Why Democracy Is Mathematically Impossible

democracy might be mathematically impossible this isn't a value judgment a comment about human nature nor a statement about how rare and unstable Democratic societies have been in the history of civilization our current attempt at democracy the methods we're using to elect our leaders are fundamentally irrational and this is a well-established mathematical fact this is a video about the math that proved that fact and led to a Nobel Prize it's a video about how groups of people make decisions and the pitfalls that our voting systems fall into one of the simplest ways to hold an election is to ask the voters to mark one candidate as their favorite on a ballot and when the votes are counted the candidate with the most votes wins the election this is known as first P the post voting the name is kind of a misnomer though there is no post that any of the candidates need to get ped the winner is just the candidate with the most votes this method likely goes back to Antiquity it has been used to elect members of the House of Commons in England since the 14th century and it's still a common voting system with 44 countries in the world using it to elect its leaders 30 of these countries were former British colonies the us being a former British colony still uses first P the post in most of its states to elect their representatives to the electoral college but first pass the post has problems if you are selecting representatives in a parliament you can and frequently do get situations where the majority of the country did not vote for the party that ends up holding the power in the last 100 years there were 21 times a single party held a majority of the seats in the British Parliament but only two of those times did the majority of the voters actually vote for that party so a party which only a minority of the people voted for ends up holding all of the power in government another thing that happens because of first pass the post is that similar parties end up stealing votes from each other the 2000 US presidential election which was an election essentially between Al Gore and George W bush at that point every state in the nation used first pass the post to ...