A look at voting systems

Ron Paul held a press conference today extolling the virtues of third party candidates, but the American two-party system doesn't give them much of a chance. Our system of voting isn't the only option though. Here's a quick rundown of the various options (brought to you completely by wikipedia) :

Plurality Voting: This is what we have now. It's a winner-take-all system. The only real advantage to this system of voting is that it preserves the one person, one vote principle. I'm not entirely convinced that's an advantage, but who am I to argue with wikipedia? The disadvantages are far stronger. The most obvious one is, Duverger's Law, which we can also call Nader's Law. The winner-take-all system inevitably leads to our two-party problem and no one can vote for a third candidate for fear of electing the person they like the least.

Approval Voting: In this system, "each voter may vote for (approve of) as many of the candidates as they wish. The winner is the candidate receiving the most votes. Each voter may vote for any combination of candidates and may give each candidate at most one vote." With this system, Floridians could have voted for Nader without taking votes away from Gore.

Range Voting: Range Voting is similar to approval voting, but rather than a straight yes or no, voters can give a score to the respective candidates. The candidate receiving the most points wins. To use our 2000 example, if a voter really liked Gore, they could give him the maximum score. (Let's say 99) If they also liked Nader, but not as much as Gore, they could give him a 75. If they didn't like Bush at all, they would give him a 0. This system allows people to vote with a much higher degree of detail. It also complicates the system, though, as voters have to figure out how many points to assign to each candidate. There's also the issue of the hanging chads - if people couldn't even handle punching a piece of paper, how are they going to handle an intricate scoring system?

Borda Voting: In this system, "voters rank candidates in order of preference. The Borda count determines the winner of an election by giving each candidate a certain number of points corresponding to the position in which he or she is ranked by each voter. Once all votes have been counted the candidate with the most points is the winner. Because it sometimes elects broadly acceptable candidates, rather than those preferred by the majority, the Borda count is often described as a consensus-based electoral system, rather than a majoritarian one." This is just like range voting, but you get less expression in how much you like or dislike a candidate. This system would also get confusing if there were too many candidates.

Condorcet Voting: This system is a little confusing just to understand, so I'm not sure how well it would catch on in the real world. Voters rank the candidates like in a Borda system and "the count is conducted by pitting every candidate against every other candidate in a series of imaginary one-on-one contests. The winner of each pairing is the candidate preferred by a majority of voters. The candidate preferred by each voter is taken to be the one in the pair that the voter ranks highest on their ballot paper. For example, if Alice is paired against Bob it is necessary to count both the number of voters who have ranked Alice higher than Bob, and the number who have ranked Bob higher than Alice. If Alice is preferred by more voters then she is the winner of that pairing. When all possible pairings of candidates have been considered, if one candidate beats every other candidate in these contests then they are declared the Condorcet winner."

Instant-Runoff Voting: Again, voters rank their candidate choices like in Borda. " If no candidate receives a majority of first preference rankings, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and that candidate's votes [are] redistributed to the voters' next preferences among the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term "instant runoff" is used because IRV is said to simulate a series of run-off elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election." The IRV system is used in Australia, Ireland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other places around the world. IRV can produce some wonky results though. "Like all runoff processes with forced elimination, Instant runoff voting fails the Monotonicity criterion. In certain scenarios, raising the rank of a winning candidate on some ballots, which originally had ranked that candidate last, could counter-intuitively result in the winning candidate becoming a loser."

For colorful charts and simulations, check out http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/