilla as second choice. To make the numbers easy. You only need 70 votes to win, so there's 30 votes left over. What you do is you take the average of the entire white-tiger voters second choices, meaning 80% of white tiger voter's second choice was purple tiger & 30% of white tiger voter's second choice was gorilla. With 30 votes left over, you take 80% of those 30 votes (24) & give them to purple tiger. Then you take 20% of those 30 votes (6) & give them to gorilla. ___ so essentially, You are giving virtual 'average' votes to the second choices, not actually giving the physical votes of specific people to different second choice candidates. Does that make sense?
That does make a lot of sense! So basically, everyone is polled, not just those who push the candidate over the limit. Thanks!
Scott J. Fox Makes perfect sense. Thanks for explaining that.
Scott J. Fox In your 3rd stanza, if you will, I think that 30% is meant to be 20%, no?
This video is wrong. Reject humanity Return to monke
libunity!
The monkeys care about what really matter; bananas
....pcm...?
pfff, libs are at it again. At least if you want to go back to the past, Stop talking with real words. True anarcho primitivist talks in "ouga bouga".
Hunters will grill your body for all eternity if you don't vote monkey!
But, but, the founding lions *meant* for the system to work like this. Otherwise the entire jungle would just be controlled by two prides.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. Not having this is exactly why the US IS controlled by just 2 parties. It is a natural consequence of the majority vote system the founding fathers set. And having the inevitable 2 party system has led to the representation getting more extremely divergent when a majority of the citizens are likely more moderate and don't actually want either party. I like to equate it to how you like your tea. Whether you like it warm or cold, you should not have to choose between a rolling boil or frozen solid and settle for what is closest. A STV would let you tier your vote from the moderate you prefer up to the lesser of two extremes you don't. Both the 2016 and 2020 elections are prime examples of why 2 parties suck. The 2020 one for example, a Republican now has to choose between a candidate that has proven incompetent at handling an ongoing national crisis or one that represents the opposite of every political opinion they have. It is a no win situation, because there are only 2 choices: lose and lose.
@@dxjxc91 he's saying the founding fathers meant for the system to work like this, but this kind of voting didn't exist yet so we have FPTP forever because it would make it harder for the two big parties to get into power, and they don't care about the American people the party care about their own agenda
@@SM-ys8lw the bigger problem is that EVERY voting system has flaws. Some are worse than others. For example, I like ranked choice proportional voting, but I also HATE political parties, and thus hate that system because it makes parties PART of the system and gives the party bosses incredible power. So while I like that, mathematically, it grants more proportional representation IN THEORY to ideological views of the voters (via the vehicle of parties), I dislike that it's based on the parties themselves actually (a) holding to their ideology and (b) that the party bosses don't abuse that power. It's why he put the hearts around the Schultz(sp?) system in that earlier video, as it's ranked by ideology, not by party...I think.
@@SubduedRadical my dispose for political parties is great, look at the state of this country, look how decided we are, it's the fault of political parties, the two party system only increases the problem
But they made winner take all, which inevitably ends in 2 parties
Grey, I'm not entirely sure how the "extra" votes are determined. If a candidate wins, how is it determined whose second choices would be used? It's highly unlikely that everyone whose first choice is a particular candidate would also back the same second-choice candidate, so taking the "extra" votes from the winner probably wouldn't work as simply as described.
Let's say we have 4 parties, Orange, Red, Blue, and Cyan. Red and Blue are the two big parties, so let's say O=8%, R=42%, B=38%, and C= 12%. Me and a buddy both voted with Orange as our number 1 candidate. Obviously Orange is dead last so then we go to second rank votes. I prefer red, so my second vote was for red. My buddy prefers blue though, so he made his second vote blue. It's really not that complicated, you just need to think about it a bit.
they could have the last voters who put the candidate over the threshold be counted for their second
PhazonSpaceSystems, Please reread my comment. You're explaining the part I _wasn't_ asking about because it was apparent. Because your first-choice candidate is eliminated, of course your second choices would be used. That much makes sense. What _doesn't_ make sense is how the system works if your candidate is over that line with "extra" votes: It could be randomly-chosen, but that's not exactly fair, especially not if you want your government to actually represent your people. It could be (as William Ladine just suggested) the "last" voters, but that would make it more worth people's time to wait until the polls are about to close before voting and would make being able to vote a crapshoot in the final hours of polling. It could be an exactly proportional split, but that involves fractional votes, and most people seem to be afraid of math to begin with (also, the phrase "close enough for government work" comes to mind).
Twentydragon betteer than First past the post though, their could be an algorithim however you spell it or every other vote. or something
If the assumption is that White Tiger voters will more or less vote similarly (i.e. have similar 2nd party choices and have that second party choice be more similar than dissimilar to their first), then randomly choosing the surplus of White Tiger's votes to allocate to their second parties doesn't matter -- it's merely an attempt to represent the second largest vote. That they will more or less vote similarly is an assumption, but a fair one I would say. Why would the second choices of people who voted identically in their first choice be radically different? (This is not a rhetorical question. You seem to think it's likely that it would be different, and I'm interested as to why. I'm prepared to concede the point.)
The ranking system seems pretty nice, wish the US could try that.
Someone will still complain...
+Lightscribe225 Touché
So then their votes will be transferred - all good!
This system favors the big parties. So they want the system to stay so they can remain in power. This exact same thing happened in 2011 in the UK. We had a referendum to decide whether we should switch to the Alternative Vote system, which is universally better. However, because the Conservatives were in power, and the system favored them, they used scare tactics to encourage people to stick with the current, broken system. And sadly, it worked. And with hindsight, people acknowledge that the referendum was very poorly executed, and had a lousy voter turnout.
Usually the rule is as soon as you're past the post, the next vote is counting your second choice. But HOW exactly this happens or can happen will produce very very similar things to gerrymandering. Theory Example: A has, 400 extra votes to be transferred, in a complicated system (not idealized like the video which I do enjoy but they forgot to explain this case) we will keep two remaining options B and C; you could easily through sampling methods or process make it so the population that leans towards C is counted for the "extra" vote and the vote that leans towards B becomes counted in the "first past the post process.
I live your videos because I can almost always recall the main idea for a long time after.
Very well done! Thank you for clarifying how the STV system works, for us!
I noticed the fun poking at the electoral college. Nice way to simply explain the single transferable vote system. A more in def explanation can be found on Wikipedia and such: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
***** What are you a history teacher?
Trust the sources Wikipedia provides, the more citations the more trustworthy
Spearka Zackly
I think he teaches Physics.
But what happens when Queen Lion dies and her heir is a total idiot?
maybe she holds little actual power, with a senate system to keep her laws in place (or not), and a court to punish the senator if they do illegal stuff
Still better than the system we have. In US, there are three branches. The Legislative and Executive both have substantial power, but the Judicial requires the other two to cooperate in order for it to have power. The worst example of this is during the Jackson presidency and the Trail of Tears. There needs to be another element to balance out the excesses of the legislative and executive branches; one that has power to back the judicial branch when the other two collude unconstitutionally. Also there is the problem of the presidency. The president is like a prime minister and a symbolic figurehead. That is a bad combination and is one reason why American politics are so vitriolic. The best solution is to separate the figurehead aspect of the president, making him/her a prime minister, and creating a monarch who is obviously the figurehead, but does also have real power that they could use to back up primarily the judicial branch when necessary, but also one of the other two if necessary to maintain balance. A constitutional monarchy with a tricameral government with STV and where the monarch does have real, not just symbolic power.
@@Theo-oh3jk Canada has this, but since the Queen can't get on a plane every time we need her rubber stamp, we have a Governor General Instead. The GG is the Crown's official representative in the country, and does pretty much what you describe. The GG used to be chosen by the queen, but is now chosen by the prime minister. I feel that this is an incentive for the GG not to rock the boat too much.
So you just pointed out the flaw in UK's elections without calling anyone explicitly. Got it.
Also applied to US. Wisconsin has a Democratic governor, but is consistently dominated by Republican legistlatures due to gerrymandering. Opposite happened in Maryland.
Portland, OR just adopted this system for our city council! 4 districts, 3 candidates from each. Very excited to have a more representative system, it's been sorely needed here!
Let's do away with this fiction that Queen Lion doesn't know what she's doing. She knows exactly what she's doing.
+Patrick Fitzgerald Beep boop.
That cracked me up. Nice one
It seems as if she is trying to make an educational video.
Dutch system: - Divide the number of votes through the number of seats in the counsil/parliament available. - Result is the number of votes a party needs to get one seat council/parliament, not percentages, because percentages are incredibly messy. - number of seats for each party (or species of animal in this case) is determined by how many times that threshold is passed. This way most of the animals are represented in a correct way, unless you voted on a party that got under like, 0,7% of the votes. This also means leftover votes don't need to be redistributed after passing the threshold as seen at 4:48. If you have more than 4 or 5 parties, this also means that it's very unlikely for one party to dominate the voting in the council/parliament, which means all parliament members will have to keep in mind the interests of the other parties when making decisions, causing consensus-based policies to be taken.
But then you don't have local representatives
@@jakistam1000 True, but then again our country is smaller than a single American state. So whilst this is a drawback, the local differences aren't as pronounced in the Netherlands as in say the United States. Plus, the Netherlands is a decentralized unitary state, which mean a fair number of things are dealt with on a more local level, either provincial or muncipal (though not as much as in the American federal system).
But wouldn't it be better if we could somehow use ranked voting in combination with our current system and redistribute those leftover votes? Because if you vote for a party that doesn't get any seats, your vote is still, in a sense, thrown away. It would be nice if those votes could go to a second choice in that case. Our system does still have strategic voting and this could cut down on that I think. Maybe even more important, I think the single biggest party should not get priority in coalition building. This because, especially in current times, the biggest party in the Netherlands actually still has a relatively small percentage of the seats. It seems if a ranked system gets implemented, we could make second choices public(but still anonymous), to show what the other choices are of the people who voted for each party. Then that could be used to show which possible coalitions have the broadest support and those could be given priority. If we want we can maybe even have a second 'negative list' where you can rank the parties you especially don't want to support, to get even more info on the best coalitions to form, and those NOT to form! But I suppose that would make it very complicated with relatively limited benefits. I suppose also, that might be difficult to combine ranked voting with the current system, especially with the system where you can vote for individual candidates within each party. I mean, our ballot is already absurdly huge! So maybe we'd have to give that up, or we should, after all, switch to a digital system. Still, at some point, more options is not better but could actually be paralyzing, and some trade off should be accepted. As far as local representation, I do feel some more explicit link between local elections and national ones might be good, but maybe only through switching up the bicameral system, have one more locally representative one, and a more national one, or maybe even a third chamber, although that might be getting too complicated and unwieldy again. ;)
The Dutch system is far superior to STV. STV is essentially a system designed for 'third parties', but not parties that get less than 20-30% of the vote, meaning it still doesn't produce a properly 'proportional' result; that's the reason it's favoured by parties like the Liberal Democrats in the UK - just proportional enough to give the Lib Dems more seats but not so proportional as to give seats to even smaller parties. Of course, the problem with all proportional systems is that coalitions becomes the norm, producing weak and gridlocked government. The strength of first-past-the-post/winner-takes-all systems is that they make it far easier to remove unpopular representatives/governments and replace them with a definite alternative that can then be held to their manifestoes and kicked out in turn, rather than continually returning the same old faces.
I think both the Dutch system and STV have advantages and disadvantages over each other. I.m.o. a better system than either would be to use STV with constituencies of around 6-8 seats, and also have a simple party vote, where everyone votes for their preferred party. Then, when the constituency seats have been filled from the STV, add more MPs, who would not represent any particular constituency, in order for the seats for each party to proportionally represent the votes in the party vote.
H.R.3863 - Fair Representation Act was actually recently introduced to the house in the U.S. to implement a system very similar to this!
The best explanation on youtube of what gerrymandering is all about
We absolutely need this in Canada. We are having a close 3-way race right now, and I'm sure we are all terrified of a split vote between the NDP and the Liberals, which would end up with the Conservatives winning....like last year...not through popular vote...but through vote splitting...
+CANADAWOOOOOOOOO I 100% agree with you.
+CANADAWOOOOOOOOO I'd be fine with any system that a: isn't FPTP and b: doesn't end with Harper still in charge.
+CANADAWOOOOOOOOO Well, as you probably already know. The Liberals took it, in a big, big way!
starr shine sooooo happy.
+CANADAWOOOOOOOOO And while today is a happy day for the Liberals, it's a more sombre day for the NDP- their second choice got in, but a lot of them had to strategically vote for the Liberals to stop the Conservatives from getting elected. All problems that could be resolved with an improved electoral system, of course!
Who decides which votes are used and which votes are unused, when more than 33% vote for one candidate? If 40% vote for a tiger, then 7% of those votes will then get put into whomever their 2nd choice is. But different tiger voters will have different second choices, so how do you decide whose second choice matters?
From another comment: "He talks about this in another video. Check, in percentage, how many voted for each candidate as their number 2, and give the votes away proportionately"
ohh that makes sense thanks
in australia we use this system, every voter marks the order down the list, or you can let the political party choose the preferances at the choice of the voter. there is deals done by big n small parties as to the direction of preferances, thus allowing smaller groups and indipendants to effect change regardless of getting into the forum.
+Danlo Troth sadly that's only the Senate. the house of reps is still first past the post
Murray Jobbins very true, and displayed by the revolving door installed on the prime minister's office lol.
YOUR VIDEOS ARE AMAZING. I LOVE THIS KINGDOM!
Dude O.O this taught me so much more than any school program ever??? Wowowowowow!
You know, this seems better than a current system in place in some big country.
No doubt.
In USA any state can do this, for their counties/parishes. Sadly only two states do it....
@@jennifermcadam1026 Nebraska and Maine are the only states that employ stv instead of unit voting.
@@MoonLiteNite Ireland Northern Ireland and Malta also does it in their EU elections.
@Abel Garcia that's kinda like saying a cup of coffee is better to drink than a cup of diarrhoea. Sure, it's accurate, but you're not exactly setting a high bar to clear.
Oh hey, more things the US could use
It sounds like Maine has voted to do this system starting the next election. Also.. DERPY...
Maine adopted instant run-off voting, which is a simplified version of this system for single-winner elections. It does not achieve proportionality (because there is still only one winner per district), but it does mostly eliminate the spoiler effect. This was motivated in large part by a series of gubernatorial elections where the winner fell well below a majority (due to strong third party showings). More about this and other electoral reforms: medium.com/@xirzon/the-global-fight-for-electoral-justice-a-primer-834ad8cb3b75#.aynu01fy4
How would we implement this in single representative districts?
MrAtlfan21 6 months late to answer but Maine does this now with a system called Ranked-Choice Voting. It’s very similar. You rank 1-3 on the ballot and if there isn’t a clear winner the votes are recounted and the lowest place candidate’s votes are redistributed.
You expect me to respect a comment from a person with an mlp profile pic
Love it. So clear. Thanks.
I'm confused about the case of White Tiger. How is it decided which votes are removed from the candidate who exceeds the necessary amount and get counted for other votes? It can be extrapolated how it works for individual votes when you're entirely eliminating a voting option and forcing them to their next option, but it's not as obvious when you're splitting the vote like you showed there.
I must say again... WHY IS THIS NOT A THING?!
cause your state chooses to use the winner take all method. 2 states currently do this
Maine is using AV hopefully it spreads to the rest of the nation
Ireland uses it.
Australia too, I think most commonwealth (or ex-commonwealth) countries do this
Sara Bennett Is is in some countries
THIS is the election process i want. at least for lawmaking bodies like councils or senates. for heads of State/executives that's another problem altogether as you can only have one head of state/executive, unless you want to go with the roman republic dual-consul system, which is not preferred.
really we should worry more about regional votes like votes for sentators than national votes for presidents and the like. sure the president is the public face of the government, but i prefer all the power going straight to a collective system of representatives these days, as the position of president, in the US at least, has been pretty much abused in regards to what the president is meant to do. to me, all politicians are bloody liars and we shouldn't trust any of them.
I am curious as too finding a better way to vote for the president. But i thought this was a super interesting video
Although I like the idea of STV, it definitely has flaws--for instance, STV can sometimes violate the monotonicity criterion (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion), which basically requires that a candidate can't be HURT by being ranked higher by some voters. Additionally, because STV ballots are often more complicated than ballots for a simple plurality-based voting system, some communities (If i recall correctly, Oakland CA had this issue) have found that people with lower levels of education / socioeconomic status are far more likely to receive misinformation about how to correctly fill out ballots, and so some argue that STV disenfranchises people belonging to such communities.
+coldsoup49 For the latter point, the obvious solution is to better education those places. It's a double win for them.
these animal illustrations are gorgeous. where can i kind the full set?
2:39 Come on, you can't sneak a tortoise in there and then never use it again...
zootopia 2 polítical kindom :v
Word
Civilization VII: Zootopia
This video came out before zootopia, it would be the prequel.
furryland
1:08 A banana in every hand! A tall tree in every yard! (I know you tried to pause.)
When I’m a Congressman for Texas’s fourteenth district I’ll introduce the STVA (single transferable vote act)
Are you actually a congressman?
@PotatoTornado Yeah, I know he's not a congressman now, it's just he said "when" which suggests that he will become one. But you're right he could just be confident in his chances or something
I find this very interesting and STV is certainly a great way of producing a highly representative election result, but I have a few objections about its use in anything more than a few specific circumstances. STV is actually used in a few places in the world today, most prominently in Northern Ireland. The reason it is used in Northern Ireland is not to improve democracy but to force a compromise between the nationalists and unionists. This is because any government elected using this system in Northern Ireland has to form a coalition including both nationalists and unionists in order to do anything because the Assembly is so divided. This is therefore a great system to force compromise, but to not to produce an effective government as compromise would be very difficult on most issues. STV is used to resolve war zones, not to produce effective governments. Secondly, STV actually does not remove tactical voting. In Northern Ireland, because compromise has to be found on everything, in order to have the best chance of their view being supported in government, a voter is incentivised to choose the representative who shouts the loudest, who is the most radical. Therefore, a moderate unionist is incentivised to vote for a very radical unionist to prevent the radical nationalists from dominating the assembly and vice versa for the nationalists, which is just a different kind of tactical voting. This is why the UUP's support has collapsed and the DUP takes such extreme actions and policy. Finally, STV is just a really complicated system and it is unlikely that all voters will be able to understand it properly and vote in the right way. This further lengthens an already very long counting process and so STV tends to be used in relatively small areas with small electorates such as Northern Ireland or certain small Scottish councils. This creates a sometimes long period with no clear government or authority, which could be dangerous if something that needs to be reacted to immediately happens, such as a pandemic or a war. Overall, STV is a really interesting system, but also hideously impractical. So as not to sound the cynic, I propose as an alternative AV+, which combines local representatives elected using the majoritarian system AV with regional lists (preferably closed). A similar, though not the same, system is used for the Scottish Parliament. It is not as representative, but it should produce clearer winners.
Really interesting, thanks
Hey! We use this in India! I never knew the reason for ranking. Thank you so much. It makes me happy that my country is using the more logical process of election.
+Caped Baldy yeah but also the caste system...
+Nathan Jones Better not open that can of worms buddy.
You should be proud of living in the biggest and most representative democracy in the world :)
No those doesn't have a shitty caste system of another age
There is a problem with the example with two tigers and two gorillas: The first tiger got too many votes (67 %), so his "overflow" of votes go to the second tiger because he was voted as the second best candidate....BUT which votes are considered this "overflow"?? Example: there are 20 votes in total. 10 of them have the other tiger as the second best candidate and the other 10 have a gorilla as the second best candidate. You needed only 11 votes to pass, so 9 are "overflow". But how do you pick which 9 votes?? Maybe all of the are for the gorilla?
The simplest way is to take the proportion all the votes of the one with overflow, and transfer it evenly. But true. This video should have touched on that.
Split them?
iamihop Though that isn't ideal either, because your vote might end up having less of an impact if your first choice "overflows".
jorisk322 it would be quite ideal, as you would still move to your second choice.
No, because only part of your vote is transferred (if you need 33%, but a candidate got 66%, only half of your vote goes to your second favourite candidate).
Thank you. This helped me understand my Space Game election system.
Alaska is starting to use a ranked choice voting system for the Alaska State Senate and State House of Reps this year. Its not quite STV since each district still only elects one representative, but it's better than before.
I see a bit of a flaw in this system. If only 5% love tarsier and he gets eliminated during the second round, he won't be a representative even if a lot of animals pick him as their second or third favorite. That means gorilla who appeals to 28% of the animals and also 5% who are cool with him, will go, even though potentially 95% had tarsier as their second or third choice. How about instead of ranking candidates, Each voter gets more than one vote, maybe ten? You could give candidates you love 7 votes, and ones you find acceptable 3 or if you are split 5 and 5 or 5-3-2 or whatever. That way, the love each voter has for each candidate will be represented.
You show a potential problem. Your remedy does not solve it, it only makes it worse. If you gave 10 votes (as an example) what is to say that a majority of voters would not put all 10 on the same candidate? That puts you right back to the very problem the explained system is designed to address. I think rather the solution to the problem you present is to tally all the preferences from all the ballots for all the candidates. That way the top three preferences always win the election, ties are resolved by going to the next lower tier of preference. I.E. if you look at all the tier one preferred you get 1 certain winner and three ties. You then add tier two results to the tier one results for anyone who didn't win solely on tier one results, if there is a tie, then the same for tier three, etc. That way the most preferred candidates always win regardless of their actual 'party'. Thus everyone is either satisfied or at the very least content with the results as it is mathematically unlikely that many ties would ever reach beyond a certain given point.
"what is to say that a majority of voters would not put all 10 on the same candidate?" yea but you still get more than one representative. one person, no matter how many votes they receive, can only be one representative. I like your other idea too, though. either way you still need more than one representative in my opinion. I wouldn't wanna have to choose between a candidate that 30% of voters love/70% hate and one that 5% love/60% like/10%hate
anoldcrow That is the elegance of my solution, actually. Do some math on it and see if I am right. The probability of getting a candidate that is actually not desirable is decreases as you run down the tiers - firsts always get it, first and seconds always get it, (etc.) - while fifths and fourths alone never get it without some pretty improbable consistencies of ties. (They would have to be the highest voted and consistently tied in every tier down!)
ok sure, that. i guess an easy way to count that though would be to assign each tier a point value, if your counting these by hand and not just letting some well programmed computer handle it. where in first choice gets 5 points, second 4, third 3 and so on. that way you don't have to figure out how ppl ranked candidates, just find out how many total points each candidate got and choose the highest scorers.
anoldcrow That doesn't work in the way you might think it would.
A BANANA IN EVERY HAND!
Sandwiches ForAll A TALL TREE IN EVERY YARD!
*EVERY MAN A KING*
*DOWN WITH THE TRAITORS, UP WITH THE STARS*
can we all the talk about how gorgeous these stickers are
The lion did his research from the jungle book
How do they determine which extra votes that take a candidate over the threshold are redistributed? ie What if the first thirty-three percent of white tiger voters had a gorilla for their second choice and the rest, the ones that got redistributed, had the other tiger? It still has the potential to misrepresent the ideals of the voting body.
Came to the comments to ask this exact question.
YOU DON'T DETERMINE. As in fact after counting votes you don't really deal with them, but rather with percentage. So you split the extra percentage proportionally - let's for the candidate A the second choice of 60% voters was B, and for the rest C, and A got 40% while 25% is needed, then that extra 15% would be distributed that way: A gets their needed 25% 60% of 15% is 9% extra for B 40% of 15% is 6% extra for C. And let's add the rest to it: 7 candidates, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. 4 need to be elected, so 25% of votes is needed. A - 40% - gets elected B - 7% C - 20% D - 8% E - 5% F - 10% G - 10% Total: 100% After splitting the extra percentage for A (without A): B - 16% (9% extra from A) C - 26% (6% extra from A) - gets elected D - 8% E - 5% F - 10% G - 10% Total: 75%, as A is already elected Let's say that all votes for C have F as their second choice (those transferred from A as the third): B - 16% D - 8% E - 5% F - 11% (1% extra from C) G - 10% Total: 50%, as A and C are already elected E goes out, 60% of E's votes go for D, 40% for F: B - 16% D - 11% (3% extra from E) F - 13% (2% extra from E) G - 10% Total: 50%, as A and C are already elected G goes out, 90% votes go for B, 10% for F: B - 25% (9% extra from G) - gets elected D - 11% F - 14% (1% extra from G) Total: 50%, as A and C are already elected D goes out, all votes transferred to the only candidate F. Finally A, B, C and F get elected with initially 40%, 7%, 20% and 10% of votes. 77% of population gets their first vote candidate elected, 12% get their second choice elected, votes of only 11% don't make any change. For comparison - in standard FPP system 80% get their first choice candidate, slightly better, but votes of the rest 20% don't matter - and that's significantly worse.
Pokegeek151 à
Latte You can’t determine that. You just assume that if somebody voted for tiger A their next preference would logically be the next tiger in the list.
@@federicovolpe3389 no, every voter gives secondary, tertiary,.... choices that determines where the votes go when someone has an overflow or gets deleted from the list.
There still seems to be an issue with STV, in the situation where one candidate receives a greater proportion of the vote than they need to win who decides which of the votes are extra? It works fine and dandy if everyone who picked candidate A as their first choice also picked candidate B as their second, but people are never so ideologically homogeneous. Some may choose Candidate C or D for their second choice instead. How do you select which votes are counted towards their first choice and which are counted towards their second?
I think they tally the second-choice for all of the first-candidate's voters, whoever gets the most of those will then have the extra votes transferred to them (if that makes sense)
The STV System is actually significantly more complicated than described for that exact reason. Each vote is actually looked at again and using some weird mathematical formula divided somehow so they meet the amount of votes they need and the 2nd preferences do match what all voters would have voted for.
You do fractional votes. If a candidate needs A% of the votes to win, and receives B%, where B > A. Then (1-(A/B))% of each vote now counts for the next option. In other words, you split each vote in the winning block into two parts, where the sum of all of the first parts is exactly the amount of votes that is required to win, the other parts count for the next option that is still in the race.
They look at the 2nd choices and divide proportionally.
Well this is how it works (or doesn't!), have a look for yourself: www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/results/senate/ WA is particularly fun/disturbing. Look up "Group Voting Tickets" and prepare to be horrified at what we did to this system.
So it's alternative vote (I'm talking about the individual renges) but more than one candidate wins.. Or it's just proporzional vote in each district?
this needs to be a Netflix series asap
There's something I don't understand about this system. If one candidate gets lots more votes than needed, how is it decided which votes are 'unused'? Surely not all of the voters who voted for the popular candidate would have put the same other candidate as their second choice. How can this be set up to be fair? (I'm genuinely asking. I have no clue)
I was just about to say, what if half of the losing candidate's votes were seconded for someone else, then wouldn't only be two that gets the required percentage.
The reason the votes are sent to same candidate of The same species is because A Democrat (Tiger) will never vote in a Republican(Gorilla) it's even stated in the Video that An animal will only vote for their own species (So Ranking all candidates of their species first and then whoever is left is Ranked with actual thought)
Same as the votes for the biggest loser
Just look at all the people that voted for the candidate with more votes then he needed and look at the total percentage of second votes for each candidate and multiply it with the percentage of votes he has too much off.
I'd say just take the overall percentages of second choices in that overlarge voting block, and divvy up the remaining votes that way.
This feels like it can incentivese more 3rd parties and independents
I'm from Ireland where we use this system, and we have so many independents, so I'd say that's true 😂 (I do think that's a good thing). We've also got seven parties in the parliament at the moment, and there are always new ones being made - sometimes they don't win any seats, and sometimes they do! I'd certainly say it's very easy to either create a new party if people feel like there needs to be a new one, or to get elected as an independent, so long as you put the work in helping people in your local area first.
yes it does and that's a great thing because the two current parties don't care about us, most Americans disagree with some of the stuff from both party, but since less will vote for 3rd parties and independents they won't either,
@@SM-ys8lw In a two party system, you're often not voting for who you like, but against who you hate more. I love democracy, but the U.S. is in deep need of some political reforms
You forgot the part where the monkeys freak out about losing their power and stage a coup
How do you decide whose votes are “extra”? Is it just luck of the draw?
Exactly, not all people who voted for the white tiger hypothetical candidate would have the same second choice.
Dang, I think you just found the flaw in this voting scheme. I still think it's an improvement, but I'm not sure how you fix this. Maybe just do an average of all first choice votes for that candidate? 90% who voted for Alice voted for Bob as their 2nd choice, and 10% who voted for Alice voted for Charles as their 2nd choice, so move 90% of the overflow to Bob, and 10% to Charles. That ignores the next possible subdivision but maybe you could do something similar. It would still be harder to game, and your original choice also won, so you at least get that no matter what.
There are a certain number of votes for a candidate. All of these votes are the '1st choice' votes for a group of people. For this group of people, there is a '2nd choice' vote distribution. There are a certain number of 'excess votes' for the candidate. This number is split between other candidates in a way that matches the '2nd choice' vote distribution. EDIT: this explanation is consistent with bitcoinweasel and Adam Lawson's descriptions.
Tom Hutton true, there is a certain number of “excess votes”, but whose votes specifically are “excess”?
@@jwil4286 I think I understand what @Tom Hutton is saying. I am going to try to example I am going to assume 100 people are voting. There is 63 voted for white tiger, 18 voted for green tiger, 12 voted pink tiger, 8 voted for yellow tiger. So 63 of them put white tiger in slot 1. What did that same group of people put in slot 2? of that 63 there is 4 choices they could have put nothing, pink, yellow, or green tiger. 45 put pink tiger, 10 put yellow, 5 put green, 3 put nothing. So there is 30 extra votes. What we need to do is figure out how to distribute based off those votes. 71% pink, 15% yellow, 8% green, we will just throw out the nothings. 71% of 30 is 21.3. 15% of 30 is 4.5, 8% of 30 is 2.4. So new scores are 33 white, 33.3 pink, 20.4 green, 12.5 yellow. Now pink is the second winner! What I don't know is what happens if the remaining people in yellow don't vote for green? Does green win by default or since green hasn't passed the 33% mark is there a different reshuffling that needs to happen?
STV is definitely an improvement over FPTP, but there is one thing that bugs me; why would people want local representatives at all? If Britain, er, the Animal Kingdom, would have PR, any citizen would be able to choose from 650 representatives, and could pick the one that best represents his or her political views, rather than be stuck with any of the three STV representatives that just happen to live nearby... Why should geographical location be more important to people's ability to connect with politicians than shared political views?
Because the local representatives tend to live in or near the city/town they represent and it means that they know what the local issues are and also makes them a lot easier to get in contact with and/or meet with. But I do understand what you're saying, more choice seems like it equals fairer representation, but imagine you lived in Glasgow and really liked a represtative from London and he got voted it, he wouldn't have the faintest clue what the issues were and you'd find it difficult to arrange a meeting with him. It would be like getting a History teacher in to teach you Calculus.
Calzour Point taken, but surely local issues tend not to be relevant on a national level anyway, because local issues fall within the jurisdiction of parish or county councils...
In some places (looking at the United States in particular), elected representatives will actually represent their home riding by raising local issues and even voting outside of party lines to represent the best interests of their constituents. For smaller governments, like State or Provincial governments or city/town councils, having a candidate who is able to represent your particular geographic location can be very helpful. It also makes it much clearer who representatives should be accountable to; if you want representatives to listen to what candidates want in an aggregated system like that, people would need to have some sort of method of divulging who they voted for, which makes people uncomfortable for obvious reasons.
Calzour What does where the politician used to live matter when he/she moves to the capital and starts voting for whoever lines his/her pockets?
Andrew Clarry Not necessarily. I know that here in the Netherlands, members of parliament are obliged by law to respond when contacted by a member of the public, regardless of where they live or what they voted, so the accountability is divulged on a case-by-case basis, and it seems to be working...
Please make a video on the Schluze Method
Agreed
Tekkogs Steve And on the Coombs method, along the Major Jugement (the two bests)
@CGP GREY What if, in the white tiger example, some of the excess wanted silverback. How would they split up non unanimous extra votes?
4:51 The problem with this is that you assume that all white tiger voters all had the same second choice for a candidate. If some of his voters voted for one of the gorillas as their second choice, the only fair way to distribute extra votes would be to distribute them proportionally (based on second vote choices) among the second-choice candidates. This would mean that each person's vote would be split into a 33/65th of a vote for white tiger and a 32/65th of a vote for their second choice. However, this still punishes voters for backing the popular candidate because if they hadn't voted for white tiger first, white tiger still would have won and their _entire_ vote would have counted towards their second-choice candidate.
In Ireland, a country which uses STV, when a candidate exceed the quota, the votes are distributed this way: 1st Choice votes (Seats = 5; Valid votes = 647; Quota = 108 votes) Evans - 144 (Elected in 1st count) Augustine - 95 Harley - 91 Stewart - 66 Wilcox - 60 Lennon - 58 Cohen - 55 Vine - 48 Pearson - 30 In this scenario, Evans is the only candidate who exceeded the quota. So, we need to look to the 2nd preference votes of Evans *all* 144 votes in the 1st Choice. Let's see: Evans's 2nd choice list: Vine - 80 Cohen - 36 Pearson - 16 Stewart - 8 Harley - 4 Now, Evans exceeded the quota by 36 votes (144 - 108 = 36). This surplus shall be divided by the full amount of 1st choice votes Evans received. 36/144 = 0,25. This means each one of these 5 candidates above is therefore entitled to one-fourth of the number of papers in which he or she is the next preference. Now, we calculate how many votes each of the 2nd choice candidates will have redistributed to them: Vine - 80 * 0,25 = 20 votes Cohen - 36 * 0,25 = 9 votes Pearson - 16 * 0,25 = 4 votes Stewart - 8 * 0,25 = 2 votes Harley - 4 * 0,25 = 1 vote THUS, in the 2º count, after the redistribution of Evans's surplus, we have this situation: Evans - 108 (Elected) Augustine - 95 Harley - 92 Stewart - 68 Wilcox - 60 Lennon - 58 Cohen - 64 Vine - 68 Pearson - 34 The counting continues (This time without any candidate exceeding the quota, only eliminating the less-voted in each count) until all the 5 seats are filled.
@@pedrovinicius7554 That's all well and good, and I appreciate the example, but it doesn't really address the problem at hand. From one perspective you could say that voters for Evans actually got 1.25 votes because they voted him at the top of their ballot but also got to have their second pick have some of their vote as well. On the other side you could also say that those voters were actually cheated of 0.75% of their vote because if they had not voted for Evans at top ballot, they would have a full vote for their second candidate instead of only 0.25 of a vote. If Evans is a shoe-in to win, then you would start to see people choosing to put others at the top of the ticket instead of Evans, which would give the false impression that he didn't get as much support as he actually had because his constituents were trying to game the system. Paradoxically, if enough people attempted to game the system in this way, it could turn out that Evans actually ends up losing the election entirely. The point being that these systems introduce a rather large amount of unfairness, oddly enough on both sides, and because of the devaluing of the second tier vote, you could also have a situation where the second place of the top two most desired candidates doesn't even get a seat. As we see illustrated by your example quite nicely actually, that the vast majority of people who voted for Evans put Vine as their second pick and thus that person ends up in the middle rather than near the top of the remaining pack. Suffice to say there are many more flaws with such a system, not to say that FPTP is a perfect system either, far from it, but you wouldn't know if from the way the video presented the issue.
@@femsplainer i don't really think that's a fair assessment actually. let's assume that 20 is the mark to get a seat, if your first pick gets 40 votes then 50% of your vote becomes your second preference, but you've also lost 50% of your first preference vote because everything after 20 was pointless. the system actually never has more than 100% of the votes counting concurrently so you never get more than one votes worth. also, as you correctly pointed out, not voting for your actual preferred candidate to "game" the system actually actively gives them fewer votes! which kinda already disproves your argument in itself
@@zephr8786 You miss the point entirely. Yes I never get more than 1 vote, but if I play my cards right, I can create a situation where I have a better chance of getting more of the people I want in office. It's a bit of a contrived example but it will work to display what I mean. Let's say that there are 40 people voting in an election. Everyone loves White Tiger so they all put him at the top of the ticket. The #2 for the ticket is evenly split between Turtle and Ferret so we have a tie after the excess votes are split. Now take that exact same scenario and one of the constituents knows that White Tiger will win no matter what because he is so loved by the people. So one member being a very smart animal recognizes that my vote for White Tiger is not really meaningful, and so I put Turtle at the top of my ticket instead of White Tiger. Now when the vote is split I have just ensured that there is not a tie, because I broke away and voted for Turtle, so he get's 100% of my vote instead of just 50% if I had voted for White Tiger. So Turtle wins the second seat and I get to have both candidates that I wanted in office by simply gaming the system.
@@femsplainer That's not 'gaming' the system, it's exactly how it's intended to work. A voter never ends up with less than a full vote, what changes is how the fraction of a full vote is split amongst the candidates they vote for. When putting a winning candidate who beats the quota by a small margin at the top of your ticket, you end up with most of your vote going to that winner and a small proportion going to your second choice. When putting a winning candidate who takes a landslide victory, you end up with a smaller proportion of your vote going to that winner, and a larger proportion going to your second choice. At the end of the day you still get a full vote of representation.
Thank you so much for making these they're so simple and clear
What country uses this? BTW, CGP Grey hit the nail on the head. One of the biggest problems is people are worried about how others are going to vote with the most wins deal. For example, with the 2 party system. The person who I want in office hardly has any money going towards advertisement and getting their name out. Because it's almost a 100% that they aren't going to get in office, I could easily vote one of the others that could get in office. However, because they don't have their name out, and they are just there (most likely to take away votes from someone). They aren't going to win. So that means there is virtually no chance in anyone who I want in office to get in office. Which means there is no point in me voting. But lets say this STV system is in place. Because people are able to vote for more than 1 person in important. There would actually be some chance that the person I want would get in, and there is a point in voting.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Adoption
Derek Thanks. I wish the USA did this.
One state (Tasmania) and one territory (Australian Capital Territory) use a system very similar to this in Australia. They call it the 'Hare-Clarke' system and it works very well in proportionally representing what people want. You can vote for the people you really like and then for the ones you like a little less without wasting your vote. The great thing about this variant is that if a cadiate dies, resigns or is no longer eligible for the job they will have scaned in the ballot papers at the time of the election and can do an instant recount (called a 'countback') redistributing people's preferences with that candiate removed. This is awesome as it means there there is no need for another election: saving money, time and political effort. This is important as voting is compulsorily at most levels of government in Australia and re-running elections is a big deal.
In Northern Ireland we use it for all three types of elections we have ; Local council, parliament and European union.
Ireland (or Republic of Ireland if you're CGP Grey!). It works very well, no landslide winners on a tiny majority of votes as frequently happens in Britain and parties have to campaign all over the country because no areas are simply safe seats as in most states in the US and vast tracts of England
I would love to see videos on Range and STAR Voting.
This is mostly what we have where I live (It is called Hare-Clarke), but the number of votes needed to win is n/(v+1) + 1, not n/v (where v is the number of vacancies, n the number of electors)
So that means this video is inaccurate, no?