At this week's Singularity U Global Summit, I got a chance to meet with Josh Silver and learn about his organization, represent.us. I have written often in My New Democracy Category on ways to attack the corruption and money in politics. Represent.us is making a push for the use of laws to fix some of these issues, through ballot propositions. In the past, I have felt this approach to be very difficult, because for every step that could improve democracy, one of the major parties is benefiting from the flaw, and will fight any effort to fix it. Fixes in congress or the statehouses are difficult, and many of the fixes people like (like campaigning restrictions) violate the 1st amendment.

This organization is trying for a few specific measures in a bipartisan effort to pass ballot resolutions. To make it bipartisan, they are doing it in pairs of "red" and "blue" states. The core changes they are looking for are:

• Public campaign finance through vouchers. Every voter gets "vouchers" they can hand to the candidates they wish
• Rules to fix the nightmare of gerrymandering, primarily by having non-partisan committees draw the district boundaries, as has already happened in some states
• Preferential ballot systems to allow minor parties to participate in elections without risk of "spoiling" the battle between the 2 main parties, as Nader did in Florida 2000 and Perot did in 1992.
• Improved voter participation though improved registration (another common approach in place in some districts.)
• Limitations on revolving door lobbying and favours for donors.

RU's plan is a surprising one -- that all 4 of these together might have a better chance of passing than the individual components do. Polls show that voters often have strong support for this full package, even if they don't like one of the items. So they have this on the ballot in South Dakota and Washington, though the ballot language in Washington is not superb. They are looking for money and support in their campaigns, and I have offered to be on their advisory board. They have already passed versions of their anti-corruption bills in several cities.

Their strategy might work on me (if I were a voter.) I have my own preferred versions of these approaches, but I would rather see this package pass than fight for the perfect version of either one. Nonetheless a few things I would tweak:

Gerrymandering is one of the great cheats of political systems, and it got a lot worse in 2010 through a deliberate effort of the Republican party to massively overspend national money on key statehouse races, allowing it to control those statehouses and redraw the lines to both assure continued control of the statehouses and a control of the House of Representatives in spite of getting a serious minority of the popular vote. Non-partisan redistricting committees are a start, but we need more, and parties that have gained control this way will be unlikely to give it up. I have advocated a rule of convexity to prevent even partisan groups from gerrymandering. But the only hope I have hear is finding a constitutional principle -- such as the basic right of franchise -- that can get this stopped.

Preferential ballots are good, but sadly the "instant runoff" (also known as Hare, Single Transferable Vote and Australian ballot) is actually the worst of the systems. The problem is not just the chaotic conditions in that simulation article, but that it is one of the harder systems to explain to the voters. If the voters are not immediately clear on how their system works, it causes lack of confidence and probably less voting.

From a purist standpoint, my favourite is Condorcet. It gives good results and can be explained reasonably easily.

Rank your choices in order. To decide the winner, all candidates are compared against all other candidates as though they were in a 2-way race, deciding if more people liked A over B or B over A. The winner is the candidate who beats all the others in these 2-way comparisons. In the very rare case where this doesn't happen, a tiebreaker is done among the candidates with a claim for the top.https://represent.us/wp-content/themes/represent.us/images/logo-no-tag.png

On the other hand, the Appoval system is even simpler. Its instructions can be understood quickly by all:

Check the box next to all candidates which you support as suitable for the role. You can check any number from one or all but one. The candidate with the most votes wins.

Approval throws away the fact that you like one candidate more than another, but in reality it seems to work just as well as the systems that don't do that, and it's much simpler to understand. The real flaw is that with Approval, if you have candidates who are close in support, you can get a little "strategy" where voters might not vote for their 2nd choice candidate (even though they like them) out of fear of hurting their first choice. You can't hurt your first choice in Condorcet and instant-runoff, which is a plus, but in reality, this sort of situation doesn't occur in the USA, where there are 2 strong major parties and much weaker minor parties. (Ie. in 2000, every Nader supporter who also liked Gore, and many Gore supporters who liked Nader would have voted for both, even though it was sure Gore would handily defeat Nader.)

Improved participation -- diminishing the value of GOTV is also a good plan, though we need much more here. Even with high registration, voter turnout remains low in the USA, which means that elections are actually won and lost mostly on GOTV.

If you support these plans, then give some money to Represent.US and vote for their measures if you live in Washington or South Dakota.