(*240913)
Voting Systems
by RKJoyce, 9/13/24
‘1.| All voting systems can be very neatly divided into two distinct phases. There is first a balloting system that specifies the manner in which votes are granted. Then there is a tabulation system that specifies the manner in which the votes are counted or evaluated. Of course these two systems must be compatible. Both the balloting and the tabulation systems should maximally avoid complexity, which always exacerbates tampering, vote thievery, and general system insecurity.
‘2.| Well-nigh all voting systems that have been utilized up to the present time have been severely deficient, and have failed to yield good governance. This is partially due to almost universal shallowness of understanding on the part of voters in general. However it is mostly due to the employment of severely deficient voting systems.
‘3.| Presumably the worst problem which plagues the vast majority of voting systems in the United States is the rampancy of the spoiler effect, which compels voters to grant a vote to a perceived lesser evil contender instead of a truly preferred one, to avoid sacrificing their ability to reduce their potential to prevent the victory of a greater evil contender.
‘4.| The concept of voter authority, which is the ability of a voter to influence the outcome of a political contest, should be considered. This is onerous to measure, and typically must be evaluated differently for differing voting systems. But it is useful for the contemplation of some aspects of voting. If each voter in the same contest must use the same ballot method we can consider the voters to all hold the same voter authority. However all of those voters lose some authority if manipulative redistricting or manipulative ballot design is imposed.
‘5.| Most commonly considered voting systems can be divided into two distinct types. One type is range voting, whereby voters can grant each of many contenders a range of number of votes. For example, the range could be from one vote to ten votes, and a voter could grant three votes to some contender, ten votes to another, and so on. In the tabulation all the votes would simply be added up, and the contender with the most votes would win. There is also a system called approval voting that can be called a type of range voting in a very narrow mathematical sense, but is realistically very different. It subjects voters to a double bind dilemma whereby the question of voting for lesser evil contenders becomes effectively undecidable .
‘6.| Another, very highly promoted system is ranked voting. Instead of granting each individual contender some number of votes, or none, voters are required to list their preferences sequentially, placing their most preferred contenders in the first place, or at the top, of a list, and placing their less preferred ones sequentially in the lower, second then third etc. places. Unless some contender wins immediately in the tabulation, the tabulation burden can become immense. Furthermore each individual ballot must be immediately sent to one single, central tabulation facility, unless some ineffectual methods that unrealistically increase local tabulation burdens are employed. This results in vast amounts of high information traffic. Also, the ballots themselves often must effectively be edited, resulting in further tabulation insecurity.
‘7.| We believe the very best system is trim range voting. With this, the voter uses the range voting system described above at ‘5.|, except that only five or four votes may be granted to contenders. The number of votes from one to three appear to be superfluous, and to add much to the tabulation burden. Five votes can still be granted to preferred contenders, and four to lesser evil ones.
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