OFC 23 May 2020: Voting

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ELECTION REFORM

This topic has come up many times, and will continue to do so. Here are a few choice subtopics:

The NEGATIVE VOTE (Jess): Decades ago I proposed the idea of a Negative Vote option -- in my version, each person still gets one vote in a "first past the post" election, but they can either cast their one vote for the candidate they like best or against the one they despise most. There has been quite a bit of discussion on the practical pros and cons of this idea, and a group in Taiwan has been attempting to implement it for years. It is also under consideration in Berkeley] and another team] is trying to raise money for a national drive in the USA; however, there is considerable disagreement about the details of implementation: should it be the version I originally described, or should every voter get both a positive vote and a negative one, or should it be combined with a "proportional representation" ballot in some way? I would love to dig into this topic, if anyone else is interested. And it is sort of relevant to the Future of Democracy.

Addendum: in May 2020, Paul Cohen (a retired mathematician and engineer living in Maine) published Why should we adopt balanced voting?, an eloquent advocacy for the Negative Vote.

Another article by Cohen explains How Balanced Voting could Remedy the Electoral College.