From an article by Warren Smith in the Huff Post Politics, The Blog, of Oct. 22, 2015. Dr. Warren Smith is former President of The Center for Election Science; he has a PhD in mathematics.
Our democracy's decisions should reflect voter views. But we are using a bad system: essentially "name one candidate, then shut up." Political scientists call that the "plurality system" (British and Canada: "first past the post").
That's a flawed system for evaluating true popular sentiment. It only can know what each voter thinks about just one candidate, ignoring their opinions about everybody else.
Each party could gain a strategic advantage over the other by simply changing its own primary to work on the basis of 'score' or 'approval' -- thus yielding for that party a nominee more likely to win. The Republicans are practically committing suicide by using the plurality system for nominating (and plurality polls to determine debate eligibility) since the head-to-head data show that Trump has worse chances against Democrats than 4 to 7 of his Republican rivals.
So we are getting the wrong impression of who is ahead, and electing the wrong leaders, by using the wrong tools to measure public sentiment.
The USA could do something really dramatic -- it could lead the world in democracy (and I'm talking about real, not fake, democracy) -- by switching to a system actually good at reflecting people's wishes.
CLICK HERE to read the entire article.
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