The Fairest Vote of All. Scientific American, March 2004

[Imperialism Inc.]

Two articles on better voting systems in Scientific American.

First is a recent one. It is only available in sumamry form on their site.
http://www.sciamdigital.com/browse.cfm?sequencenameCHAR=item2&methodnameCHAR=resource_getitembrowse&interfacenameCHAR=browse.cfm&ISSUEID_CHAR=878E2767-2B35-221B-69CC014464E24757&ARTICLEID_CHAR=87AD4BC1-2B35-221B-6269531B70360440&sc=I100322

But you can find it on the edonkey network as well if you are familiar with that.

ed2k://|file|Scientific.American.-.2004.March.-.Political.Politics.Mathematics.-.The.Fairest.Vote.of.All.pdf|162525|17B938E65A3D83E199A2083AE696CEF1|/

The Fairest Vote of All; March 2004; by Partha Dasgupta and Eric Maskin; 6 page(s)
File size: 159 KB

Most American and French citizens - indeed, those of democracies the world over - spend little time contemplating their voting systems. That preoccupation is usually left to political and electoral analysts. But in the past few years, a large segment of both these countries' populations have found themselves utterly perplexed. People in France wondered how a politician well outside the political mainstream made it to the final two-candidate runoff in the presidential election of 2002. In the U.S., many voters asked why the most popular candidate lost the election of 2000.

We will leave discussions of hanging chads, butterfly ballots, the electoral college and the U.S. Supreme Court to political commentators. But based on research by ourselves and colleagues, we can address a more fundamental issue: What kinds of systems, be they for electing national leaders or student council presidents, go furthest toward truly representing the wishes of the voters? We argue that one particular system would be best in this sense - and it would be simple and practical to implement in the U.S., France and myriad other countries.



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The other is all online at their site and is from 1999.

http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=000055AE-B864-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7&catID=3

ASK THE EXPERTS : MATHEMATICS
Has there been any progress in developing fairer ways for people to vote in elections?


"After two centuries of efforts by mathematicians and political scientists, positive results about 'fair voting procedures' are emerging. This is important because 'fairness' can be a casualty when current methods are used in multiple-candidate elections--such as this year's presidential campaign.

"To illustrate, suppose that 200 voters prefer Alice to Candy to Becky (denoted by Alice > Candy > Becky), 195 prefer Becky > Candy > Alice, whereas only 20 prefer Candy > Becky > Alice. The plurality election outcome, where we vote for our top-ranked candidate, is Alice > Becky > Candy with a 200:195:20 tally. While we might worry whether these voters prefer Alice or Becky, Candy's feeble support suggests that she is of no interest to these voters.

"This assertion, however, is false. If we compare candidates in pairs, it becomes arguable that Candy is their favorite. These voters prefer Candy to Alice (215 to 200), Candy to Becky (220 to 195), and Becky to Alice (215 to 200); these rankings suggest that these voters actually prefer Candy > Becky > Alice. Notice how this outcome conflicts with and reverses the plurality ranking. Moreover, it shows that Candy's lack of votes more accurately manifests inadequacies of our commonly used election procedure rather than voter disinterest. The example also shows that, inadvertently, we can choose badly.

[wtmusic]

1. In the words of Bruce Schneier,

universally regarded as one of the world's leading experts in computer security:

"Computerized voting is a horrendously dangerous idea."

[NMDemDist2]

2. huh? n/t

[Imperialism Inc.]

3. Huh to me or the first response?

I was going to huh the first response myself.

[rock]

4. Voting preferences are not transitive

Rather unintuitive but true.

[kiahzero]

5. The first guy is wrong

Borda count has serious strategic voting problems... a fair voting method should not require any sort of strategic voting to maximize your happiness with the outcome.

[scottxyz]

6. We should use "Approval Voting"

The best online discussion of different voting systems I've seen is at:
http://www.accuratedemocracy.com

This has to do not with touch-screens or optical scans or hanging chads (the hardward) - not even with GEMS or MS-Access other vote-talling software - but rather with WHAT this hardward and software should implement.

Using our existing hardware, we could easily implement a much more accurate type of voting, called Approval Voting.

Approval Voting systems let you vote for ("approve") any number of candidates. (None, one, two.) You don't rank them on a scale of 1-5 - you don't order them from best to worst - you just check off ALL candidates you could tolerate having in office.

You can see how this gets rid of the whole "Nader spoiler" problem. A few Kerry voters (and a few Bush voters) could also check off Nader, but it wouldn't cancel their other votes.

There's a lot of research going on into the mathematics of different voting systems. One of the main results they've discovered is that whenever the field of candidates is greater than two, then picking just ONE candidate will NOT give optimal results - it will not be the most accurate democracy. When you have to pick just one, the Nader spoiler effect happens, where two candidates on one end of the spectrum split the vote.

Approval Voting gets rid of this problem. Choose MANY candidates - not just one. This is so similar to our current system, it could be easily implemented on most of our existing hardware.

Check it out at http://www.accuratedemocracy.com - and think what a relief it would be to not have to beat up on Nader any more!