As for those papers, are they all based on FPTP voting systems? How would you imagine the ameripol landscape to change if it were to be tallied as ranked choice for federal elections?
One might as well ask how I would think the American social fibre would fair under communism. Which is to say that I don't think it could happen except as part of some much larger movement or in response to some major event, and thus those results could not separated from whatever event caused the initial change.
Regardless, those papers have nothing to do at all with first-past-the-post. It's intrinsic to democracy itself. You could design a million different systems and none will alleviate the central issue that the individual cannot outweigh the many, even though the many only exists as a collection of individuals (that is to say, individual votes). Thus the individual is dehumanized and made unnecessary on a personal level, despite the fact that the system requires those same depersonalized individuals to function.
So my vote (which, coincidentally, was not for Red. I was just using them/him as an example) did have a more tangible, recognizable impact than one that has no effect unless the majority of all voters happen to agree with me.
Yes, and you can calculate exactly how much it matters. And the answer is always
not very much, unless you live in a city of 10,000 or so, with roughly 50% turnout, your vote is, even then, not enough to raise your party's share of the votes by a single tenth of a percentage point. If you want, you can calculate exactly how likely your vote is to raise your parties share of the votes, and this number will signify that your vote is much more powerful than in a FPTP system. And it is sitll, in-and-of-itself, completely useless 99% of the time. Or rather, you have a much higher chance than a FPTP voter to have
any power at all, but likely not much more likely to make any sort of significant difference, unless that coalition has a 1 seat difference. But if it gets to that you find that you have merely obscured the central value, and hidden it.
What I am discussing is
the likelihood a single vote will be the decisive one. That you, the voter on the street, will cast a vote which will change the outcome of elections and policy. It is all well and fine that your party gets one more seat, but how much good is a single seat? Well, it controls how much power the coalition has in Parliament... meaning, how likely it is to have a majority and thus control. But will a single extra seat make a diference between control and coalition, or coalition and minority government, or whatever you? If it does, than that vote is the decisive vote, and if it does not, that vote is still "wasted". You see, you can't get rid of this idea of the deciding vote through pluralism or representation, you only shift around how valuable the vote is. Even if you personally voted in every single parliamentary debate, your vote is still likely to be outweighed.
I am not arguing that all democracy is a sham, or that voting is stupid and that no one should ever do it, or that all electoral systems are created equal and are equally good and viable. Nothing of the sort. But from a strictly rational, "Homo Economicus" POV, a vote is as worthless as a lottery ticket. The likelihood that you will ever make a difference is trivial, and that even if voting is as convenient as possible it is
never "worth the effort" in terms of "breakng even" on the labor you put into it.
Regardless of these facts - of which, be assured, I could literally drown you in evidence of -
people still vote. That is the essential fact of the matter. They may not vote as often or as much as they used to or should, but they vote. So if you are going to go on about counting the precise number of wasted votes, please bear this in mind: You can design a system that produces better outcomes than others, or that is more representative of the people's will, or that is fair and balanced for all viewpoints, or that is most conducive to a long-term, healthy democracy, or perhaps some or all of the above at once. And all of this are laudable and achievable goals. But you
cannot design a system that makes "my vote matter" (well, you can, but even the best designed system will still give you a utterly trivial amount of "power"). If you live in a system where your vote does matter, it is because you have more than one effective vote and/or more than your fellows, or you have an extremely small voting pool, or both.
So the virtues of democracy, of which there are many, cannot come purely from the fact that your vote (as distinguished from the
people's vote, which is very powerful indeed) has power to change things, since it does not. I offered alternatives; such as a vote that "doesn't matter" having symbolic meaning, but even this is constrained by the fact that a single symbolic vote (of dissatisfaction, for example) is also useless unless enough others vote similarly that the vote is actually noticed. Something else must be important.
What's critical to see is that the "wasted vote" metric describes votes which do not contribute to electing a representative given an existing distribution of votes that must be counted and divided between a finite number of seats. You're right that this value doesn't have a proportional relationship to a hypothetical probabilistic function of voter power, but what it does describe is the exact underlying mechanic by which the aggregate outcome can differ from the actual proportion of votes, and on top of that it is also the main underlying mechanic that creates the permanent two party system in the US.
The intuitive basis for the significance of those metrics of surplus and doomed votes is best seen by examining why gerrymandering works. The objective of gerrymandering is to group votes in a way that wastes as many of the opponents votes and minimizes the wastage of friendly votes, and in FPTP systems it does this exactly along these "surplus" and "doomed" lines. In particular, any system can be perfectly gerrymandered to "waste" 0% of one party's votes and "waste" 100% of the other party's votes.
One simple edge case is where party A has 51% of the votes and party B has 49% of the votes. Party A can draw their lines in such a way that they win every district and 100% of their opponents' votes are wasted. 100% of B's votes in this case were "doomed" and subsequently "wasted", by my phrasing.
Another case can be imagined where party A has just over 25% of the votes, and party B has the other 75%. If party A gets to draw the lines, they can "pack" as many of B's votes as possible into quarantined districts while ensuring that a few other districts go to A by slim majorities. By doing this, party A can waste none of their votes and win 50% of the seats, while party B will waste 50% of their votes on "surplus" and 50% on "doomed" while winning 50% of the seats. This is why I won't say that there's a strictly proportional relationship here, because B is still guaranteed to get some seats (how many depends on whether the districts must have even populations) and yet still had 100% of their votes "wasted".
The case you're imagining here where only one vote mattered is indeed this case of a perfect "packing", but your argument doesn't recognize the necessary existence of other districts. Conversely, in my uncontrollable impulse to be a dumb edgelord, I overreached a little in implying what this metric means.
This is actually what I was expecting to respond to before the foreigners got in here and I started ranting semi-coherently about democracy
in general like some sort of lunatic ancient greek philosopher with an internet connection. Anyway, all of what you said is true (at least so far as I understand gerry-mandering), but my point remains that going around and caling votes "wasted" and "surplus" is, indeed, overreaching. The exact value of a vote is already in question by the time we reach Gerrymandering as an issue, although it is also true that gerrymandering has the ability to create an interesting situation where the actual value of your vote is a big fat zero (assuming we know perfectly the votes of everyone before they vote, which is no small feat) instead of merely infinitesimal. Reminds me of that joke about the
King and the Parliament of Ghargaroo. But again, my objection to gerrymandering is that it produces outcomes which are bad for good government (corrupt one-party systems) and bad for representing the public will, and bad consequences for civil engagement (fewer people vote and feel their vote matters), not that it actually makes peoples votes matter less; as previously stated, the amount of power that you are actually losing is inconsequential.
For what it's worth, in spite of all I've written, I too will vote. And I think that speaks for itself.
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