Venezuela: Voters Repeal Presidential Term Limits

[Felch]

For all the people who think they know something about voting systems (in particular which one is 'best').

From the Range voting article:

As it satisfies the criteria of a deterministic voting system, with non-imposition, non-dictatorship, monotonicity, and independence of irrelevant alternatives, it may appear that it violates Arrow's impossibility theorem. The reason that range voting is not regarded as a counter-example to Arrow's theorem is that it is a cardinal voting system, while Arrow's theorem is restricted to the processing of ordinal preferences.

[Kuciwalker]

Range voting has obvious problems in that insincere voting is clearly the best strategy.

Next.

[Felch]

Range voting has obvious problems in that insincere voting is clearly the best strategy.

Next.

Care to explain?

How is insincere voting the best strategy? It's not clear to me.

[Kuciwalker]

Say you have two front-runners (e.g. R and D) and a bunch of third-party candidates, none of whom have a reasonable chance of winning. If you favor D over R, your rational vote is to give D 100% and R 0%, regardless of how you actually feel about R relative to the third parties.

[Kuciwalker]

dp

[Gatekeeper]

**shrug** I, too, have to admit to some surprise that such a major change wouldn't require, say, super-majority support in order to pass (i.e. 60 percent), since it'd be kind of a sticky situation if 50.5 percent of the voting population supports Change X while 49.5 oppose it).

The true test for Chavez and his allies in the coming year or so will be in how they handle the impact of low oil prices on Venezuela's economy, which is highly dependent on oil exports. To add insult to injury, a good portion of Venezuela's crude is of a type that needs extra refining in order to purify it, which means it fetches even less per barrel than the going, standard rate of West Texas crude (the standard-bearer of oil prices).

It will be very interesting to see if Chavez, et al., can maintain or increase the level of current social spending on Venezeula's poor if oil prices fail to rebound or take too long to rebound.

Gatekeeper

[Felch]

Say you have two front-runners (e.g. R and D) and a bunch of third-party candidates, none of whom have a reasonable chance of winning. If you favor D over R, your rational vote is to give D 100% and R 0%, regardless of how you actually feel about R relative to the third parties.

How is that any worse than the current system? I understand that you're better and smarter than everybody here due to your cynicism , but you haven't proven than range voting is worse than the current system.

Range voting is meant to help people show their support for third parties without "wasting" their vote. You can give D 100, R 0, A 30, and B 100. Or whatever you want.

I'd say that's more sincere than a single vote system where you vote D only because B has no chance of winning. Range voting helps third parties break the ice. And it does it without giving tax dollars to political groups.

[Felch]

It will be very interesting to see if Chavez, et al., can maintain or increase the level of current social spending on Venezeula's poor if oil prices fail to rebound or take too long to rebound.

I read that their budget expects $60/barrel oil, while current prices are below $40. I think Venezuela's government is going to have to take drastic austerity measures. That's part of why this vote was timed for this week. Push the referendum through before the money runs out.

[Naked Gents Rut]

I understand that you're better and smarter than everybody here due to your cynicism

I know you were being sarcastic, but this is totally true.

[Kuciwalker]

How is that any worse than the current system? I understand that you're better and smarter than everybody here due to your cynicism , but you haven't proven than range voting is worse than the current system.

I've shown that they're isomorphic.

Range voting is meant to help people show their support for third parties without "wasting" their vote.

The practical upshot of this is... what, exactly? So a third party gets a lot of pity points without actually winning. Unless those pity points translate into actual elected offices (and they won't, as they'll dry up as soon as a party becomes a real contender for power), they are nothing but warm and fuzzy numbers.

[Felch]

I've shown that they're isomorphic.

No you haven't. You've declared it, but you haven't shown it.

The practical upshot of this is... what, exactly? So a third party gets a lot of pity points without actually winning. Unless those pity points translate into actual elected offices (and they won't, as they'll dry up as soon as a party becomes a real contender for power), they are nothing but warm and fuzzy numbers.

The practical upshot is that political parties that get no attention and money in the current system would become competitive. During the first election after range voting, I would expect it to have little difference. However, with voters no longer forced to abandon principles for practicality, smaller parties would garner respectable vote totals. That would lead to more media attention and more money. You'd start to see big changes in later elections.

Consider Florida in 2000. Nader took in a lot of votes that otherwise would have gone to Gore. If voters had the option to vote both Gore and Nader, the results could have been quite different.

Your contention that the pity points would dry up also seems doubtful. No one would have to abandon any party that they support. You'd be free to vote 100 Gore and 100 Nader if you chose. Is there empirical backing for your assertion? Some sort of psychological experiment that proves it perhaps?

[Agathon]

Who needs a theorem to cast doubt on democracy? Empirical evidence does that quite nicely.

[Darius871]

Who needs a theorem to cast doubt on democracy? Empirical evidence does that quite nicely.

The empirical evidence is of little value when you have few empirically superior alternatives to compare/contrast. Lesser evil and all that.

[Ramo]

Your contention that the pity points would dry up also seems doubtful. No one would have to abandon any party that they support. You'd be free to vote 100 Gore and 100 Nader if you chose.

Let's suppose that Nader and Gore are the main competitors in the 2000 election. Let's say I support Nader first, then Gore, then Bush. And suppose I don't have a strong preference for Nader over Gore (so an "honest" ranking might be Nader 100, Gore 95, or something like that). I also know that there are folks with a roughly opposite perspective (they prefer Gore 100, Nader 95). Now, let's ignore the impact of Bush and reduce the electorate to two people, for simplicity.

I have the choice between 100 N/0 G or 100 N/95 G. The other guy has a choice between 0 N/100 G or 95 N/100 G. Defining the N-G total as my "gain" and the other guy's "loss," there's trivially a "saddle point" (where my minimum gain is maximized, and his maximum loss is minimized): 100/0 and 0/100.

That system is pretty terrible. A better one would be instant run-off voting.

Personally, I'd like an IRV first past the post system in one house and a proportional representation system in the other house (with all districts within a house equally sized and controlled by nonpartisan redistricting).

[Agathon]

The empirical evidence is of little value when you have few empirically superior alternatives to compare/contrast. Lesser evil and all that.

That's actually unproven. Every society has practical limits on what its rulers can do, even dictatorships. If you look at any dictatorship, the dictator has to buy people off, including the public at large, since they will simply overthrow him or withdraw their labour. A dictatorship where the dictator has to constantly use the threat of physical force isn't a particularly efficient dictatorship and the dictator will probably end up dead.

Dictators actually look worse now than they did before this century, because most of them were funded in recent years by countries like the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. This meant that they had an economic incentive to brutally repress their populations as they were insured against bad management. That variable would not operate if Britain and the United States became dictatorships tomorrow, because they don't have anyone to fund them.

In fact Japan has been in some ways like this. The place has more or less been run by the same party since the war, and Japanese politics is somewhat of an illusion (I realize things have been different in the last few years). People moan about Chavez, but he hasn't been in power anywhere near as long as the LDP had Japan under its thumb, and it would be fairly described by people in other democracies as "****ing bent". Yet ordinary people manage to live happy and fulfilling lives in that country.

Democracy doesn't really exist in countries like Britain anyway. You get a very narrow choice of electable parties, and they more or less end up doing the same thing. For example, in New Zealand, there have been about 12 elections since I was born, and in only 2 of those has there been a profound change in the manner of governance. It won't surprise you to learn that those were the elections of 1975 and 1984. Since 1984 it has been neoliberalism all the way, even if the party getting elected swore it wasn't. It's more or less the same old ****, because that's what people like.

I don't think that things would change all that much for most people if elections were to stop. The only difference is that there would be a lot less politics, and that need not be a bad thing. Indeed, if it got rid of some of the more obscene pandering it might not be a bad thing.

One thing is for sure, democracy is responsible for the fine financial pickle we're in now. People kept voting for this crap, and so politicians pandered to them. One example is the ridiculous rules favouring home ownership, which contributed to the housing bubble.

And what do we get in response? Endless screeds on how the media and politicians are brainwashing the public (each accuses the other, it is quite hilarious). They aren't. The public are just stupid, shortsighted and greedy.

We just have a prejudice for democracy in the way we used to have a prejudice against blacks. Merely having a prejudice does not make it right.