[OT] Voting systems [was Wrong ad on www.linux.org]

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> better.  The green party even sounded fairly reasonable, but almost no
> one seems to vote for them.

The "first past the post voting system" currently in use in Canadian
federal elections is a problem IMHO.  The fact that it discourages voting
for minority parties "that won't get in anyway" is well known.  A system
of preferential voting can help here since people can vote for a minority
party as first preference without fear that their vote will be "wasted."

Proportional representation allows more representation for minority views
but it can be taken too far as well (see the Knesset for an example of
this).

Wikipedia has several great sections comparing various real-world voting
systems currently in use.

Rob
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