Design a bad voting system

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

@Grey

Westminster parliamentary systems tend to work this way. Due to first past the post voting in multiparty environments you typically have a party with a sub-majority popular vote result winning a majority of the seats in the legislature.

It’s true for a first past the post system, but the OP specifically asked for a proportional system, where 40% of the vote gets you 40% of the seats.

Getting 40% of the electorate to generate 60% of the votes cast is the challenge.

[Grey]

Missed that piece.

Well how about weighting the vote by area of the riding/district involved? Rural areas are bigger but they have lower populations so by scaling the vote you inflate the representation of your base.

[ftg]

Another vote for Gerrymandering with a House of Rep. type body.

Note that in the 2012 elections the total votes for Democrats for Congress was larger than for Republicans, yet the Republicans easily control the house thanks to Gerrymandering at the state level. And they don’t even control all states legislatures.

Having 40% control an entire country is not a problem.

As for the vote itself, touch screen voting machines with no physical recording of votes is a proven method to steal elections.

[RealityChuck]

@drachillix

Vote by selecting brightly colored cards for the candidate in question and having to walk through a crowded area to put your “vote card” in the ballot box. No measures are taken to prevent the harrassment of voters with “unpopular” colored cards.

The color coding to avoid obvious errors in marking the ballot or “misreading” by counters.

This actually was how Americans voted in the early 19th century. You got a color-coded ballot from your party headquarters and went to the polling place. The ballots were large, and everyone could see what color it was.

[alphaboi867]

@Joey_P

The OP sounds like something similar to the system set up in The Hunger Games. I don’t remember the details, but IIRC, it was essentially a dictatorship. I want to say that each district sort of got to pretend like they got some representation with the Capital but really didn’t, in the end what the Capital said was what happened…

The closest thing the Districts to democracy (even sham elections)
was during the 1st Quarter Quell they had to elected their Tributes. All government officials, even the local figureheads, were appointed by the Capital which didn’t even pay lip service to the idea of local self-rule. It’s possible the Capital itself had some kind of elections on paper, but President Snow was clearly in charge.

@RealityChuck

That’s how the communist countries did it – with a slight twist. Secret ballots were not prohibited, and there were even voting booths. But you were not required to go into the booth.

So the loyal party members would show up first, take the ballot, and loudly say, “I don’t need to go into that booth. I’m voting for the party choice all the way!” and mark it for everyone to see.

The next voter was not going to go into the booth.

Iraq under Saddam used the same system. The last time he ran for reelection he got 100% of the vote (w/ 100% voter participation), and some voters were going to far as to sign their ballots with their own blood.

@Tapioca_Dextrin

It’s true for a first past the post system, but the OP specifically asked for a proportional system, where 40% of the vote gets you 40% of the seats.

Getting 40% of the electorate to generate 60% of the votes cast is the challenge.

Something along the lines of Mussolini’s Acerbo Law would fit the OP’s requirements.

[Desert_Nomad]

One, county, one vote… done by simple majority in each county. The Republicans would win every time.

[Scholar_Beardpig]

Thank you all for your hard work and clever ideas so far; I’m seeing a great deal that will be useful to me.

I suppose I forgot one qualification, which is that from the outside, it has to essentially look like a modern democracy - it can’t be obviously rigged, or have such features as non-secret ballots. Every good dysotopian novel has a scene near the climax of the book, when the ‘only sane man’ who has been our protagonist faces down a representative of the evil system, who explains exactly how and why it works the way it does. Winston faced down O’Brian, Guy Montag faced down the chief, and John must face down Mustapha Mond. I want to have my own scene in a similar vein, where an intrepid journalist who’s been following the story finally gets a chance to sit down with one of the elites who rules this country, and after a long explanation of such concepts as “the fundamentalist, nationalist, ethnocentrist mind-prison,” our hero can only give a long, low whistle of admiration for something so elegantly sewn up.

[jtur88]

Set up a two-party system, in which both parties have exactly the same basic political philosophy (say, anti-socialist free-market capitalism), and where the really important influential people (say, the free-market capitalist owners) will not be threatened by the policies of either party. Create just enough rancor that the voters vote against, rather than for, a partisan platform, so a third party never arises. Then you are assured of perpetuating the prevailing system, with virtually zero risk of anybody rocking the boat, regardless of how any voters vote…

[bengangmo]

If one party, for historic reasons, is vastly stronger than another they could do some, or all of the following to retain the power…

1. Have Groups representing each consitutuency - instead of 1 representative for 10,000 people - make it 6 representatives for 60,000 people. Why so hard? While 1 person might be popular and get 5001 out of 10,000 people to vote for them, to get 6 unknowns popular enough to get 30,001 out of 60,000 votes is harder

2. Make the nomination process hard, cumbersome and complex - with a healthy side dose of not outright illegal, but partisan decision makers on the correctness of the nomination

3. Make the nomination period very short

4. Require BIG deposits to win (with the attached big resources needed to participate)

5. Require people to vote at the voting centre closest to their residence - and the track the results down to one or two city blocks. (allowing those in power to “punish” the blocks that voted the wrong way by denial of services)

[Northern_Piper]

@RickJay

Hell, we don’t have to even make anything up; the OP describes Canada.

The system as it exists hands a virtually guaranteed majority government to a party that can pull 40% of the vote. You can pull off a majority government even just making it to the high 30s, if things break your way.

As it happens, the various parties have managed to maneuver themselves into being that party so no ONE party has been able to keep up the dodge for long, but it would hardly be much of a stretch to imagine a country where one party’s support is sufficiently entrenched to guarantee endless power with 40% support.

No, because of this key phrase from the OP’s requirements:

[QUOTE=Scholar Beardpig]
What sort of voting system would guarantee a victory for the people who set it up without requiring them to break it?
[/QUOTE]

It is correct that a party that gets 40% of the vote in Canada will win the election.

But, there is no guarantee that the party in power will be victorious every time, as the OP appears to be asking for. Opposition parties that pull 40% will become government.

[Little_Nemo]

Even a system that seems as open as direct democracy can be rigged.

Consider ancient Athens. They handled all their political business via public meetings. All citizens could attend and vote. What could be more fair than that?

But now think about who could actually attend public meetings as a practical matter. Could a rural landowner afford to spend several hours of each day walking into the city to attend these meetings? No. But a merchant who lived in the city could do so with relative ease. So you ended up with a system where the rural population might be a majority but the city dwellers ran the government.

In such a situation, the rural citizens would be protesting against direct democracy. They’d want a “fairer” system of representative democracy where they could elect people to live in the city and vote on their behalf while they worked on their farms.

[Little_Nemo]

You can do amazing things with gerrymandering. Consider a country with ten provinces. Fifty-eight percent of the population belong to the Nationalist Party and forty-two percent belong to the Federal Party. So you’d figure the Nationalists would be running things?

Here’s where the people live. (Each letter represents a million voters.)

Province 1: NNNNFFFFFF
Province 2: NNNNFFFFFF
Province 3: NNNNFFFFFF
Province 4: NNNNFFFFFF
Province 5: NNNNFFFFFF
Province 6: NNNNFFFFFF
Province 7: NNNNFFFFFF
Province 8: NNNNNNNNNN
Province 9: NNNNNNNNNN
Province 10: NNNNNNNNNN

On Election Day, seven provinces send Federalist representatives to the National Assembly and only three provinces send Nationalist representatives.