We are a nation of 314,447,627 people (those of us in the US at 09/25/12 at 00:36 UTC (EST+5)). There are certain groupings of aligned thought, but to a certain extent, we're still individuals, and regardless of what our party bosses tell us, we don't always think along the party designated lines.
If we could imagine a scenario where there were only 4 issues that were of concern, and were able to simplify them to yes or no answers, how many combinations of differing opinions could we come to? Two would be the dilemma we sometimes feel we need to face in the two party system, but the answer math tells us using 0 as one answer and 1 as the other in binary notation is:
| Binary | Decimal |
| 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 10 | 2 |
| 11 | 3 |
| 100 | 4 |
| 101 | 5 |
| 110 | 6 |
| 111 | 7 |
| 1000 | 8 |
| 1001 | 9 |
| 1010 | 10 |
| 1011 | 11 |
| 1100 | 12 |
| 1100 | 13 |
| 1101 | 14 |
| 1111 | 15 |
15! Err, that would be 16 counting the zero, but you get the idea.
So if we could have a simplified world, where there were only 4 issues, with yes or no answers, we'd have to contend with 16 different groups of people that held differing view sets. If we could imagine a world with as many as 8 different issues (yes, I realize my audience is getting the point, but I made the stupid diagram, so bear with me) we could see a situation shown in the picture below:
(Imagine there's a column on the left that has [1,2, --------,254,256])
To state what a better graphic would show, from 8 issues, we end up with 256 permutations of view sets. If we need to have 100% agreement with a candidate in this scenario, we'd have to establish a set of 256 candidates with each potential view set to get a guarantee that our views were being represented.
Ok, you say that's not fair, some views are related:
To state what a better graphic would show, from 8 issues, we end up with 256 permutations of view sets. If we need to have 100% agreement with a candidate in this scenario, we'd have to establish a set of 256 candidates with each potential view set to get a guarantee that our views were being represented.
Ok, you say that's not fair, some views are related:
like guns == wants prayer in school
wants civil rights == likes pot
But wait, there might be people who like guns AND like pot. Some view setsare beat into us held in common by larger groupings of people, that throws a very obvious flaw into my analogy. Most will hopefully agree with me that this set of 8 questions proposed as, yes or no, equally weighted issues, presents an incredibly impractical analysis, and runs far short of being close to the scale of issues we have at play in politics. I think my whole point still works for a much larger set of issues, with the added complication of multitudes of viewpoints within a single issues, even with the discounting of tendencies for groupings of issue sets.
So maybe we need to take the tragedy of our two party system, and accept that it is marginally useful. If we disagree with a candidate on two issues in this grossly simplified country simulation, we'd only have 78,611,907 (1/4) of the people on agreement with us in having the same viewpoint.
Did I just try to frame an argument to endorse a two party system!?!? Ugh, well it probably deserves its own blog post, but if you want a look into what would do a lot to solve these voter choice issues (and lower the cost of some elections), take a look into Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This involves thinking outside of two parties, and bringing in what we refer to as third party candidates in the US. Did a brief search and found a number of good sources to read if you're unfamiliar with IRV:
But wait, there might be people who like guns AND like pot. Some view sets
So maybe we need to take the tragedy of our two party system, and accept that it is marginally useful. If we disagree with a candidate on two issues in this grossly simplified country simulation, we'd only have 78,611,907 (1/4) of the people on agreement with us in having the same viewpoint.
Did I just try to frame an argument to endorse a two party system!?!? Ugh, well it probably deserves its own blog post, but if you want a look into what would do a lot to solve these voter choice issues (and lower the cost of some elections), take a look into Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This involves thinking outside of two parties, and bringing in what we refer to as third party candidates in the US. Did a brief search and found a number of good sources to read if you're unfamiliar with IRV:
We're probably stuck with a two party system without election reform that moves us to IRV. My math may not have completely illustrated it, but I think the math shows us that it's extremely hard to get a candidate to match all of our views. If we could find one that that matched all of a voter's particular issues, that still doesn't bridge the gap across the differing view sets of the rest of the population who are not in lock step with "like guns AND like pot."
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