Voting systems

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Reference

• Particular Systems
  • range voting
  • Single Transferable Vote
• Collections & Discussion
  • ElectionMethods.org
  • ElectoRama! wiki
  • Voting Simulation Visualizations by Ka-Ping Yee (posted 2005-04-21, updated 2006-07-31)

Related Pages

• virtual voting districts
• InstaGov: a voting-related project on Issuepedia

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia

Articles

• 1996: Declared-Strategy Voting: An Instrument for Group Decision-Making by Lorrie Faith Cranor
  • Voting Systems Overview
    • Vote Aggregation Methods does not seem to mention range voting, although the author essentially uses range voting to assess voter preferences in the 1992 case study: "The respondents were asked to rate each of the main candidates in the US Presidential race on a "feeling thermometer" scale that ranged from 0 to 100 -- the higher the number, the more favorable the respondent's feeling toward that candidate." The case for DSV seems based on the idea that voters will always adjust their vote based on how they think other people will vote -- but with range voting, such adjustment is either unnecessary or greatly reduced. So how is DSV superior to range voting?
• 1996-11: Math Against Tyranny: by Will Hively: "When you cast your vote this month, you're not directly electing the president – you're electing members of the electoral college. They elect the president. An archaic, unnecessary system? Mathematics shows, says one concerned American, that by giving your vote to another, you're ensuring the future of our democracy." Note, however, that the US is the only country now using this system for electing a chief executive.
  • "James Madison, chief architect of our nation's electoral college, wanted to protect each citizen against the most insidious tyranny that arises in democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in a dominant bloc. As Madison explained in The Federalist Papers (Number X), "a well-constructed Union" must, above all else, "break and control the violence of faction," especially "the superior force of an . . . overbearing majority." In any democracy, a majority's power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives." It's clear that Madison was against direct democracy, but his argument doesn't really make sense. How does the Electoral College (or representative democracy in general) make factionalism any less likely?

    If nothing else, recent election results have shown that his stated goals -- electing the most "fit characters", allowing clear heads to prevail, preventing self-interest from overriding the common good, preventing candidates from fooling the voters through rhetoric, preventing money from ruling the election, and preventing "frivolous claims" (i.e. frivolous arguments, e.g. the argument over Obama's birthplace) from drawing attention away from serious issues -- have all utterly failed.

    The best interpretation I can put on Madison's argument is that he wanted decisions to be made by communities -- groups of people who were able to function together and self-police (weeding out what we would now call "trolls", not to mention sociopaths and others not interested in the common good) -- whose sanely-made opinions would then be aggregated to make the final, national choice. Translated into a modern context, this would be an argument for government by social network, not geography -- since these days, people in the same neighborhood (much less the same state) may not even know each other well enough to know who is sincere and who is trolling.