The Democracy Amendments

A Selection of Data Behind the Charts in the Book
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This website is an extension of The Democracy Amendments (Anthem 2023) -- a book that analyses the fundamental problems in the American Constitution that underlie the massive dysfunction we see in the US federal government today.

For each of the 25 main constitutional amendment proposals in the book, there is a subpage on this website with further thoughts and details, which will eventually include responses to reader objections and suggestions as well.

This page includes further details on

Proposal 1, ranked choice voting / automatic runoffs in all federal and state elections

Standard Bottom-Elimination Ranked Choice (RCV) Voting and its Condorcet-based fine-tunin

Voting theory is a complex topic, but we know so much more now than the founders did in 1787. The Democracy Amendments defends using the most common RCV method, in which the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated on each round, and any ballots cast for them that also named a lower-ranked candidate are transferred to that candidate instead. In most cases, as the first proposal in the book argues, this will work well enough.

But it is also possible to use a "Condorcet" method, in which any candidate who would win all two-way races (head-to-head matchups with one other candidate at a time) is selected as overall winner. The proposal in the book explains a way to combine these methods that allows standard RCV to avoid problems with three or more quite evenly matched candidates (the one sort of scenario in which standard RCV does not do as well).

Some Details on Voting Theory
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