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Poundstone reckons that at least five U. Senate was tipped to the Democrats because a Libertarian in Montana siphoned a few thousand votes away from the incumbent Republican. What would work better? In the last half of the book, Poundstone tells the story of several plans, all of which, in theory, work better. Pierce County has adopted Instant Runoff Voting, which requires voters to rank candidates: 1, 2, 3, etc. So do Borda voting and Condorcet voting — systems named after the French mathematicians who invented them.
Approval voting allows you to cast single votes for more than one candidate — you could vote for Ralph Nader and Al Gore which would not be unfair.
Maybe too much thought for most of us. Whatever the merits of this reservation, I am intellectually intrigued enough to look into range voting further, but on a practical level I still find ranked choice voting the more attractive alternative.
Ranked choice voting is better known, it has a political support infrastructure, and it has been tested a lot in the real world. It has been used in other parts of the world for many decades.
To make headway the proponents of range voting will need to build political and intellectual support for the method, which is also going to take time not to mention money and political skill. There is another dictum that applies here. Aug 02, Tamra rated it really liked it Shelves: politics , science-and-nature-and-math-and-tec , shelved , economics. Gaming the Vote is an impressive overview of the convoluted math and psychology behind different voting systems and the benefits and drawbacks of those systems.
Poundstone then goes through the other electoral choices - range voting and approval voting receive the most review - and examines their histories, their strengths and their weaknesses. The book is a bit thin on what we actually can do to change our voting system, and the issue of the Electoral College is outside of his scope, but it is overall a very helpful start to understanding the issues involved.
Jan 15, Xavier Shay rated it really liked it. As a result, democrats regularly win deeply conservative states and vice versa. Clearly an insane state of affairs. Range voting i. Instant run-off voting is still a broken ranked system what we use in Australia , but probably the most likely reform candidate in the US today because it would still preserve the two-party system - doesn't change the norm too much but allleviates some of the more egrerious vote splitting cases.
Jan 11, Jonna Brewer rated it it was amazing. Good critique of the election system of the US, with reviews of other possible voting methods we could use and what limitations those have as well. The author does give us what might be the best system, but allows that our chances of ever achieving it are slim. Jul 21, Neil rated it it was amazing. Giving this 5 stars, because I think the subject is VERY important, especially now, and I'm not yet aware of another book about the topic that's even half-remotely consumable by the public at large, despite this one being a bit dense at times.
The first third of this book is about history of plurality voting i. My eyes started to glaze over a bit here because it's the exact same story over and over Giving this 5 stars, because I think the subject is VERY important, especially now, and I'm not yet aware of another book about the topic that's even half-remotely consumable by the public at large, despite this one being a bit dense at times.
My eyes started to glaze over a bit here because it's the exact same story over and over again both sides have been bitten, although lately the right seems to do a better job of reigning it in than the left, which is depressing.
Power through this part, or skip it. It's extremely disappointing that so many vain academics can't get their heads out of their asses thus are as vehemently divided as the general populace right now, and this is why voting reform hasn't happened yet. Yay America. At least he's in jail now, after the fact. PSS - Nader is a fucking egotistical asshole.
View 1 comment. Jan 27, Bruce rated it liked it Recommends it for: Machiavellians, math-enthusiasts, and other political animals. Shelves: social-science. Gaming the Vote is a book for all those who are better test-takers than learners.
I don't have much to add to what others have said about this book, which is fairly entertaining although eventually a bit on the redundant side. William Poundstone starts by explaining Kenneth Arrow's Nobel-prize winning mathematical proof that applying different "fair" voting schemes will yield different results, the upshot being that anyone familiar with the voting rules in effect can manipulate them to their adv Gaming the Vote is a book for all those who are better test-takers than learners.
William Poundstone starts by explaining Kenneth Arrow's Nobel-prize winning mathematical proof that applying different "fair" voting schemes will yield different results, the upshot being that anyone familiar with the voting rules in effect can manipulate them to their advantage.
In an ideal world we would all just strive to gather and share information about all candidates, reject attempts at dis- and misinformation, and vote in a way that honestly reflects our relative hopes and fears.
The author mertilizes this kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking by providing a lengthy historical analysis of split-voting in presidential and other elections spoilers and then thoroughly examining a wide variety of proposed voting schemes, their various re discoverers and proponents through the years Louis Condorcet, Lewis Carroll, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
As Poundstone puts it, "[w]hen hackers corrupt software, we blame the hackers. We also recognize that the software must be changed to prevent the hacking. A voting system is software. It describes how to compute a winner from the raw data of marked ballots. To be useful software, voting systems must work with people the way they actually are. Voters, candidates, and strategists can be insincere, scheming, spiteful, and even self-destructive.
When such people are able to use the system to defeat the overall will of the voters, blame is properly laid on the system itself. Following an intriguing Bayesian analysis a statistician's way of saying, "which outcome will bum people out the least? Since we Americans don't have a parliamentary system that would lend itself to proportional representation and its voting correlates, I have chosen to paraphrase only that part of the voting bestiary contained in the book's glossary that is relevant to single-choice elections.
In a nutshell, if this piques your interest as it did mine, I'm guessing you'll enjoy the myriad colorful characters, anecdotes, examples, and explanations that populate this book. Plurality Voting - What we currently use. One person, one vote. Only plurality of votes is needed to win, so winner need not and usually won't be the unequivocal majority preference. Leads to "spoilers" in competitions among 3 or more choices, encouraging Machiavellians to support opponents who will bleed enough votes from the strongest candidate to give them a chance to come out on top.
See Bush-Gore-Nader. Approval Voting - Vote for as many of the candidates as you wish. Encourages blandness and homogeneity. No clear optimal strategy presents itself. Borda Count - Rank all candidates by merit from 1 to X and count up the points to determine a winner basically how the College Football polls work. Machiavellians can skew results by putting their strongest opponents at the bottom of their lists, arbitrarily depressing their score.
See Oklahoma-Miami-Ohio State. Condorcet Voting - Voters rank candidates by preference and winner will be the one with the most collective one-on-one round-robin victories. Requires computers to tally and can result in a statistical tie in rare cases of mathematical equivalence rock beats paper beats scissors beats rock. Range Voting - Rate the merits of as many of the candidates as you wish on a scale from 1 to whatever see Goodreads, Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes, etc.
Highest average rating wins. I suspect that this system perverts into a Borda Count in a one-time voting scenario when more people try to vote "strategically" instead of honestly leading to a classic prisoner's dilemma in which what I do is determined by what I think other voters will likely do. If so, this method arguably makes polls horse race knowledge as influential as candidate information assessments of character, issues, and ability.
Because this method hasn't been formally tried in a political context since Renaissance Venice, no clear optimal strategy presents itself beyond exaggerating one's immediate preferences. See p. Lowest-vote getters are successively eliminated and votes thrown to the runners-up choices of those voters' until someone can claim a majority.
Requires computer tallies, can take a while to calculate, and in closely-contested races converts the weakest candidates into kingpins, thereby promoting cultivation of fringe points of view. A wickedly perverse example of this is provided on page May 08, Ryan Routh rated it really liked it. I read this book during the election season, and it felt very timely.
Poundstone's book is partly-historical and partly-analytical. It reviews the history of vote splitting in the United States, identifying situations where the "wrong" candidate i. It talks about the Arrow Theorem that proved that any voting system fails a quite minimal test at least some of the time. The bo I read this book during the election season, and it felt very timely. The book then has a section on the various potential replacements to simple plurality voting -- ranked voting Borda count , Cordorcet voting going through all of the head-to-head matchups , instant runoff voting, approval voting and, ultimately, range voting.
Poundstone ultimately makes a reasonably good case for range voting. While I enjoyed the above, Poundstone veers into a contemporary history of the arguments between champions of the various voting systems, which I found largely tedious.
The various names were hard to keep track of and it seemed as if Poundstone felt he had to include the information because he had interviewed all of the experts -- not because it was particularly illuminating. After Gore's loss in , the vote-splitting impact of Nader and Trump's rise in , one might think that a movement to get away from plurality-based voting systems would be afoot in the United States. But you hear less of it now than you did 5 years ago or 8 years ago, when the book was published.
It's really a shame. The flaws in our current system are obvious. They have had a real impace on multiple important elections. While replacement systems are not without flaws, they are inarguably an improvement. I learned so much from this book! I learned that when you click on one to five stars to rate a book on a site like this one, this is called "range voting," while the type of voting we do in US Presidential elections is called "plurality voting.
So the person who winds up wi I learned so much from this book! So the person who winds up winning, fairly often, is not the candidate that the majority of the people would be happiest with.
Poundstone's discussion of vote-splitting the phenomenon whereby Ralph Nader probably helped cause Al Gore to lose the election is the clearest I've ever seen. His examination of the intricacies of voting is fascinating. He gets into game theory, social reform history, and some pretty disturbing election anecdotes such as the "Wizard versus Lizard" gubernatorial fight in Louisiana in , and Lee Atwater's entire ouvre of fear-based voter manipulation.
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