Thinking about voting

Simulation Of Various Voting Models for Close Elections

OR: Making Democracy Safe For The World

2004 Presidential Election

Vote on a mock up ballot for the 9 Democrat Party candidates and 1 Republican Party candidate. There is an Acceptance ballot, and a Ranked ballot that will go toward Condorcet and Borda tabulation.

News

2003/12/20 New simulation set has been running for about two weeks. Added "Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings" and "Random" election methods. Preliminary results are now available. The graphs are still a little rough, but that should smooth out as more data is added.
2003/11/19

A Proposed Ammendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

...for electing the President without the Electoral College and with Acceptance Voting.

2003/10/08

New Flyer

Not happy with the party machines?
Feel that the ``choices'' they offer don't really represent you?
Elect Different

the rest of the flyer, also available in two and four per page layout.

2003/07/02

MoveOn.org Primary shows popular mandate through Acceptance Voting

Abstract

One vote can only serve to differentiate between two candidates. In close elections, a third party "C" can become a spoiler such that "A" gets elected while the "C" voters would have preferred "B" over "A". This essay and simulation explores several improved voting systems.

Systems tested: Acceptance, Instant Runoff, Ranked (Borda), Rated, Condorcet, and some variations of those. These procedures and the results are explained in the...

Voting Essay (HTML 36k) (PDF, 44k)

Results

Rated voting is in general the winner. Acceptance voting is very simple and produces good results, so may be more practical to implement (and it should be implementied as soon as possible). Condorcet has some good properties but due to complexity it may not go over well with a public that would have trouble understanding it. Instant Runoff produces results only barely better than the current single vote system and has some bad properties which make in undesirable.

Two representative graphs with captions. This is the short-short version of my results.

Many graphs over various numbers of voters and choices and error rates. Includes newly graphed data on reliability and consensus.

I've seen a few contrived voting sets online to illustrate points. Just as a check I ran them.

Simulator

Download (release or nightly) the C++ source code to the simulator. Includes all the voting systems.

See Also Voting Utility source code.

(included in above source archive) A perl script that makes nice ballots. (and the input data for that ballot)

To Do:

Using Alternate Voting can begin at home!

Do you have a club or a church that holds elections? You can simply and easily implement advanced election methods and improve your own democratic process. National organizations for computer scientists and mathematicians have already made the move.

Acceptance voting and rated voting are easy to do by hand, or they can be augmented by a simple spreadsheet or other program run on a personal computer.

Reccomendations

Use Normalized Ratings, Cordorcet Rankings or Acceptance Votes. All fairly and accurately record the will of the people, considering the votes in whole, and all are resistant to strategic voting, encouraging voters to vote their consciences.

Links


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