- By Arnav Sampigethaya
“A government of the people, by the people, for the people” – Abraham Lincoln
A few Indian, Mesopotamian and Spartan governments had traces of what we consider democracy, but nothing close to what we hold as the standard today. The first true democracy was devised by Athenian poet, Solon in 594 BCE when he codified some laws to avert the archaic Athenian nobles. Cleisthenes is the father of democracy because he took these laws and urged immediate political and social reform in Athens after the fall of tyranny.
Ancient Athens
Source- Heritage Daily
The elections were direct and everyone’s vote was counted equally. However, women, slaves, foreigners and men under 20 were all banned from voting. This shows a trend that carries on through democracy for several years. For some reason, democracy died in Athens and wasn’t resurrected for a really long time. Even from it’s origins we can see that the system was fundamentally flawed in its uneven suffrage.
I’m going to try and show the different forms of democracy and their advantages and disadvantages. For a much more detailed explanation, you can check out this series of videos by the fantastic YouTuber CGP Grey (Grey, 2011).
1) First Past the Post
This is the most simple form of election possible. There’s no preferential voting. Whoever gains the most direct votes wins! This system is used in most of the English-speaking world and former British Colonies (United States, United Kingdom, India, Canada, Pakistan etc) and almost 25% of the world.
Source- Hollywood Insider
How does this system work? All voters can only vote for one person. Each constituency has one representative. On election day, the candidate with the most votes is given the seat. On paper, this seems fair. And in a two-party system, it is. But reality plays out quite differently. Let’s take a hypothetical situation. There are three parties in a constituency, Alpha, Beta and Gamma. The election happens and this is the result –
Now by FPTP, Gamma gets the seat. Even though 65% of the population did not vote for Gamma, they have the seat. What this does is make people think how other people are voting and promote a two-party culture which does not represent a majority of the population. Because why would someone vote for the party they like, if it makes no difference?
A session in the Lok Sabha
Source- Zee News
Another problem with FPTP is GERRYMANDERING. Gerrymandering can be most easily defined as -
“Manipulate the boundaries of (an electoral constituency) so as to favour one party or class.” (Oxford Dictionary)
This is very easy to do, especially in corrupt governments (not pointing fingers at anyone). Especially in this age of data analysis, the drawing of political boundaries has become a very arbitrary and ambiguous process. It is very easy to dilute the majority votes in an area by drawing the boundaries in intelligent ways.
What’s the alternative?
2) The Single Transferable Vote
The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the closest thing we’ve created to true democracy. Australia was the first adopter and has used it for many years now. The Republic of Ireland was also an early adopter. It’s used in most parliaments for internal elections (UK’s House of Lords, India’s Rajya Sabha etc.), it’s used by many NGOs and several constituencies in New Zealand and Canada.
There are many great feature with the STV. Firstly, the voting is in a preferential system. The ballot would look like this –
A voter who supports the Nation Delta Alliance might hate The National Charlie, but wouldn’t mind if Bravo Justice Party wins either. So they can put things in a preferential order. This is great because unpopular candidates can be eliminated and the vote will not be wasted because each voter has more options to weigh.
Another great feature is that, instead of making multiple small constituencies with one representative, you have large constituencies with representatives proportional to the population of that constituency. Now let’s simulate an election.
The distribution of population is –
By the first past the post system, Ron would win the seat even though 55% did not vote for him. We have only three seats in the council. So the first thing we do is divide 100 by the number of seats, and we get 33.333%. If a candidate crosses that threshold they get the seat by default. So Ron gets the first seat, which is fair because Gryffindor represents the majority of the population. Next, there are an extra 12% votes that Ron got but did not need to cross the threshold. These are analysed and it’s found that all Ron voters had Harry as their second choice, so Harry now has 17% of the vote. Which makes sense if you look at the distribution of the population. Next what we need to do is eliminate the lowest candidate, who is MacMillian. But Hufflepuff voters don’t want Luna to get the seat and any cost, so they’ve divided their seats between Harry and Draco. Now, Draco has 33% of the vote and he gets the second seat. Harry now has 20% of the vote. The next lowest candidate is Luna. She is eliminated and most Ravenclaw voters had Harry as their 2nd or 3rd option, so the 14% is transferred to him and gets the third seat.
So now we have 2 Gryffindor voters and 1 Slytherin Voter on the council. Which is a much better representation of the population. If we had used FPTP with 3 seats, the council would be very wrongly representative. Although the majority of the population are Gryffindors, there would be a 1:1:1 ratio. Here is a picture illustrating the mechanism of STV.
Source: CGP Grey
I know this article was very technical, but if we don’t understand democracy and the intricacies what’s the point? These people control our lives, our laws and everything that governs us. STV and FPTP are the two extremes, there are many systems in-between but understanding how flawed the widely used systems are helps us change the way we think when we vote. Humans are afraid of what they don’t understand, and it’s important that we aren’t afraid of our leaders, our government and the system, because otherwise how is it even a democracy?
Works Cited
Grey, C. (2011, May 11). Politics in the Animal Kingdom.
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