Does winning an election against the popular vote represent the choice of the voters?

[The Romulan Republic]

Based on a discussion that arose in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=166874

Since its been deemed off-topic for the thread in which it originated, and because the topic is one which is worth discussing, since it has bearing not only on the current state of America but on the question of what constitutes a democratic government and what responsibilities the people of a country have in one, I'm giving it is own thread.

My contention is that Trump does not represent the choice of the American people, because he lost the popular vote, and because his election occurred under legally questionable circumstances (widespread voter suppression, Russian interference/collusion).

Since the original argument is fairly narrow, I'd like to take this as an opportunity to have a broader discussion on what constitutes a democratic election or government.

Note: I am NOT denying that winning by the Electoral College without the popular vote is LEGALLY legitimate. It certainly is, more's the pity.

Just highly undemocratic.

[aerius]

Define "choice of the voters". Are you talking about the nation as a whole, whether the state/city/whatever got a representative that reflects the vote, or something else? For instance in a FPP system a candidate could get 30% of the popular vote and still be elected to represent everyone in his district, is that "democratic" since 70% of the people didn't vote for him? Or let's say we do proportional representation on a provincial/national level, and we get an even 3-way split between team Weiner-Holder, the Butt-Toucher party, and the Pussy-Grabbers. If I live in a city that's 90% Butt-Touchers, am I fairly represented?

[Jub]

I think we need his rigerous and complete definition of what democracy means before we can answer any of this.

It would also help if he defined his favored systems of democracy are, what exactly a democratic failure is, and why some events like the US election are undemocratic while legal and other events like the Catalonian succession vote are undemocratic specifically becasue they're illegal.

[TheFeniX]

48% of the population didn't see fit to vote for anyone in 2016. And I honestly can't see how "empty seat" could be doing a worse job than the assholes currently running the show.

[bilateralrope]

My starting principle with democracy is that every citizen gets an equal voice on voting day. There can be exceptions to that, but they must be justified.

So any system where the popular vote doesn't automatically resemble the outcome is not a system I'd call democratic. This rules out the US EC system for electing the president. FPP can produce results way out of line with the popular vote, even without obvious gerrymandering, so it's out.

This leaves only two ways of running elections that I'd consider democratic:
- For a winner takes all position like the President, it needs to be the popular vote. Preferably an STV system.
- For a system that elects multiple people to fill seats, proportional vote is the only option. District representatives can work, providing that electing them doesn't mess with the percentages of seats each party gets (eg, MMP)

[Gandalf]

I wonder how this works within the context of nationwide elections which are essentially a large amount of smaller popular votes.

In Australia, each electorate has a popular vote for its new MP. That MP then votes on the Prime Minister. Technically the PM only has the votes of those in their home electorate. I assume other parliamentary systems are pretty similar. Is Australia democratic by this measure?

[Zixinus]

I personally see the problem more simply: the vote is not one vote, but several representative votes. States vote (or rather, states elect representatives that then vote supposedly according to how they were elected but not obligated to), not people.

A simple* solution is to leave out the representative system and simply count individual vote. Every person has one vote.

The problem of course that this system is logistically impossible. Hence the *. Digital voting would be great if it was less secure than a broken fence.

[The Romulan Republic]

I think we need his rigerous and complete definition of what democracy means before we can answer any of this.

It would also help if he defined his favored systems of democracy are, what exactly a democratic failure is,

Certainly.

Democracy- literally, "rule by the people".

The most perfect form of democracy, theoretically, would be direct democracy by referendum, where all citizens vote on all decisions. However, since this is not practical in a large country (at the very least, you need an executive who can take action quickly to address an immediate crisis), representative democracy is an acceptable substitute, provided that all citizens have an equal vote regardless of race, religion, culture, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or national origin, and that the outcome of elections is a reasonable accurate reflection of the choice of the voters.

Certain rights are necessary for the functioning of a democratic state, including, but not necessarily limited to:

1. Freedom of belief/expression.
2. Freedom of information (to ensure that the electorate has the information to make informed choices- uninformed consent is not consent).
3. Due process of law and equality under the law (so opposition forces cannot be harassed).
4. A fair vote.

We have never had a perfect democracy on this planet, and probably never will. However, some systems are more democratic than others.

My theoretical preferred system does not currently exist (direct democracy by referendum, with an elected executive and judiciary appointed by the executive and approved by popular referendum).

However, I would settle for the American system, with three major changes:

1. Abolition of the Electoral College, to be replaced by a direct nation-wide popular vote for the Presidency.

2. Eliminations of voter suppression laws, in favor of automatic voter registration.

3. Greater regulation and standardization of primaries, with a preference for primaries by straight popular vote.

4. Substitution of electronic voting with a return to paper ballots (preference for voting by mail, but this is not obligatory).

A "democratic failure" would be any instance in which a purportedly democratic state abolishes or fatally undermines key democratic rights/freedoms, or holds a vote in which the outcome is in direct contravention to the will of the voters.

Not all of this is directly relevant to the topic, however, and I would appreciate it if we try to keep focused and not broaden the discussion to the point of incoherency, as sometimes happens in such threads.

and why some events like the US election are undemocratic while legal and other events like the Catalonian succession vote are undemocratic specifically becasue they're illegal.

This thread is not about the Catalonian secession. Why don't you try actually backing up your points in that thread, rather than dragging it into this one to continue your attack on me?

Also, are you seriously questioning weather something can be both legal and undemocratic? If so, that is a far more authoritarian position than anything I've ever said here.

[Simon_Jester]

I would argue that if there are specific reasons to suppose that an election result doesn't reflect the will of a majority of voters or likely voters (that is, including anyone who was "vote-suppressed" unjustly, but excluding anyone who didn't vote out of apathy or personal convenience unrelated to voter suppression laws)...

Then that election result cannot reasonably be said to reflect the popular will of the country.

48% of the population didn't see fit to vote for anyone in 2016. And I honestly can't see how "empty seat" could be doing a worse job than the assholes currently running the show.

You can make a legitimate argument that not voting constitutes saying "meh, whatever," and if not actively endorsing the outcome, at least not opposing it. I don't think nonvoters count one way or the other.

[Ralin]

You can make a legitimate argument that not voting constitutes saying "meh, whatever," and if not actively endorsing the outcome, at least not opposing it. I don't think nonvoters count one way or the other.

You can also make a pretty good argument that voting in an election implicitly means admitting that said election is legitimate and that you agree to abide by the results. Which means you don't get to cast a ballot and then declare that the system is wrong and undemocratic.

[bilateralrope]

I wonder how this works within the context of nationwide elections which are essentially a large amount of smaller popular votes.

Splitting the nation into districts and using those districts as the primary means of determining who gets into parliment does not work with my principle.

Technically the PM only has the votes of those in their home electorate.

If the PM able to represent the interests of his or her electorate ?
Or is he/she too busy with the duties of PM to serve his electorate ?

I personally see the problem more simply: the vote is not one vote, but several representative votes. States vote (or rather, states elect representatives that then vote supposedly according to how they were elected but not obligated to), not people.

Why do you see district based elections as a good thing ?

representative democracy is an acceptable substitute, provided that all citizens have an equal vote regardless of race, religion, culture, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or national origin, and that the outcome of elections is a reasonable accurate reflection of the choice of the voters.

I noticed that you left where the voter lives on election day out of that list. FPP has serious problems with being an accurate representation of the voters because it restricts who they can vote for based on where they live.

Or, for a US example, people living in Puerto Rico are unable to vote for the president at all despite having full US citizenship.

Was leaving out a voters address a mistake ?
Or can you justify why address based discrimination is a good thing on voting day ?

You can make a legitimate argument that not voting constitutes saying "meh, whatever," and if not actively endorsing the outcome, at least not opposing it. I don't think nonvoters count one way or the other.

You can also make a pretty good argument that voting in an election implicitly means admitting that said election is legitimate and that you agree to abide by the results. Which means you don't get to cast a ballot and then declare that the system is wrong and undemocratic.

I disagree with you there based on practicality. You are making people choose between
- Refusing to vote because the system is broken. Giving a better chance for the people exploiting it to get in. People who won't want it changed.
- Voting and not complaining about the results.

Then there is the problem of not realizing the system is broken until it spits out a bad result because it usually gets close enough.

[Gandalf]

Technically the PM only has the votes of those in their home electorate.

If the PM able to represent the interests of his or her electorate ?
Or is he/she too busy with the duties of PM to serve his electorate ?

It all appears to work fine. I wager there's some more staff on hand and some more delegation for small day to day actions, but one regularly sees the PM in their home electorate. They still have to campaign there, which is sometimes amusing if their decisions taken in their role as a PM aren't popular in their role as an MP.

Also, if the PM is unpopular, the MPs who are accountable to their electorates can choose a new PM in a process that can take a few hours. It can get funky, but it's wonderfully responsive.

[Simon_Jester]

You can make a legitimate argument that not voting constitutes saying "meh, whatever," and if not actively endorsing the outcome, at least not opposing it. I don't think nonvoters count one way or the other.

You can also make a pretty good argument that voting in an election implicitly means admitting that said election is legitimate and that you agree to abide by the results. Which means you don't get to cast a ballot and then declare that the system is wrong and undemocratic.

I'm not sure how that works.

I mean, by that logic, no one entitled to vote in a system that limits the franchise would ever have standing to vote to change the system by expanding the franchise. I'm a man; if I live in a society where women can't vote, is it wrong for me to vote in the society's elections, then be an activist for women's suffrage?

For that matter, how would you even get lawful change in a democratic system, if you argue that the bare fact of exercising your vote means you fully endorse all features of the current system and its rules?

[Crazedwraith]

I personally see the problem more simply: the vote is not one vote, but several representative votes. States vote (or rather, states elect representatives that then vote supposedly according to how they were elected but not obligated to), not people.

A simple* solution is to leave out the representative system and simply count individual vote. Every person has one vote.

The problem of course that this system is logistically impossible. Hence the *. Digital voting would be great if it was less secure than a broken fence.

Why would it be logistically impossible. If it's known what the popular vote was, and for the PoTUS Election we do, why don't we just go no that? I know a few states are much slower to verify their popular vote but that's surely not an insurmountable problem and even if they do take a while elections are long enough before the change of power that it doesn't matter. People would just not know the result the day after.

--

To answer the title, in a purely literal sense, I can see why you'd say it's not the choice of 'The People' if the winner didn't get a majority or at least plurality of the votes but at the same time if it's the system that everyone agreed was going to be used ahead of time, that doesn't make the results illegitimate.

[Simon_Jester]

I personally see the problem more simply: the vote is not one vote, but several representative votes. States vote (or rather, states elect representatives that then vote supposedly according to how they were elected but not obligated to), not people.

Why do you see district based elections as a good thing ?

Missed this earlier, but I can think of reasons.

Off the top of my head, it keeps the size of a given representative's constituency down to a manageable size, so that the representative can be accountable to some specific, clearly identified group of people. Systems that work by (for example) having voters vote for parties that and each party getting to choose X people off its slate of candidates depending on how many votes it wins do not have this advantage.

If I'm the MP from Lesser Peatlingshawborough and surrounding area, I know that I am specifically and personally accountable for representing their wishes and needs in Parliament. I know exactly which of the people I need to please in order to remain in office, and their numbers are small enough that I can realistically hope to have a personal staff that tracks communications from that specific electorate. If my constituency wants me to break with the opinions of the national party, I have an incentive to break with the national party. This does not happen in a "choose X people off the slate of candidates from Party Y" system, where party loyalty is basically the only incentive.

Furthermore, small, locally concentrated groups have at least some access to direct representation in the legislature, even if that influence is limited to "the potato farmers in my district want me to attach a paragraph to this big omnibus law that is beneficial to potato farmers." You may reply "who the fuck cares about potato farmers," but this point isn't just about potato farmers, it's about every one of hundreds of locally concentrated groups with their own needs and interests. None of those groups get significant representation in a "X people of Party Y's slate" system directly, and in aggregate their needs will tend to cancel each other out, such that parties that only see the view from the national level have little incentive to care.

...

So that's the advantage of district elections- accountability to a specific local population, rather than to a nebulous cloud of half a million

This is traded off against the fact that I am totally UN-accountable to the other 99-point-something of the national population. I can be a stench in the nostrils of people everywhere outside Lesser Peatlingshawborough and a thirty-kilometer radius surrounding it, and it won't matter. This is why Congress's approval in the US can be in the teens-percent, without any specific congressmen getting voted out of office over it. Furthermore, it means that while locally concentrated minorities (e.g. farmers or inner city residents) have a hope of getting good representation... Widely dispersed minorities (e.g. gays or online content creators) have much less hope.*

It's not a case of one system being clearly better than another, it's a case of both systems having perceptible advantages and disadvantages.

*[Examples of minority groups that are concentrated versus dispersed chosen more or less randomly. "Minority" is here used in the literal statistical sense of "makes up a small fraction of the population." No attempt to directly compare the level of difficulties or discrimination faced by gays, inner city residents, farmers, or online content creators is intended. Ask your doctor about any GRRs lasting more than four hours]

I noticed that you left where the voter lives on election day out of that list. FPP has serious problems with being an accurate representation of the voters because it restricts who they can vote for based on where they live.

Or, for a US example, people living in Puerto Rico are unable to vote for the president at all despite having full US citizenship.

Puerto Rico is one of those edge cases that is very hard to categorize in a general overview of how a system works. Most democratic nations don't have extraterritorial territories (or whatever you call them) where millions of citizens can't vote.

Why would it be logistically impossible. If it's known what the popular vote was, and for the PoTUS Election we do, why don't we just go no that? I know a few states are much slower to verify their popular vote but that's surely not an insurmountable problem and even if they do take a while elections are long enough before the change of power that it doesn't matter. People would just not know the result the day after.

I think what Zixinus meant is that it's logistically impossible to do this for everything. You can elect people to nationwide political offices by nationwide direct democracy. You cannot have everyday legislative decisions being made that way, so you still need some kind of deliberative body (Parliament/Congress/etc.) to actually run the country. And the representatives on that body have to be chosen somehow, which leaves you holding some kind of subsidiary election.

[Tribble]

It doesn’t have to be local politicians vs proportional; you could have mixed-member proportional representation which combines elements of both.

[LaCroix]

Hungary has such a voting law - 100 districts with people using their first vote (of two per voter) voting for their MP, and the second for a party, which will decide the other 98 seats, proportionally divided up between parties by result and filled with people from party lists.

It mitigates the objective falsehood of first past the post local representation, somewhat. Still, it means that with just 100 charismatic people, you could potentially take over the parliament.

[Zixinus]

Why would it be logistically impossible

Direct piling and counting of millions of individual votes is problematic, especially as it has to be done both openly and securely. This is actually the really, really big problem because ensuring vote integrity is kaleidoscope of security nightmares.

Digitally it could be solved but only by removing one of the necessary liberties for free voting (example: a vote cannot be traced back to you), at opening a floodgate of new ways of tampering but most likely both.

Region or district voting is partially a way to solve this by braking down the task to small piles. In certain ways, this has advantages as Simon points out. It is certainly an advantage for decision making, because it is much easier to well-inform one person than an entire state.

The issue seems to come up however when a nation-wide decision is required to be made and you have region-based voting. It is easier as a government but it leads to situation where someone has 0.8 vote while someone else in another region has 1.2.

If it's known what the popular vote was, and for the PoTUS Election we do, why don't we just go no that?

In other words: why is the electoral college, an institution designed to compensate for slow communication, still a thing after they finished the nation-wide telephone network? Because that is what I am interpreting your post to be about.

[The Romulan Republic]

You can make a legitimate argument that not voting constitutes saying "meh, whatever," and if not actively endorsing the outcome, at least not opposing it. I don't think nonvoters count one way or the other.

You can also make a pretty good argument that voting in an election implicitly means admitting that said election is legitimate and that you agree to abide by the results. Which means you don't get to cast a ballot and then declare that the system is wrong and undemocratic.

So if you participate in a rigged game, that means the game is no longer rigged?

By that standard, if they reintroduced Jim Crow, and people still chose to cast votes, they would be saying that the system is in fact fair and democratic.

This is an obviously absurd position.

[The Romulan Republic]

I noticed that you left where the voter lives on election day out of that list. FPP has serious problems with being an accurate representation of the voters because it restricts who they can vote for based on where they live.

Or, for a US example, people living in Puerto Rico are unable to vote for the president at all despite having full US citizenship.

Was leaving out a voters address a mistake ?
Or can you justify why address based discrimination is a good thing on voting day ?

It was a mistake, of course. I've been quite vocal about the injustice suffered by Puerto Rico and the other territories, which amounts to the US (still) being a colonialist nation with legally enshrined second class citizenship.

Actually, the more I think about it, we've never had a truly democratic election in America's history.

Dickless Donald's was just less democratic than most (recent) elections, so it serves the purpose of drawing attention to the issue and driving the point home.

[Patroklos]

The discussion seems to have left out the primary reason why many nations have the voting representation they do, which is because of the way they nation formed in the first place. For nations like the US that were formed via voluntary degree of multiple polities vice just being a legacy state from history that was amalgamated via conquest, marriage, treaty or any other number of ways polities were formed in the past (and sometimes still are) who later adopted democracy (sometimes by decree), PEOPLES get a vote not just people.

I don't know if you can call that undemocratic if that's the voluntary deal democratic states willfully committed to, even if there is a subset of modern voters who no longer identify along the lines those deals were made and thus feel them anachronistic. Especially if there are legal democratic ways to address them that the citizenry as whole voluntarily fail to enact via voting.

[The Romulan Republic]

I do understand the historical precedent, but I don't feel it has much application to the Electoral College today, at any rate. States are largely abstract concepts,and I am hesitant to put the "rights" of an abstract concept over those of actual people.

The Electoral College may give more voting power to small states, but I strongly question weather it gives more voting power to the voters of the those states,unless they're in a swing state. The vote of a Republican in Vermont, or a Democrat in Wyoming, is virtually worthless in a Presidential election, except as a small symbolic gesture. And even for a Democrat (or independent) in Vermont, or a Republican (or independent) in Wyoming, there's not much incentive to campaign hard for their vote, because its a "safe" state.

Under a nation-wide popular vote, their votes would be worth as much as everybody else's.

Hell, I am a voter in a swing state (since my last address in the US was in Colorado, I am counted as a Colorado voter). I am one of the small percentage of voters who actually has my voting power increased by this absurd system- and even I can see how unjust it is.

You also have to question weather the original reasons are still relevant, in a case like America. We are no longer a loose confederation of separate colonies. Most Americans identify as Americans first, and certainly not as a resident of their state first. Our system should reflect that.

And of course, a country can have entirely unrelated issues that undermine the fairness of its election. The Electoral College, or other systems that skew the popular vote, are one example of something that can undermine the integrity of an election, but they are not the only one. To take the American example, the aforementioned discussion of the disenfranchisement of citizens in the territories. If your concern is making sure that regional groups are represented, then that should be a major concern of your's.

[Crazedwraith]

Why would it be logistically impossible

Direct piling and counting of millions of individual votes is problematic, especially as it has to be done both openly and securely. This is actually the really, really big problem because ensuring vote integrity is kaleidoscope of security nightmares.

Digitally it could be solved but only by removing one of the necessary liberties for free voting (example: a vote cannot be traced back to you), at opening a floodgate of new ways of tampering but most likely both.

Region or district voting is partially a way to solve this by braking down the task to small piles. In certain ways, this has advantages as Simon points out. It is certainly an advantage for decision making, because it is much easier to well-inform one person than an entire state.

The issue seems to come up however when a nation-wide decision is required to be made and you have region-based voting. It is easier as a government but it leads to situation where someone has 0.8 vote while someone else in another region has 1.2.

I'm sorry, I don't still don't see quite what you mean. It may not be feasible put to pile up all the votes into one heap and then count through them all at once. but that doesn't mean you have to have regions with imbalanced powers. Even sub regions have different polling stations that top up totals that are then centralised, you can just keep doing that, all the way up to one central node.

As Simon says though, you can only do this to elect people every few years, not constant decisions about every aspect of government, if that is what you were originally referring to. I'm sorry if I missed some context.

If it's known what the popular vote was, and for the PoTUS Election we do, why don't we just go no that?

In other words: why is the electoral college, an institution designed to compensate for slow communication, still a thing after they finished the nation-wide telephone network? Because that is what I am interpreting your post to be about.

Partially, but partially I was using it as an example of what I meant. Was that not the context of what you were talking about?

I mean, I'm not greatly interested in how the electoral college came to be and whatever factors is leading the US to keep it. It's just an illustration, clearly the winner of the popular vote can be determined, so there's no technical reason it can't be used as the decider rather than the electoral college.

[Simon_Jester]

It doesn’t have to be local politicians vs proportional; you could have mixed-member proportional representation which combines elements of both.

Well, yes; that's the nice thing about tradeoffs. There's nothing stopping you from choosing various points along the 'sliding scale' of possible solutions.

The trick is to recognize you're making a tradeoff at all.

Hungary has such a voting law - 100 districts with people using their first vote (of two per voter) voting for their MP, and the second for a party, which will decide the other 98 seats, proportionally divided up between parties by result and filled with people from party lists.

It mitigates the objective falsehood of first past the post local representation, somewhat. Still, it means that with just 100 charismatic people, you could potentially take over the parliament.

If your party can manage to muster 100 people who are uniformly and without exception significantly more charismatic than anyone my party can find to run for those 100 local districts, even though my party (somehow!) won all 98 of the at-large seats...

Something is deeply, deeply fucked up.

In other words: why is the electoral college, an institution designed to compensate for slow communication, still a thing after they finished the nation-wide telephone network? Because that is what I am interpreting your post to be about.

For that matter, the nationwide telegraph network...

Honestly, the answer is that at no specific point in our nation's history did a majority of the stakeholders have an incentive to change the way the system works. For the bulk of our relevant history, cases of a president losing the popular vote but winning in the Electoral College were very rare (no instances from 1888 to 2000, and 1888 was riiiight around the dawn of vaguely modernish communications). It happened in 2000 and 2016 and is increasingly likely to happen again precisely because of a very specific alignment of rural voters with the Republican Party, and of very low-population states (with disproportionate electoral power) behind the Republicans.

As a result, the Republicans have a very strong incentive to keep the Electoral College as is, at both the state and national level; of the three presidential elections they've won since the rightward drift of the party began accelerating in 1994, two were losses in the popular vote. Only in 2004 did they actually win the popular vote.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are likely to remain divided on this issue or at least lukewarm, because they do have plenty of viable success strategies under the current system, and many Democrats at the state level hail from states that would lose political relevance in a popular vote paradigm.

[Coop D'etat]

My starting principle with democracy is that every citizen gets an equal voice on voting day. There can be exceptions to that, but they must be justified.

So any system where the popular vote doesn't automatically resemble the outcome is not a system I'd call democratic. This rules out the US EC system for electing the president. FPP can produce results way out of line with the popular vote, even without obvious gerrymandering, so it's out.

This leaves only two ways of running elections that I'd consider democratic:
- For a winner takes all position like the President, it needs to be the popular vote. Preferably an STV system.
- For a system that elects multiple people to fill seats, proportional vote is the only option. District representatives can work, providing that electing them doesn't mess with the percentages of seats each party gets (eg, MMP)

That might be your personal way of viewing things, but from what I can tell, democratic systems seem to work perfectly fine without adhering closely to that rule and the degree of satisfactorily effective and democratic governance bears only a slight relationship to the degree the electoral systems conform to the ideals of PR advocates. PR systems in particular appear to be excellent at giving the appearance of a one-person one-vote system while effectively cedeing all real power on who holds power and represents the populace to the party bosses and backroom negoiations between parties to form coalitions. Meanwhile FPTP systems are a theoretical nightmare but give every appearance of working out about equally well to the alternatives in practice.

I'd consider the details of the system used to be quite secondary to the conditions of the civil society holding the elections in terms of real world results. Which is why I find the benefits of electoral system reform to be much more a plaything of poli sci nerds than any kind of pancea to practical aliments.