Hi there DK, long time no update make.
I figured I would pimp out my White House petition now that it has around 500 votes and about 2 weeks left for 5000, and I need your help getting it there. The bulk of my post after the jump.
We've all been faced at one time or another, voting for a candidate who we dislike in order to keep a candidate we hate from being elected. We have to play some sort of weird application of Game Theory with massive consequences and seems at times that the only winning move is not to play, and voting for a 3rd party is doubleplusungoodthink and only serves to harm yourself.
I'm suggesting Instant Runoff Voting as a good first step towards fixing a broken election system. IRV, while not as robust as some other ranked voting options, is simple and easy to implement, as well as being more palatable to two-party politicians because it's comparably non-threatening.
While pimping out my petition in various other locales, I've had a few people tell me about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem regarding ranked voting. I do want to address this. Arrow's Theorem, simply stated, says that any ranked voting system can have pathological scenarios where the outcome doesn't obey the will of the electorate. My critics tell me that any sort of ranked voting scenario is doomed to mathematical failure because of this theorem.
There are several ways to rebut this argument, so here's two. Firstly, All of mathematics is under a similar curse right now from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Which states that under any given mathematical set of rules it's either possible to incorrectly prove a true statement is false or vice versa, or not be able to prove all statements to be true or false. But this finding certainly did not invalidate all of mathematics by any stretch of the imagination.
Secondly, our current system is also victim to this mathematical proof. The purpose of this petition is to make an undesirable (is in not representative of the true feelings of the public) outcome less likely, not impossible. And while it would still be possible to construct scenarios where an undesirable outcome is possible and where one would need to play Game Theory to get a good result, they are far less likely to simply happen by chance. Rather than constantly happening for every election.
Thank you for your time, please feel free to share my petition.