How to implement a voting system?

Why do we need a better system for voting?

• This is a follow-up to You can apply it to the country of your choice; especially the English-speaking countries share many of the same issues with local variations.

• Answer:

  The curent voting systems in most of the world are horrible. Plurality turns anybody but the two frontrunners into a "spoiler", a waste of votes. That either replaces reasoned debate with attack ads; or leads to spoiled, undemocratic results; or both. It encourages the media to produce unhealthy "balanced" horse-race coverage. In the long run, it leads to politics where most of the people involved are second-rate egotists and the system is totally unable to respond to the challenges of the time. Runoffs and instant runoffs can help a little, but there are simpler, cheaper solutions which give better all-around results. I favor SODA voting (http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/SODA), but Range, Condorcet, Approval, and Majority Judgment are all good alternatives. .... Here's my prior answer to , which I've moved here to make room for a more specific answer there: This is a huge question, of course. Improving democracy is a long, hard task, and, though the overall historic trend is progress, there are setbacks. For instance, in the US, several reforms made in the Progressive era were rolled back around the end of prohibition. So, instead of posting an overall blueprint, I'll quickly sketch out the problems I see, and some possible solutions. In many cases, the problems interlock with each other - and so would the solutions. That means we have to be pushing on many fronts at once, but also that any progress on one front would make the other fronts easier. Problem 1 is the two-party duopoly (in most English-speaking countries). The solution is voting reform. There will of course always, by definition, be two parties larger than the rest - possibly much larger - but the problem is when those parties can get lazy because the incentives of the plurality voting system crush any challenges before they start. There are solutions. Though the Gilbert-Satterthwaite theorem shows that no voting system can have all the characteristics you might desire, plurality voting is pretty much the worst democratic system you can design. Instant Runoff voting is a step up - but it's complicated; it has some significant defects that have shown up in real elections (for instance, when it was used in Burlington, VT); and, in Australia, it has not really alleviated excessive two-party domination. Approval voting is simpler and gives better results; and Majority Choice Approval, a modified Approval with an extra "preferred" level above "approved", is also simpler and better than IRV. (MCA is a little more complex than Approval, but since it doesn't force you to vote your favorite on the same plane with your compromise, it is more palatable to voters.) Problem 2 is campaign finance. As long as it takes millions of dollars to get elected, entrenched interests can distort the debate and stifle progress. And of course, large media corporations reap a huge bonanza from all this money, so they have every reason to oppose real reform. I'm afraid that, in the US, this is not a fight which will soon be solved. Problem 3 is the lack of citizen engagement. I think that Josh's answer shines some light on the path to solutions there. In that regard, the small Swedish political party "Demoex" shows a promising model. A politician who was elected on the platform of simply obeying a secure, online vote of their constituents on any measure, could still be a leader in communicating with their constituents and in drafting legislation. The key point about that is that it can be organized completely from the ground up; it requires no legislative change to implement. This answer is getting long, and I've only barely scratched the surface. The question should probably be subdivided. See also: