Comment Stability of Election Result (Score 1) 485
One of the reasons that there has been so much recent interest in the US in electronic voting systems is that the overall election result is so sensitive to (even relatively small) errors in the vote counting process. Realistically, there are two solutions to the problem: reducing the error rate, and making the overall voting outcome less sensitive to vote counting errors.
Indeed, an unstable voting system (such as first-past-the-post in the US/UK elections) where a change of one vote can trigger a drastic change of result is fundamentally undemocratic - it gives some individual voters (e.g. in Florida) much more influence on the final result that others.
If you are trying to measure any quantity reliably, you want your metric to be as insensitive to errors in you input data as possible, and a proportional electoral system is one way out of that problem. Not all the blame belongs with the vote counting technology.
Indeed, an unstable voting system (such as first-past-the-post in the US/UK elections) where a change of one vote can trigger a drastic change of result is fundamentally undemocratic - it gives some individual voters (e.g. in Florida) much more influence on the final result that others.
If you are trying to measure any quantity reliably, you want your metric to be as insensitive to errors in you input data as possible, and a proportional electoral system is one way out of that problem. Not all the blame belongs with the vote counting technology.
