The “Correct” Answer
The choice of optimal voting system is heavily dependent on the type of governance you are setting up. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend we are setting up a small, state-level government.
We love conducting comprehensive reviews of the research in various fields (hence our books). We have yet to encounter a field with more transparent corruption of evidence than the field of voting. Academics in the space seem to have chosen “teams” that support specific voting system types. Once a researcher picks a team, all their research magically reveals that their team has the best system.
Worse, voting research seems to focus on things like how “fair” a system is or how much the governing body reflects the values of the voters. They use fancy words for this sort of thing, like Bayesian regret, defined as the average difference between the utility of a strategy and an ideal utility in which desired outcomes are maximized—but it all comes down to the same concept.
From a pragmatic perspective, the fairness[[8]](#_ftn8) of a system is largely irrelevant unless the government is designed specifically to maximize fairness. This is vanishingly rare in real-world conditions. Voting bodies generally don’t exist to ensure the views of the populace are perfectly mirrored in their governance. When the U.S. was created, its founders explicitly attempted to prevent this: Voting bodies primarily exist as a methodology for removing corrupt or ineffective decider bodies. Voting bodies should not be thought of as a mechanism for stakeholders to have a collective avatar that acts as a dictator over a system, but rather as a method to prevent dictatorial behavior altogether (or really, any egregious behavior on behalf of the decider).
In other words, instead of being designed for fairness, governance structures are more often designed to:
- Outcompete other governments on the world stage or local stage (to prevent having another government’s will exerted over them)
- Prevent worst-case abuse scenarios (dictatorships and the like)
- Last a long time
- Grow
- Enjoy minimal corruption
- Effectively achieve things at minimal cost
- Maintain the fidelity of the founders’ vision(which may be immoral, but the morality of something’s purpose doesn’t change whether or not we should judge it by its effectiveness at said purpose—we should still decide whether a gun made to kill people is effective by determining whether or not it kills people)
Outside of fairness, some other not-so-important things that academics often highlight when judging a voting body are: Simplicity, speed of vote counting, the potential for fraud or disputed results, the opportunity for tactical voting or strategic nomination, the degree of proportionality produced in multiple winner models, effective representation of minority or special interest groups, political integration, and effective voter participation. If you are super interested in whether it is possible to create a voting system that perfectly models voter preferences, you can dig into social choice theory—just be warned that the field is fairly hollow and pedantic.
Back to the question at hand: Which system should you choose? To further simplify the question, because this is the “voting” chapter, we are only going to talk about the vote itself while warning that:
- We think a well-designed system will use more than just a simple vote.
- We think any well-designed governance structure has more than just one body of voting stakeholders.
The correct answer for the vast majority of circumstances is the Single Transferable Vote system. While imperfect, it has the fewest flaws, is backed by robust research, and is easy for the public to quickly understand.
In a single transferable vote system, subordinate voting bodies (i.e. states) elect multiple candidates who are chosen once they pass a predetermined threshold. Winning candidates give the votes they did not “need” to pass the threshold to the voters’ other choices and candidates with no hope of winning also give their votes to other candidates. While this sounds complicated, it can be made even more so using systems like Schulze STV.
The concept of liquid democracy—where you can vote directly or vote for someone to vote for you with their vote weighted proportionally to their number of supporters—can be useful in some very specific forms of government.
We also fancy the concept of “futarchy,” in which decision markets are used to make decisions and voting is used to source values. Essentially, success metrics are determined by vote and the strategy for accomplishing that success is decided within a decision market.
Some systems thrive in very specific contexts. A multi-majority system works well when you have a governance structure which contains multiple well-defined, mutually acknowledged groups. While we hardly suggest that it’s the “correct” choice, this type of governance structure would have been interesting for the U.S. to have set up in Iraq, with Sunni, Shia, and other religious minority groups each having their own “unit” in the system, and consensus among the three units being required for all major decisions.
In a system like this, voting within each unit could be executed via a single transferable vote system. Such a system would have made it very hard for the other countries representing Shia and Sunni factions on the global stage to meddle so readily with Iraqi politics and would have potentially even motivated foreign actors to do more to ingratiate themselves to the Christian, Jewish, and other minority religious groups in their respective regions as those groups’ opinions of them would actually “matter” in Iraqi politics (beyond international optics).
For further illustration: Suppose the government was essentially made up of a triumvirate representing three groups: The Shia, the Sunni, and Other (mostly Christians and Jews). While the Shia and Sunni majority would ensure that the government broadly acted in line with Muslim values, putting the Other group in a position in which it acts as tie breaker ensures that both the Shia and the Sunni groups have a vested interest in winning the “Other” group’s favor. This would be true at both the national level (i.e., Shia and Sunni in Iraq) and at the international level (i.e., in Iran and Saudi Arabia meddling with the Iraqi population).
In addition to modeling internal players when setting up a government, consider how its power structure will draw action from outside players. If there is financial motivation for outside players to meddle in a governance structure, they always will—unless systems are specifically built to prevent this.