this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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It absolutely isn't. There is no inherent reason why votes can't be added up and tallied in a straight forward way in a representative democracy.
It's not inherent to representative democracy but let's be honest most systems we use have flaws like that, including Europe.
(An exemple in Europe would be choosing only one individual to vote. Which divide voters of two close candidates and lower both of their score.)
And that's probably why we feel like most representatives democracy can't escape some of thoses problems.
Mathematically though there is some systems that have been proven to not have those same flaws.
Problem is, of course how hard it is to fix a system that can only be changed by the people that it favors.
No, that's not an example of votes not counting equally...? Am I misunderstanding your example?
You don't need some mathematical proof to just count all the votes and see which candidate got more votes. It's how most elections throughout the world work.
In Europe, the countries i know of at least, count each vote equally.
What i meant was that it doesn't mean it's a perfect system if your goal is democracy.
Other factors can totally break the purpose of counting votes equally altogether and end up with a unsatisfying result. And my exemple is as such.
(I live in France, we have equally counted vote but with this issue, and some other neighboring countries have it too. If you're interested i can explain more what the issue is...)
(I guess Australia, for the user you were replying to originally, have it's own issues too, not that i'm familiar with them.)
Mathematicians worked on how different suffrage creates different results.
There are plenty like the majority judgement but one that i particularly like is Condorcet's method to solve the problem.