The Third Vote - Your political voice

Why "The Third Vote"?

 

Do politicians and parties really represent our opinion on relevant issues?

In Germany´s “Bundestag” election system, there is a first and a second vote. But do we really know for which policy the parties we elect stand for? We say no! And why?

For example, the answers to “Wahl-O-Mat”-questions of many parties in relation to the answers of their voters do not match.

That means: The actual political orientation of the voter is not represented by its contention in the election. Thus, the positions of the parties in the German Parliament to political decisions are independent of the public opinion.

 

How democratic is our electoral system?

Exactly this is where our work in the seminar group is beginning. By using a so-called "third vote" the actual political opinion of the voter should feed into the election. With this third vote neither a party nor a candidate is selected. Instead, the voters choose exactly the policy setting to be represented in his opinion.

In the next step it is checked whether the policy matches the profile of the candidate. Eventually then the division of the parties begins, but not in relation to the percentage of votes received, but in terms of the representativeness of encouragement of the population. So the average percentage of the population which is represented by each party will be calculated.

Finally, we want to achieve that the previously identified irrationality between the actual election result and the actual political affiliation of a voter will be reduced and thus the elected Parliament representativeness is increasing.

In the Paper "Improving policy representation of the German Bundestag by at alternative election method" of Prof. Dr. Tangian these inconsistencies between election results and actual political orientation of the voter can be understood in detail.

 

The beginning of an alternative election system

Of course, the whole project is still at its beginning or rather the inconsistency between election results and actual political orientation is not completely proofed. Therefore we are looking for application areas to collect new data and compare it mutually, similarly as the StuPa experiment. There are many possibilities to apply the idea, for example at universities or in companies (e. g. the employee representative committee). Are you interested in carrying out this experiment to your métier or would you like to apply it as a well-developed election method? Get in contact with us! We will help you.