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#votingsystems — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #votingsystems, aggregated by home.social.

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  1. 🚨BREAKING NEWS: Internet voting is insecure! 🤯 Thanks, Captain Obvious, for the shocking revelation that nobody saw coming, ever. Meanwhile, vendors continue their magical quest for the mythical "secure internet voting" system, because who needs facts when you have marketing, right? 🦄✨
    blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/0 #InternetVoting #Insecurity #CyberSecurity #News #TechHumor #VotingSystems #HackerNews #ngated

  2. Alaska is heading toward a high-stakes 2026 vote on whether to keep ranked choice voting and open primaries or return to party primaries and single-choice general elections. 🔥🗳️ If you care about how votes are counted and who gets a voice, this is must-read context: ⬇️ tinyurl.com/5fnw6ak4 #AKPolitics #Alaska #AlaskaHeadlineLiving #RCV #RankedChoiceVoting #Election2026 #VotingSystems #Democracy#TomBegich #SarahVance #NancyDahlstrom

  3. Gerrymandering seems a feature of
    majoritarian elections (i.e. not proportional)
    in single-member districts
    (it is affected by multiple factors, of course).
    And it is an example of one of the many positive-feedback loops in politics:
    if one side does it, the other will as well.

    Remember the rotten boroughs in Great Britain?
    It took serious legislation to abolish them.
    (The Reform Act of 1832.)

    #Elections
    #Gerrymandering
    #Politics
    #VotingSystems

  4. I’d like to share some thoughts on a fascinating topic: why democracy—as a decision-making process—is, in a strict mathematical sense, impossible when you have more than one participant. This idea has been influentially formalized in Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which provides a set of criteria that any fair voting system should ideally meet. Unfortunately, Arrow’s work—and many subsequent proofs by scholars like Yu, Geanakoplos, and others—shows that no voting method can perfectly satisfy all these fairness criteria simultaneously when converting individual preferences into a collective decision.

    In a nutshell, the theorem illustrates that when voters rank multiple options, trying to find a method that always reflects individual values, maintains consistency, and respects collective rationality leads to an inherent contradiction. For instance, one of the key issues is that any system must sometimes arbitrarily privilege one candidate over another based on small shifts in voter preferences. This phenomenon can even lead to paradoxical outcomes where, for example, a supposedly “more democratic” decision ends up being self-defeating.

    These findings do not mean that democracy is unworkable—in fact, democratic systems have evolved to accommodate human imperfections. The mathematical impossibility points out a trade-off: all voting systems have built-in limitations, no matter how sophisticated they are. In our modern, high-information society, there’s a growing opportunity to refine our methods (think of innovations like ranked-choice voting, liquid democracy, or even sortition-based approaches) to better capture the complex voice of a diverse populace.

    If you’re curious to delve deeper into these ideas, I highly recommend checking out the TED Talk by Alex Gendler, “Which Voting System Is the Best?” It offers a really approachable introduction to the subject. Additionally, there’s a treasure trove of academic work on Arrow’s theorem and its implications available through resources like this video youtu.be/qf7ws2DF-zk by Veritasium and various research papers (by Maskin, Sen, Black, and others) that explore the nuances of social choice theory.
    Ultimately, while democracy might be “mathematically impossible” to perfect, engaging with these ideas can help us understand our systems better and inspire innovations that move us closer to fairer, more representative governance. It’s a reminder that striving for improvements—even in imperfect systems—is both necessary and worthwhile.

    Additionally, I recommend checking out the French-speaking channel Science4All, which has produced a great series exploring the theoretical and mathematical concepts behind democratic election systems. Their video “Le scrutin de Condorcet randomisé | Démocratie 5” (youtu.be/wKimU8jy2a8?list=PLtz) offers, in my opinion, one of the best explanations of Condorcet elections—a perfect launchpad if you decide to take a deeper dive into these topics.

    #Democracy #SocialChoiceTheory #VotingSystems #ArrowsTheorem #CondorcetMethod #PoliticalInnovation #CivicEngagement

  5. I was thinking about voting systems earlier: has there been research into a system where the probability of a decision being made is a monotonic function of its votes?

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_b is just this but with the function being the identity, but I wonder if others have been explored.

    #voting #elections #democracy #socialchoice #votingsystems #electoralsystems #gametheory #probability

  6. #FreeSpeechForPeople : 'A group #ComputerSecurityExperts have written to Vice President #KamalaHArris to alert her to the fact that #votingsystems were breached by TRUMP ALLIES [capitalisation mine] in 2021 and 2022 and to urge her to seek recounts in key states to ensure election verification.'

    #STOPTRUMP #handcount 2 of 3

  7. #AskFedi does anyone know if there's an FEP for running ranked choice polls over the fediverse?

    #polls #voting #VotingSystems #RankedChoice

  8. To be clear, I vastly prefer sortition and direct democracy (e.g. citizens' initiatives) to any kind of election system, but if we must have elections why settle for anything less than pure proportional representation of the actual votes?

    My blog post on sortition: adamasnemesis.com/2020/11/03/a

    Image is Thomas Le Clear's "Young America".

    #politics #politicalreform #elections #votingsystems #voting #fairvoting #rankedchoicevoting #sortition #democracy #art #traditionalart #painting #oilpainting

  9. With STV you still elect individuals, not party lists, and since a majority in one local district have enough nationwide vote share to win a seat under nationwide PR they'd still be able to elect members of their choice, so what's not to like? Let's do it!

    Image is Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach's "Abschied".

    #politics #politicalreform #elections #votingsystems #voting #fairvoting #rankedchoicevoting #art #traditionalart #painting #oilpainting #beautifulgirl

  10. Today I learned H.G. Wells supported proportional representation, and agreed with me that single transferable vote in large districts (like the whole country) is the best version! His arguments for ranked-choice voting in 1918 are still relevant today.
    archive.org/details/infourthye

    Image is a photograph of H.G. Wells thinking, c. 1890.

    #photography #politics #politicalreform #elections #votingsystems #voting #fairvoting #rankedchoicevoting

  11. Tune in to our new episode! @katherined and @dsearls talk to Brian Fox about voting systems, open source, work in the post-covid era, blockchain, programming languages, and more. Visit the following link for full episode - reality2cast.com/76

    #BASH #VotingSystems #openSource #Privacy #Technology #Podcast #newEpisode

  12. here is a very cool interactive website where you can compare (single-winner) #votingSystems with fairly in-depth explanations: ncase.me/ballot/

    (it's also #publicDomain software! (and it has cute polygons!))

    #webapp