the disillusioning inevitability of swing votes

You're familiar with a swing vote: it's the single vote that breaks a voting tie. I hate them. A swing vote is the very antithesis of democracy. It places the power of a decision entirely on a single person, making all other votes irrelevant.

I was discussing this with the mayor of Los Gatos yesterday. He and his wife Kim also don't like the swing vote situation. (We got on this topic because we were talking about the recent California budget resolution that passed by a single republican vote. Even though there were at least three republicans who voted for the resolution, the last one (the swing vote) is getting tons of heat from the party for being a turncoat.)

My first thought was that maybe this is why some resolutions require two-thirds majority to pass instead of just simple majority. But even that can have a swing vote as well -- if 66 have voted for and 33 against, that next vote decides the issue. Even unanimous votes can have them -- with 99 in favor, that last vote decides whether it passes or not.

How disillusioning that the democratic ideal of "majority rule" can still degenerate into occasional autocracy.

I had a thought for how to prevent that, which is to make resolutions scalable: they always pass if anyone votes for them, but they're scaled down to the percentage of affirmative votes. For example, if there's a bill to spend $1,000 on a library but it only gets 4 of the 10 votes, then the library get $400. However, that doesn't work when the issue is binary, such as declaring war. ("Yes Mr. President, you may declare war for 57/100ths of each day. The rest of the day you cannot be at war.") It also doesn't work when politicians get selfish, because they can propose a bill that their district gets a bajillion dollars, and when the results come back at 1 vote for and 99 against, their district would still get 1/100th of a bajillion dollars.

Why does it seem that discussions about government never result in immutably correct answers?