Birdnow's Aviary

August 09, 2026

Ranked Choice Democracy Falsified by Science

Timothy Birdnow

Scientists are finally starting to figure it out; there is no way to make democracy work.

Democracy Has a Math Problem No Country Can Fully Solve

That is why the Founding Fathers of America didn't even try to make a democracy but rather a representative republic with serious checks and balances on both the government itself and the power of the people to manipulate said government.

FTA:

Denmark’s 2022 national election came down to a single seat, even though its proportional voting system was designed to make party representation closely match the vote. That outcome points to a deeper mathematical problem: no electoral system can always preserve local winners, guarantee proportional national results, and keep parliament at a fixed size.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen reached that conclusion after analyzing proportional and first-past-the-post systems. Their work shows that every method of electing a national legislature requires compromises, most often among regional representation, proportionality, and the number of parliamentary seats.

Well duh. It mirrors life, and it is impossible to create a truly just and equitable system in life. The will-o-the-wisp that Liberals have pursued for two hundred years now is a truly fair and equal society and it just is not mathematically possible.

The best we can do is make rules and stick to them.

Of course politics is now about so much money and so much power over people's lives that the parties - particularly those on the Left, where they are not constrained by a moral or religious code - will do anything to win, and if that means subverting the rules set in place so be it. They see them as suggestions made by tired old white men anyway.

With so many trying to subvert the rules is it any wonder politics is such dirty business?

The article continues:

The investigation began after Denmark’s 2022 national election, when votes and seats failed to align for the first time in 75 years. Like many European democracies, Denmark uses a two-tier proportional system. Voters first choose local representatives, after which ‘leveling’ seats are distributed to bring each party’s share of parliament closer to its national vote share.

That mechanism becomes harder to maintain as more political parties compete. Greater fragmentation requires a larger number of ‘leveling’ seats to preserve proportionality, and the 40 available in Denmark’s 2022 election were no longer sufficient.

"Essentially, it almost broke the system,” said study co-author Dr Frederik Ravn Klausen, from Cambridge’s Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. "The end result was that the Social Democrats got one seat more than their votes corresponded to. Of course that is nothing by UK standards, but in a two-tier system, that isn’t meant to happen. It increased the drama that this single seat decided the election.”

Klausen and co-author Sebastian Tim Holdum of the University of Copenhagen used the election as the starting point for an impossibility theorem. Their result explains why growing party fragmentation is placing established voting systems under pressure and changing real democratic outcomes.

This is the reason why the United States only has two major parties; the parties act as the coalitions and it is the internal politics that play out prior to the elections that determine how things are going to go. Multiple parties as in most parliamentary systems mean more fights and trying to make it fair with proportional voting (and we see this in some of our states now as well) leads instead to more cheating and less fair outcomes as minority winners can still wind up in power.

As readers here know, the U.S. only elected the House of Representatives at first - the President was elected by the College of Electors and the Senators by state legislatures (and of course the Judiciary was appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate). We created the bicameral legislature for just this reason, to offer "proportionality" by limiting the mob rule of pure democracy. The College of Electors helped avoid the problem of multiple candidates splitting the vote and the House of Representatives being forced to choose a President. Actually, that was how the Founding Fathers thought it would work; they wanted the House to choose the President. But it's never happened in American history because we early on developed the two party system which pretty much guaranteed only two viable candidates. Yes, there have been three or more parties, especially in the early 19th century (like the Whigs or the No-Nothings) but they never lasted. They never lasted because of this very reason.

At any rate this study should be jumped on by Conservatives to bash the ranked choice systems implemented by Democrats to give them power even when they are the minority. And RINO Republicans - Lisa Murkowski is in office solely because of ranked choice.

BTW the Democrats are STILL complaining about the Electoral College and how they won the popular vote but lost the election in 2016 and 2000. But that is a result of this very principle and it is why we have an electoral college in the first place. Without it we would have had pure chaos and the vote fraud would have been far worse (it was bad anyway).

So for all you Democrats who call us "science deniers" because we disagree with what you insist is "settled science" and wouldn't take the clot shot I ask you to defend the system you've been demanding in place of the one we have. Science shows you are wrong. Are you man enough to admit that the science proves you wrong?

Didn't think so.

But then you mighty Philosophe's and Men of Science can't even define what a man is anyway.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 965 words, total size 7 kb.

Hide Comments | Add Comment