Your Individual Vote Won't Affect The Outcome

 

People who think we are compelled to vote in elections use ethical persuasion (namely, civic duty and the value of participation), but they never use mathematical probability, because then they wouldn’t have a good argument. Their thinking is roughly; before an election, without knowing the margin of victory, it’s theoretically possible for any vote to be decisive if the race turns out to be exceptionally close, so you should vote, because all votes count.

But there’s a lot wrong with that reasoning, because all votes do not count in a way that they would need to, to make it worth your while voting. In my constituency, the Norwich North seat was won by a margin of 10,850 votes. That means the chance that a single vote in Norwich North could change that outcome would be one in 10,850. It’s so unlikely for a large lead to be reduced to a margin of just one vote, the probability of an individual vote deciding the outcome here is actually much lower than one in 10,850. In fact, it’s closer to being so rare that it’s practically negligible.

Even more so across the pond - the chance of your vote making any difference to the US Presidential Election result is even smaller.

So, I don’t think we have a civic duty to assent to the value of participation, when the actual value of participation in terms of a probability estimate is close to zero.

Other than that, enjoy the Election. 😅

Further reading that elaborates much more on this subject: 

A Radical Way To Change Politics For The Better

Some Things You May Not Have Considered About The Process Of Voting

Why It's OK Not To Vote

Why You Probably Shouldn't Have Bothered Voting

A Radical Way To Change Politics For The Better

I have three radical, brilliant and yet wacky ideas for how to revolutionise our political system. The first one involves ditching constituencies and drastically reducing the number of MPs with a new system of representation (your local council could fulfil any need your MP can). The widespread mediocrity of our MPs is a lot to do with the fact that they are working within a system that does not provide much of an incentive for moral probity or intelligent policy-making. 

It's only when professional people are accountable for their actions or words that we lessen the duplicity and complacency. I doubt we would have seen the MP expenses scandal nor be subjected to the regular tosh to which we have become habituated if we had upstanding MPs who feared the opprobrium (and voting power) of the electorate, and had to conduct themselves with integrity and intelligence to secure their next vote. 

The main cause of this lack of incentive is that too many MPs are in safe seats in their constituency, and party associations that choose the candidates for constituencies can ensure that those in Ministerial roles get the safest seats. My antidote to this is a whole new system that instils some kind of accountability to MPs, and ideally brings in a better and more scrupulous calibre of candidate, and a more carefully thought out voting process.

Idea 1

First we need to decimate the notion of votes attached to constituencies according to geographical borders. As a replacement, my radical proposal would be that candidates will stand to represent surnames demarcated into sections of the alphabet, not regions of the country. We could reduce the exorbitant number of MPs down to about 500 (that'll save on expenses) - and then have a system in which MP 1 represents everyone whose surname begins with Aa-Ad, MP 2 represents everyone whose surname begins with Ae-Ah, and so on. 

Under such conditions, an MP really would have to work hard to forge a good reputation and the prowess for positive influence, because the people he or she represents would be all over the country, and they would make up a body consisting of a diverse range of classes, cultures and ethnicity. MPs are much less likely to be complacent if they are required to have a positive impact on tens of thousands of people scattered across the country rather than people concentrated in a specified area of the country - they will have to think more innovatively about plans, policies, investments and strategies.

And instead of having constituents and holding surgeries, elected MPs could get involved with local issues through regional councils, primarily motivated by doing good, honest, decent work for the region. There may be occasions when conflicts of interests occur between a local person and a person he or she represents alphabetically, but I don't expect them to be too frequent. Put this system in place and I'll bet we'd see a higher standard of MPs, in a system in which Westminster attracts more candidates who want to be MPs for the right reasons.

Idea 2

In addition, my second idea adds even more intellectual and moral scrutiny to the process - because in order for MP 1 to represent everyone whose surname begins with Aa-Ad, and MP 2 to represent everyone whose surname begins with Ae-Ah, and so on, we could try to lessen party political biases and tribalism by offering category distinctions between policies and parties. In other words, rather than everyone whose surname begins with Aa-Ad voting for a party candidate, they could instead be asked to tick boxes for a large range of policies they support (after reading intelligent annotated arguments for the costs and benefits of each policy - we could make this mandatory), while being blind to the parties to which those policies belong.

I got this idea during the last election, after clicking on one or two of those websites that attempt to tell you which party it thinks you should vote for based on a series of policy selections you've made from behind a Rawls-type veil of ignorance, blind to the parties to which those policies belong. It’s obviously not totally blind, as it’s fairly easy to tell which policy belongs to which party in the most obvious areas - but it certainly was the case that when people did the exercise they frequently ended up being most closely aligned with parties that were not the parties for whom they would usually vote.

Being more economically right wing than most, and more socially left wing than most, when I partook in the exercise it was clear that I am further from all the mainstream parties than any of them are from each other, which means there is no obvious party for me to vote for. However, this isn't true of the average voter - in fact, rather worryingly, a poll seemed to indicate that if people voted for policies not personalities, the Green Party would have won the last election - which does rather suggest that the average voter is likely to make a real mess of things with a policy-only vote, and that democracy would not be all that safe in their hands.

Idea 3

This is where my third idea can help - because, as I talked about in this Blog post, I think the nation pays too much regard to the so-called qualities of democracy. Leaving decisions and policies that require intelligence and evidence-based analysis in the hands of largely uneducated and short-sighted populations is highly overrated. What's needed, in my view, is a voting system comprised of fewer, smarter voters - but having tweaked my system a bit, I'd now wish to incorporate my two above ideas into it.

Added to my above system of having MPs represent surnames rather than constituencies, and voters voting on policies not personalities, I'd also want the outcomes to be in the hands of far fewer, more educated voters - maybe with something resembling jury duty, where a random selection of the population (to ensure a proportional representation of sexes, ages, ethnic backgrounds, income groups, religious beliefs, political views, education, and so forth) - let's say 50 people for each letter group (at 500 groups, that's 25,000 voters) - are called to partake in a rigorous voting process involving careful, considered analytical scrutiny over a number of weeks.

So here's how it would work. The first step is to ensure that voters voting in my reduced voter election are better apprised of the facts, and of the pros and cons of all policies (the seen and the unseen). Rather than decide where your vote should go based on personalities, the 50 x 500 chosen voters get to spend a number of weeks, getting paid for their time, studying the economic, sociological and philosophical tenets of all aspects of the policies in front of them, attending lectures from speakers of both sides of the argument, partaking in group discussions and becoming involved in debates orchestrated by experts in the fields (the benefits of the outcome would more than pay for the financial costs of this, and some of the offsetting savings will occur by not having to employ polling clerks throughout the country on election day).

And then at the end of the process, after developing a much broader understanding of the costs and benefits of all policies, the individuals get to vote on those policies, and then the results are announced, with the winning 500 MPs taking their place in Parliament

You may worry that this will disenfranchise most of the other citizens that don’t get to vote – but there’s no reason to think this.  At the start of play, everyone has exactly the same chance of being selected, and everyone in the country (both those selected and those not) will be secure in the knowledge that the people who are going to represent them in Parliament will have been chosen with more rigour and a higher degree of analytical scrutiny by highly conscientious citizens in the country. That cannot be as disenfranchising as the current system in which every single person that votes knows that that vote will have the same use as if they’d stayed at home.

What I'd also predict will happen is that if politicians knew that their policies would be subjected to proper, rigorous analytical scrutiny - and that they'd have to be credible to pass intellectual muster - the policies offered would be far more carefully thought out, and more in tune with a formal economic accountability.

One would hope the politicians that made empty promises, and sold policies based only on benefits with scant regard to costs, and politicians who took advantage of the electorate from within the comfort of their safe seats, would be greatly diminished, and in many cases got rid of altogether in my proposed system. Who knows - it's even possible that higher quality politicians with properly analysed policies may end up rubbing off on a greater proportion of the electorate.

Extending The Corbynomics Sham To 16 Year Old Voters Will Harm Them, Not Help Them

Talk about being subtle: the left wing parties, led by Labour, treated 16 years olds as electoral chattel by pushing for them to have a vote in order to improve the number of seats their party has in the House of Commons (people of that age tend to vote for more left wing parties).

Unsurprisingly, as it would disadvantage their own political standing, the Tories filibustered the debate, meaning that there was no time for a Parliament vote on whether to lower the voting age to 16.

It was a squalidly transparent claim of Labour to want to 'empower' young people - no one was falling for it. But this does bring to bear another important factor in how young people embracing left wing economics and the promise of free sweets are going to one day pick up the bill for all the fiscal irresponsibility they demanded in their youth.

The young people who are trusting Jeremy Corbyn's ludicrous magic money forest economic policies do not seem to realise that the government must raise taxes in the future on the very people they are trying to help now. It's a bit like buying your son a games console on his 14th birthday but then telling him he only gets to play on it if he pays for it on his 21st birthday. At no point along the way can this boy think of the games console as a free gift.

 

At the moment Corbyn wants to defer increases in taxation (for anyone earning up to £80,000 pa) by borrowing. The economics behind what I'm now going to tell you is more complex than my simple illustration, but not in any way that alters the efficacy of the generalised arithmetic. Suppose Corbyn wants to tax you £100 to help wipe out student debt. Here are some possible scenarios (figures rounded for simplicity):

 

Scenario 1: Corbyn taxes you a £100, which you remove from your £1000 savings account, leaving £900. A year from now, your bank account has grown (at 10% interest - again for simplicity) to £990.

 

Scenario 2: Instead of taxing you, Corbyn borrows the £100. This leaves £1000 in your savings account, which grows to £1100 a year from now. At that point, Corbyn taxes you £110, leaving £990 in your bank account.

 

Scenario 3: Corbyn taxes you £100, reducing your bank account to £990. Then he lends you the £100 back at 10% interest, raising your bank balance to £1000, which grows to £1100 a year from now. At that point Corbyn demands repayment of his loan, so you fork over £110, leaving £990 in your bank account.

 

Note that despite some complex tweaking of the knobs to adjust for real values over a lenthier execution time, all three scenarios bear out on the taxpayer no differently - the only major factor at play is the time that it is recouped. In other words, Helen the student who wants all her free sweets now is going to pay for them later in life anyway in ways that will esacape her naked eye.

 

The government is merely a representative agent of the taxpayers, and politicians are a bit like magpies - they steal from the shiny objects of enterprise to line their nests (magpies don't really do that - but it's part of popular mythology) - in that any good things that politicians can do for citizens are done as the result of extrapolating from the fruits of other people's labour.

 

Raising taxes depletes our present day assets, and increasing borrowing to pay for Corbyn's short-sighted policies depletes our future assets and only defers its main damage to a few decades' time when Jezza is a distant memory. No wonder Corbyn loves these policies - he'll be long gone when the voters that love them most end up feeling the costs.

Which Brilliant Ideas Are Far Less Widely Known Than They Ought To Be?

It's a great question which a friend and I were discussing over a group dinner Friday night. I can offer plenty of suggestions to whet your appetite; there are numerous ideas that would enrich people's understanding of everyday societal matters that are not currently captured with enough depth to do so. Examples would be things like comparative advantage, that which is seen and unseen, deadweight costs, Coase's theorem, Chesterton's fence and the concept of the invisible hand. Then there are absolutely life-changing ideas such as Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Harsanyi's Amnesia Principle that bear repeating regularly to get them as widely disseminated as possible. All of those ideas make an appearance in this blog from time to time.

However, the idea I'll pick as the idea of choice in response to this blog post's title will be Arrow's Theorem, as a tribute to Kenneth Arrow who died this week. He was, up until a few days ago, one of the greatest living economists. Arrow's Theorem is not the easiest to describe simplistically because it is mathematically dense, and is quite counterintuitive too (I had a go once before using voting as the illustrative template). In fact, past reading of economics has given me the impression that several economist social commentators have described Arrow's Theorem as the hardest complex idea to simplify for a layperson. I'll have a try with a version I typed up yesterday in the hope that you find it both understandable and intriguing.

To do so, let's discuss my favourite dessert - cheesecake. What I'm going to illustrate is that no democratic system, however fair it appears in terms of participants and number of choices, can satisfy all the axioms associated with the preferences. So for example, if there are three, then: if two are satisfied the third must be violated, whether those two are 1 and 2, 2 and 3, or 1 and 3.

Let's illustrate this. Every day, Julie, Frank and Timothy split a cheesecake with one flavour - Chocolate, Strawberries or Lemon. Their preference orderings change from day to day - some days Julie is in the mood for Strawberries, other days the very thought of Strawberries makes her wish she was eating another flavoured cheesecake. Every evening at dinner time they have to call in their first, second and third choice cheesecake orders (let's say the cheesecake patisserie insists that you specify your second and third choices in case they run out of something.) So Julie, Frank and Timothy need a method for translating their individual preferences to a cheesecake order. Now as it happens, on the 22nd on February, their preferences ran as follows:

 

	Julie	Frank	Timothy
First Choice	Chocolate	Strawberries	Lemon
Second Choice	Strawberries	Lemon	Chocolate
Third Choice	Lemon	Chocolate	Strawberries

I’m not going to divulge what system these three were using to determine their order, but I will tell you that on the 22nd they phoned the patisserie and expressed Chocolate as their first choice. On the 23rd, Julie ranked Chocolate over Lemon again (and let's suppose we don’t know anything about Frank’s or Timothy’s rankings). On the 22nd, only Julie ranked Chocolate over Lemon, whereas on the 23rd, Julie plus possibly one or both of the others ranked Chocolate over Lemon. So if the cheesecake order ranked Chocolate above Lemon on the 22nd, then it should certainly have ranked Chocolate over Lemon on the 23rd, no?

In principle, yes (disallowing for a change of mind for variety - not something that's as likely to happen in political voting). Any other result would have seemed unreasonable to Julie, Frank and Timothy, so when they designed their system, they designed it with the following feature. If we list Chocolate over Lemon on our order on one day, and if none of the people who prefer Chocolate over Lemon change their minds about that the next day, then we should list Chocolate over Lemon the next day as well.

Because this was implicit in their system (and because they’d listed Chocolate over Lemon on the 22nd when only Julie had that preference), they always listed Chocolate over Lemon on any day when Julie preferred Chocolate to Lemon. That is to say, Julie was the principal figure on the Chocolate/Lemon consideration - the 'authoritarian', if you like.

Now on the 24th, Julie was in a Chocolate/Lemon/Strawberries frame of mind. Suppose again we don't know much about Frank’s or Timothy’s moods except that they both favoured Lemon over Strawberries. Since everyone preferred Lemon to Strawberries, Lemon was, of course, listed higher than Strawberries in the cheesecake hierarchy. Once again, any other result would have appeared unreasonable to Julie, Frank and Timothy, so they’d built their system along the following lines:

Whenever we unanimously prefer option X to option Y, option X should rank higher than option Y on our order.

First, Julie preferred Chocolate to Lemon, so of course Chocolate ranked higher than Lemon. Second, everyone preferred Lemon to Strawberries, so Lemon ranked higher than Strawberries. Logic says that Chocolate must have ranked higher than Strawberries. Logic also says that when Julie prefers Chocolate/Lemon/Strawberries in that order, and everyone else prefers Lemon to Strawberries, Chocolate must be more preferable than Strawberries.

They also agreed the following:

Our preferences regarding Lemon should not affect the relative positions of Chocolate and Strawberries in the ranking. Therefore, the above should hold if we drop all the Lemon-related assumptions. That is to say, on any day when Julie prefers Chocolate to Strawberries, Chocolate must rank higher than Strawberries.

The next day, the 25th, Julie’s preferences ran Strawberries/Chocolate/Lemon, while the other two both preferred Strawberries to Chocolate. Since they all preferred Strawberries to Chocolate, Strawberries came out higher than Chocolate on the cheesecake order. Since Julie was a Chocolate/Lemon authoritarian, Chocolate came out higher than Lemon. Logic tells us also that Strawberries came out higher than Lemon. And the same would be true on any day when Julie preferred Strawberries/Chocolate/Lemon and everyone else preferred Strawberries to Chocolate.

But the ranking of Strawberries vs. Lemon was designed to be unaffected by how anyone cared about Chocolate, so the Chocolate-related information cannot be relevant. This tells us that on any day when Julie prefers Strawberries to Lemon, Strawberries rank higher than Lemon. She’s not just a Chocolate/Lemon authoritarian and a Chocolate/Strawberries authoritarian; she’s a Strawberries/Lemon authoritarian too.

What we’ve uncovered is that any Chocolate/Lemon authoritarian is also a Chocolate/Strawberries authoritarian and a Strawberries/Lemon authoritarian. Interchanging the flavours, we could have just as easily discovered that any Chocolate/Strawberries authoritarian (e.g. Julie) is also a Chocolate/Lemon and a Lemon/Strawberries authoritarian - and so on as every pair of flavours appear. In other words, despite the table of preferences above, Julie is an absolute cheesecake authoritarian as all of her preferences are entirely reflected in the cheesecake order on any given day.

Now here's the upshot of it all. We started by declaring that Chocolate came out on top on the 22nd. But if Strawberries had come out on top, then using Arrow's model I could have given evidence to show that Frank is an absolute authoritarian, and if Lemon had come out on top, then using Arrow's model I could have given evidence to show that Timothy is an absolute authoritarian. Regardless of what happened on the 22nd, someone must be an absolute authoritarian - counterintuitive as that may have first appeared.

Extending that further, if there had been more people than just Julie, Frank and Timothy, and more flavours than Chocolate, Strawberries and Lemon, then although the argument becomes more mathematically intractable, it is not at heart any further from the nub of the wisdom just covered - that is, if you have a scenario that translates a series of individual preference choices into a single group preference of choice, that scenario will throw up an authoritarian.

Crucially here, we're seeing the distinction between what are very coherent individual preferences (called transitivity), and how at a group level it becomes incoherent (intransitivity). Transitivity is formally expressed as: if A > B, and B > C, then A > C - so in other words, with cheesecake choices, if Julie likes Chocolate more than Strawberries and Strawberries more than Lemon, she should like Chocolate more than Lemon.

Groups, however, don't necessarily have a transitive preference order - they have intransitive 'cycling' of preferences, which means Chocolate beats Strawberries, which beats Lemon, which beats Chocolate, which beats Strawberries, which beats Lemon, which beats Chocolate - meaning for group scenarios you might just as well put the flavours of cheesecake in a hat.

  

Some Things You May Not Have Considered About The Process Of Voting

The hideous Trump vs. Clinton contest has probably made more people feel like not voting than in any time in recent American history. The prospect of choosing their President this time around is rather like voting for a four year dose of haemorrhoids or a four year chronic earache. 

If you are someone to whom the above applies (and ditto the British political equivalent), I have one or two things to say. I've written before (here and here) about how in terms of probability your individual vote in an election or a referendum almost certainly won't make the slightest bit of difference to the outcome.

 

A challenger once tried to prove me wrong by posting a link doing the rounds to a low-turnout local election in which a councillor had won a district seat by two voles. What he should have realised is that the fact that an outcome like this is so newsworthy and shared so many times is all the indication one needs that 99.9999% of the time individual votes (or even a few hundred votes) don't make any difference to the outcome.

 

That doesn't necessarily mean I'm advising everyone not to vote - for some people the experience is worthwhile, and it's not for me to tell people how to behave. When it comes to deciding on whether to vote, people should do whatever is valuable to them. But it's always important to remember that value is measured in a whole range of things, and everything is a trade off. If you get x, you get don’t get y.

If you choose y you get less of z, and so on. One is ill-advised to just think of voting as ‘Well everyone should do it!’. Those for whom voting is a beneficial trade off should do it, and those for whom it’s not, should not. As with most things, it’s easy to plug in the numbers and ascertain probability for whether a trade off is beneficial, to yourself and to the wider population.

 

Here's an illustration to show why it probably isn't worth your while voting. Suppose a single vote costs you £3 of your time. In addition you are made an offer – if you care that much about the outcome you can buy as many additional votes as you like for £50 a vote. In other words, if you want to vote 11 times for your local MP or councillor it’s going to cost you £503 (that’s £500 in cash, and £3 in time).

 

Given the astronomically low chance that your additional 10 votes are going to make any difference to the outcome, I would think that most rational minds would agree that in the trade off – negligible chance of securing a candidate vs. not sacrificing £500 – you’d be ill-advised to waste £500, because in all likelihood your £500 of additional votes is likely to mean that the winning margin will be, say, 6031 instead of 6041 (or reverse that if you vote for the winner).

 

It’s pretty obvious to me that if offered additional votes for money, your individual demand curve for increased probability of outcome is pretty flat, and ditto almost the entire population. Therefore, taken to its rational conclusion, and in full knowledge that almost nobody else is going to change their voting habits based on the above wisdom, you’d be wise to take the logic to its farthest conclusion and trade off the vote that costs £3 of your time.

 

A friend replied with the following comment:

 

"I suppose the exception would be in the cases where the difference in the outcome would be so high that it would offset the negligible probability when working out the expected value. In the recent Scottish Independence referendum, 400,000 votes would have altered the outcome. At £50 a vote that would mean £20million would be the cost of a different outcome - so if you thought Scotland being independent would bring more the £20million in value to you then the £50 investment would be worthwhile (not to mention the £3 of time to vote). Admittedly, this exception would only apply to a very small number of people.

 

Also, there's surely an altruistic implication to this. If the £20million of value wasn't something that I saw for myself but for society as a whole (and people on both sides of debates of these kind are throwing around numbers much larger than £20million), then surely that provides a very compelling reason to vote - I am using my time (or in your hypothetical example, money) to produce a greater expected value for society than the cost I have incurred to do so. It seems to me that the smallness of the odds of an individual vote changing the outcome is mitigated by the largeness of the potential payoff of changing the outcome compared to the cost of casting that vote."

 

My friend is partially right - I could conceive of instances in which that’s the case, yes. However, by equal measure, uncertainty of the ramifications of an outcome has to be factored in too, as does the trivial nature of some outcomes.

 

In the case of the latter, in the grand scheme of things it really makes little difference whether the city councillors for Blackpool south wards are Labour councillors or Lib Dem councillors, so even if a millionaire could affect the outcome by buying £50,000 pounds’ worth of votes, I’d argue there are far better ways he could spend the money.

 

In the case of the former, it’s very difficult to know the exact ramifications of a massive decision like Scottish independence or hard and soft Brexits – much of it is contingent on numerous factors not yet apparent, so you could argue that spending millions of pounds affecting the outcome might be a bit of a blindfold in the dark-type of bet.

 

Finally, sometimes in life we find that even big outcomes could be settled in trivial ways, particularly if the democratic process has primacy, as I argued in this blog post about deciding the Scottish referendum by tossing a coin.

 

 

 

Compulsory Voting Is A Terrible Idea

With all the excitement surrounding the EU referendum recently, some people have been using it as a platform to campaign for compulsory voting in the UK in the hope that it will force encourage people into political interest.

It should be far more obvious than it apparently is, but compulsory voting is a foolish idea, not to mention repressive. Even if we ignore the latter part, that forcing people to vote is a horrid infringement of personal liberty, compelling people to vote that otherwise have complete apathy towards politics is going to have the effect of lowering the quality of the voter pool by adding more uninformed people into the mix*.

To prove the point, the places in which compulsory voting has been introduced has raised voting turnout by around 20 percentage points, but it has also raised left wing votes by roughly the same amount.

Compulsory voting would also lower the quality of politicians too, as an increasingly uninformed forced electorate would be more likely to vote for incompetent politicians and not understand the full extent of their ineptness.

Forced voters are also more likely to be the kind of people to vote in people who seduce them with headline-grabbing inflammatory rhetoric, or deliberately vote for an extreme person in protest at being made to go into the polling booth.

The sooner people grow out of this crazy idea of forcing people to vote, the better.

* I'm all for trying to get more people interested in politics - interested enough so that they make informed decisions, but that is something altogether different from forcing uninformed citizens to vote for something or someone they have no interest in or no clue about.

The Best Way To Improve Outcomes Is To Have Better, Fewer Voters!

It's been a funny week for the word 'democracy' - the recent EU Referendum, despite having the largest voting turnout for nearly 25 years, has called some to question the democratic process if it throws up outcomes that are unsettling.

Some have asked whether democracy itself is a sufficient system when the results bring about a sense of foreboding, and whether potential costs ought to allow a mechanism by which democracy can be overruled.

 

This is slightly ironic in that people are always calling for more UK citizens to engage in politics and get up and vote, yet when this does happen there are widespread complaints that too many ignorant and ill-informed people voting does not a good outcome make.

Of course, given that politically and economically the majority of the electorate are abjectly uninformed, it is not in the least bit surprising that big decisions put in the hands of the public can be a dangerous thing.

All this makes a blog post I wrote over three years ago seem quite prescient. It was there that I addressed the problem of the voting public and came up with an idea for a solution:

"The only way to vastly improve the quality of our MPs is to improve the quality of the voters – and the only way to improve the quality of the voters is to drastically reduce the number of them, and then give a randomly selected few the time and resources to rigorously research and analyse the candidates before them. 

Here’s what I’d suggest. Reduce the number of voters in each constituency to 200 people chosen at random (to ensure a proportional representation of sexes, ages, ethnic backgrounds, income groups, religious beliefs, political views, education, and so forth) and have each of them accompany the political candidates to a location in which they stay for a week, ensuring the time, resources and intellectual and emotional capacity to question the MPs, give and solicit feedback, and test the candidates’ political calibre before casting their votes at the end of the week (the benefits of the outcome would probably more than pay for the financial costs of this, and some of the offsetting savings will occur by not having to employ polling clerks throughout the country on election day).

You may worry that this will disenfranchise most of the other citizens that don’t get to vote, but there’s no reason to think this. At the start of play, everyone has exactly the same chance of being selected, and everyone in the country (both those selected and those not) will be secure in the knowledge that the people who are going to represent them in Parliament will have been chosen with the utmost rigour and analytical scrutiny by the most conscientious citizens in the country. That cannot be as disenfranchising as the current system in which every single person that votes knows that that vote will have the same use as if they’d stayed at home. 

All that said, the bottom line is, even if the system I proposed is a superior system for improving the calibre of our MPs (which seems logically unimpeachable to me), it might still instinctively be the case that our present less effective voting system is a pearl of great electoral price from which it is too emotionally and psychologically costly to depart."

As would always be the case, you'd have to decide whether you prefer including everybody in the voting process and therefore giving some of the craziest cats and bigoted individuals a voice, or whether for the good of the country you'd be happier with far fewer but possibly better informed voters.

Or suppose, if we could find a workable method for this, we somehow only allowed the smartest, knowledgeable and best-informed 1000 people in the UK to vote on who ran our country, how would that sit with you?

 

If allowing everyone to vote is not as good for the country as allowing a selection of only smart and informed people to vote, which seems like a sine qua non to me, then there will always be a trade off between better outcomes and a better spirit of total inclusivity in the country.

Of course, rather amusingly, I'd like to leave you with the following thought, which perhaps kills two birds with one stone. The whole country gets to vote on whether the smartest, knowledgeable and best-informed 1000 people get to vote for our political outcomes.

 



Why It's OK Not To Vote

I'm always bemused when I hear people say "You are morally compelled to vote: people died for your right to vote, and it is outrageous if you choose not to use it". They also say things like "You've no right to moan about the politicians in power if you abstain from voting". They are popular opinions, but like many popular opinions I think they are wrong.

On the first one - even if we ignore the fact that the odds are astronomically stacked against your vote making any difference whatsoever, the majority of people who died for our liberties and freedoms didn't die for our right to vote, they died for our right to the privilege of choice and autonomy, of which both voting and abstention are constituent parts.

And on the second one - not only do your freedom of choice and autonomy give you every right to praise or bemoan to your heart's content, the fundamental truth here is that if you have no political parties you would support then the ability to vote means little when the variety of options on offer fundamentally depart from what you want to be on offer. For the people to whom that applies I see no reason to expect them to be any less vocal - one may even expect them to be the most vociferous critics of all.

Here's an illustration to show what I mean. Suppose a friend of yours has been sentenced to death in a State that allows it, and yet you are against capital punishment. Someone asks you to vote on how your friend is put to death: electric chair, lethal injection, hanging, a bullet to the head, or being starved to death slowly.

Given that I am opposed to the death penalty I want to campaign against my friend being put to death at all. If you tell me I'm morally impelled to vote on how my friend dies, I'd certainly say that the lethal injection option is a less bad option than being starved to death slowly, but my vote is only an adjunct to what I feel is a bigger issue about the inhumanity of capital punishment.

Similarly, in politics my vote for the Conservatives, UKIP, the Lib Dems, Labour, or whoever would only be an adjunct to what I feel is a bigger issue - that I'm a Christian libertarian that isn't being represented by any of the parties for whom I can vote. Thus, my vote would only be a vote for the least bad party - but when you combine that with the fact that that vote is almost certainly going to make no difference to the outcome, then not voting becomes a perfectly rational thing to do.

You're probably very accustomed to how the party political system has manifested itself over the last century or so, and you're so used to the kind of choices you're being asked to make that perhaps you don't know what it's like for those of us for whom the choices in front of us are so many miles away from what we'd support. A fact you may know is that dinosaurs were actually alive on earth for over twice the length of time than the time between their extinction and now. By a similar measure, the ideal party I'd like to see in government is probably about twice as far from the Conservative Party (the most electable party by a country mile) as the Conservative Party is from, say, a far left party like the Green Party. If you can understand where I'm coming from there, you should have no trouble understanding why, as things stand, I just don't see voting in the same way that you do.

Even if you can't swallow all that - and I'd be at a loss to understand why ever not - then at the very least you should respect my right and decision not to vote, just as I respect your right and decision to vote or not vote as you see fit.

Voting Qutopianism (Warning: High Wonk Content Contained Within)

People who favour democracy should wish for votes to translate into MPs, but alas, as things stand the constituency boundaries currently favour Labour and disadvantage the Conservatives, because they are not of equal size, and because Tory votes are often heavily concentrated in safe seat areas.

The proposal to reform the boundaries was blocked by the Lib-Dems in coalition a couple of years ago - a reform that would have seen the number of MPs reduced to 600, and the constituency boundaries being of roughly equal size, making the political outcome much more representative as the Conservatives would have gained between 20 and 25 extra MPs. Until those boundary changes occur, the people of Great Britain will not be democratically represented in a way that reflects their votes.

Not only does percentage of votes not translate consistently into number of seats - number of seats doesn't translate into voting power either. At the low end there is no direct link between a party's influence and its number of votes.

Imagine a reduced parliament in which there are only 120 MPs.  The Conservatives have 50, Labour has 40, The Lib Dems have 20 and UKIP has 10. Despite Labour having twice the number of MPs as The Lib Dems, a coalition between The Conservatives and The Lib Dems would give them a majority, and give Labour less power than a party that obtained half their MPs. There are a vast number of inter-party permutations for coalitions, meaning that a party with relatively few votes can be nearly as powerful as a major party in a coalition, or equally pretty much powerless, depending on how the land of the coalitions lies.

While we're in the mood for oddities - some of you may have heard of Kenneth Arrow's 'impossibility theorem', which proves that an aggregation of society's individual preferences doesn't translate into a comprehensive aggregate societal preference. Let me try and break it down this way. Imagine the three big leaders are running for a national popularity contest, and observe the strange goings on that occur here. Let us say that a third of the electorate prefers Ed Miliband( M ) to Nick CKlegg ( K ) to David Cameron ( C ), another third of the electorate prefers K to C to M; and the remaining third prefers C to M to K. There is nothing particularly strange about this until we consider what happens in two person contests given the above preferences.. M can boast that two-thirds of the electorate prefers him to K. C responds that two-thirds of the electorate prefer him to M. Finally, K counters by noting that two-thirds of the electorate prefers him to C.

In mathematics, a binary relation over a set is transitive if whenever an element a is related to an element b, and b is in turn related to an element c, then a is also related to c. If the societal preferences in what I’ve just said are determined by majority vote, we have an irrational ordering of preferences; that is, ‘society’ prefers M over K, K over C, and C over M. Thus even if the preferences of all the individual voters are transitive (by that I mean that transitivity holds if, wherever a voter prefers Cameron to Miliband and Miliband to Clegg, he or she prefers Cameron to Clegg), the societal preferences determined by the majority vote are not necessarily transitive and thus not necessarily rational either.

Kenneth Arrow's theorem demonstrates that given the foregoing all reasonable voting systems (or equivalently, economic market systems) are subject to such irrationalities.

Let me try to posit some further clarity with a different illustration. Think of our three leaders M, K, and C as cars rather than people, and then think of a woman deciding which of the three cars to buy. Let’s give her three criteria (interchangeable and commensurate with one another) for making this decision; looks, affordability and performance. Car M looked better than car K, which looked better than car C. On the other hand, car K was more affordable than car C, which in turn was more affordable than car G. Finally, car C performed better than car M, which performed better than car K.

Since the woman placed equal and commensurate measure on each of these criteria, she would be in a bit of quandary here. She clearly preferred car G to car K (M outscored K on two criteria). She also preferred car K to car C (for the same reason) - yet she preferred car C to car M. And if you are following here you will see that the same problem of non-transitivity holds for individuals, and that when broadened out to an election it leaves a bit of a detritus. In the case above one only need induce the woman to declare one of the criteria more important than the others. This is easier than convincing one third of the electorate to change its mind.

Given the foregoing; there are four conditions under which consistency will show that we cannot derive societal preferences from individual preferences…

1) The societal preferences must be transitive (if society prefers x to y and y to z then it must prefer x to z)

2) The societal preferences must satisfy the principle - if alternative x is preferred to alternative y by a majority in the society, then society must prefer x to y.

3) The societal preferences must satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives (the societal preference depends only on the orderings of the individuals with respect to alternatives in that environment).

4) The societal preferences must not be susceptible to autocracy - there is no individual whose preferences automatically determine all of society’s preferences.

As for the realities of the electoral situation, of course we know that the political portrait of lucidity has been gravely disfigured from the bottom up as much as the top down, so the absolute best that one can hope for is that through the media-manipulating smokescreen the impressionability and cognitive indigence does not wholly impair the view of those gazing in, and that in the absence of a good rationale people’s gut instincts amount to enough in seeing who is very evidently the least bad party for the job - at least in the next few years.

 

Why You Probably Shouldn't Have Bothered Voting

As much as I’m glad to see Barak Obama victorious in the Presidential Election, I’m reminded again of something that seems on the surface to be contentious, but is in actuality evidently true.  Despite all the excitement and impassioned campaigning at the collective level, every single person’s vote is irrelevant to the outcome at the individual level.  In other words, the paradox is this; all the votes for Barak Obama saw him victorious at an aggregate level, but each one of those votes at an individual level didn’t affect the outcome one bit. 

To see this, let’s take the closest election known to man.  The closest official margin in American history was two elections ago when it all hinged on Florida, and George Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes.  So consider what needs to happen for your single vote to make the difference – firstly, you need the voting to be hinged on one single State, and it needs to be the one that you happen to be in.  Then you need the election in your State to be absolutely neck and neck, with your one vote being the deciding vote.  The odds of that happening are close to zero – but let’s suppose that instead of partisan votes we improve the odds of it being 50/50 by having coin tosses instead of votes.  Florida has around 6 million voters (let’s say 6 million for simplicity’s sake), which means you’d require exactly half of those coin tosses to land heads and half to land tails. The odds of that happening are just over 3000 to 1*.  Note that 3000 to 1 is the ‘most’ generous to you based on a 50-50 likelihood that every individual votes for either Obama or Romney – in real terms the odds would be astronomically greater than 3000 to 1**.

The probability of your vote making any difference in the outcome is so narrow that you might like to consider doing something better with your time (it’s the same kind of reasoning used to tell you that you shouldn’t buy insurance on your electrical goods, but with even greater probability in your favour this time).  The argument that “If everyone thought that way, the voting system would be a debacle” is a meaningless argument.  The fact is, almost everybody doesn’t think that way, and they never will.  But that doesn’t mean you have to think as they do – in fact, to realise voting is a waste of time means you shouldn’t bother – unless you have a psychological inclination to do so. 

Yet despite all that, I can understand why Americans vote for a President.  It may not be rational (after all, there are not many cases in which you would do something that you knew in advance would have no effect at all) but I can conceive of a situation whereby the satisfaction of voting for Obama or Romney outweighs the costs. 

I cannot say the same for the situation in Britain though, where the voting is far less tangibly rewarding, where candidates are tied to constituencies, and where the outcome of the vote makes even less difference than it does in the USA.  Moreover, you have to factor in that even if your vote made a difference in one constituency in the UK elections, the odds that that difference would have any tangible effect on your life are significantly more minuscule again.  Some do have psychological inclination, because they feel good voting for a candidate or party they support, so it can be contended that in some cases the time spent voting is worth the price for feeling good about voting.  But in most cases it is a waste of your time – particularly given that even if by the narrowest of chances your vote does happen to be the one that swung the result, the odds of your candidate actually going on to make any difference in the areas of concern that most affect you are virtually nil. 

Time is a more precious commodity than one vote, just as money spent on feeding the homeless or a new ironing board or a lunch meeting with a friend is more precious than insurance surcharges on products.  If it takes 30 minutes to cast a vote, you’d be better off spending that time doing some shopping for an elderly neighbour, or picking up some litter, or scrubbing off some graffiti, or writing that letter to the friend or relative you kept meaning to.  Then you will have done more good for the country than casting a meaningless vote.

If you’re the sort of person for whom voting gives you a greater satisfaction than the time and energy consumed, then carry right on voting.  But if you’re one of those who feels your vote is of some value to the outcome, or that you really ought to make the effort due to some compulsion, then congratulations, you can relieve yourself of the duty and spend the time and energy doing something else, safe in the knowledge that your vote very likely won’t matter, and that almost nobody else is going to think like you on this one.

* The exact odds are 3100 to 1, which is 6,000,000 coin-flippers, each choosing Barak Obama with some probability p and Mitt Romney with probability 1-p, where p is 1/2 and 1-p is also ½.

** For example, if p drops to .51 because of one small bias, the chance of a 50/50 tie drops to 1 in 10 to the power of 1046 (that’s 1 with 1046 zeros).