Re: OT: For information only !

En réponse à Paul Bennett :

>>a president put there because he got 20% of
>>the votes wouldn't represent the people of the country as a whole.
>
>Yet forcing 31% of the people to vote for him as the lesser of two evils
>is fair?
Who's talking about forcing? Nobody is forced to vote in France (actually, 
sometimes it looks like they'd rather have people *not* vote). If they 
don't like either candidate, they can stay home. But the two candidates 
*did* get the most votes at the first round, so *yes*, it's fair, as far as 
personal elections go. I'm personally against electing persons for single 
positions. Democracy is an affair of groups of people, and powers should 
stay among groups rather than handed over to individuals. I'm all for true 
parliamentary systems. But I digress :) .
______________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Tristan Mc Leay :


>So? You can get an absolute majority with only one round. You do all the
>'rounds' at once, in the first round, by numbering your ballot. You
>prefer the Jo Bloggs to John Smith, Smith to Tran Nguyen, Nguyen to Jim
>Doe, Jim Doe to Fred Nurk, and Nurk to Vasco Pyjama; you number your
>ballot appropriately. You progressively eliminate the ones who clearly
>aren't going to win till come down to a race between two, when you'll
>either get a 50-50 split or a winner. There's a number of ways of
>counting these (instant run-off being the one I'm most familiar with, as
>it's what we use in almost all elections for a single person here...).
>What happens if lots of people voted for Bloggs, and lots for Pyjama,
>but the people who wanted Bloggs would rather die than have Pyjama and
>vice versa, but they'd all settle for Nurk, even though no-one voted for
>him? With IRV, you'd eventually have a race between Nurk, Pyjama and
>Bloggs...
I actually fail to understand how such a system would ever provide an 
absolute majority. Absolute majority means absolute majority of *first 
choice* (only choice in our case) during one election *day*. Anything else 
is no absolute majority. With your way, it looks like one can get an 
absolute majority out of first, second, and maybe even third choices *on 
the same election day*. That strikes me as particularly unfair. If it's 
your way there, so be it, but I would never recommend such a system 
anywhere else.

>Of course, no system is perfect but it always seemed better to me to
>just do the election once and get the information you need...
I disagree. Especially since I don't believe one can really rank all 
candidates to one position like that given the information they get during 
a campaign. I would personally be unable to rank them all meaningfully, 
which would make my vote non-representative to what I believe. And if you 
don't rank everyone, you end up with an unfair system.

>  I was more
>wondering if there was a significant advantage to the French one or if
>it was just done that way because it was done that way.
One: simplicity. I find going twice to vote much simpler than having to go 
through hoops to get an absolute majority during a single vote.

Anyway, my preference stays for non-personal elections with pure 
proportional results (like the Second Chamber elections here in the 
Netherlands). That is true democracy. It also forces concensus governing, 
which isn't necessarily inefficient (the daring policies of Holland in 
medical and social matters prove it - even the current government, which is 
*not* a government of concensus, proves it: socially Holland is going 
backwards full speed -) and at least represent the added opinions of the 
majority of the population (and prevents extremisms to take over too 
easily). It's all in checks and balances, and nothing better than spreading 
power through a group of different-minded people to get checks and balances 
:) .

Note that all this is purely IMHO. I don't judge other systems. I just say 
what is my opinion of them...

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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