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What are the “99%” and “Occupy Wall Street” movements overlooking?
The “Occupy Wall Street” and “99%” movements realize that money has excessive influence in politics, but they have not yet realized that the 1% easily outvotes the 99% because elections use single-mark ballots, and that this unfairness allows the 1% to take advantage of vote splitting that happens — either unintentionally or planned — in primary elections. The unfairness is hidden because single-mark ballots do not collect enough information to reveal which candidate is really the most popular, and because the winner of every primary election is always from the correct political party.
The way to solve this unfairness is to ban single-mark ballots from Congressional elections. Details about making this change are posted at a proposal to ban single-mark ballots from Congressional elections.
Surprises coming in the 2012 Presidential election
An upcoming complication is that a money-backed group named Americans Elect has been preparing to put an extra candidate on the Presidential election ballot (in more than 20 states). Although supposedly they have been using fair processes to choose their candidate, probably the intended effect will be to introduce a (liberal rather than conservative) spoiler candidate for the purpose of splitting votes away from Barack Obama.
If there is vote splitting in the general election, that could trigger the the new provision that some states have adopted, which requires those states to look at the “popular vote” to determine which candidate deserves their electoral votes. Unfortunately, when single-mark ballots are used, the candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the most popular candidate, and that realization would lead to further complications.
Regardless of the details, the 2012 Presidential election looks like it will have major surprising twists and turns.
What's wrong with current voting methods?
We currently use primitive voting methods! In particular, most elections and contests fail to ask voters to indicate a second choice, third choice, and so on when there are more than two choices.
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A fully fair voting method needs to ask: "In addition to your first choice, who is your second choice, third choice, and so on?" These secondary preferences can be collected on paper or on a website using 1-2-3 ballots like the one shown here — and the intelligent ballots on this website. |
After you collect full preference information, how should it be used? |
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The preference information needs to be analyzed so that every preference of every voter is taken into account! Only VoteFair ranking does this. |
