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Democracy Chronicles

Voting Methods Central

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Voting Methods Central covers the study, promotion and adoption of voting methods reform worldwide. Increasingly important systems of voting like instant-runoff voting, approval voting, top-two voting and proportional representation will be covered here. DC authors focused on voting methods include Aaron Hamlin, augustin, Michael Ossipoff and Richard Fobes.

polling
N.H. Ban On Political Clothing at The Polls Up For Debate N.H. Ban On Political Clothing at The Polls Up For Debate (2/9/2021) - New Hampshire has a law that prohibits political clothing in polling sites. The rule is…
Most Republicans Say They Doubt the Election. How Many Really Mean It? Most Republicans Say They Doubt the Election. How Many Really Mean It? (12/1/2020) - Over 70 percent of Republicans express doubt over the November election results. However, this is…
We Have Never Had Final Results on Election Day We Have Never Had Final Results on Election Day (11/2/2020) - Trump has tried to delegitimize ballots counted after the elections on November 3rd. However, vote…
Eight of America’s Most Unusual Polling Places Eight of America’s Most Unusual Polling Places (10/21/2020) - We expect polling places to be formalised settings where voters exercise their voting rights. But…
Hotels are taking on a new role during the pandemic: Polling locations Hotels are taking on a new role during the pandemic: Polling locations (10/13/2020) - As a result of the social-distancing rules due to the pandemic, cities are turning to…
Facebook launches poll worker recruitment push in the News Feed Facebook launches poll worker recruitment push in the News Feed (9/14/2020) - There is a shortage of poll workers ahead of the November 2020 elections. Facebook has…
direct democracy
Idaho Senate OKs Bill To Make Ballot Initiatives Tougher Idaho Senate OKs Bill To Make Ballot Initiatives Tougher (3/3/2021) - In a measure with urban vs. rural overtones Idaho’s Senate passed a bill Monday toughening…
French Citizens’ Convention ‘Direct Democracy’ Designed to Fail French Citizens’ Convention ‘Direct Democracy’ Designed to Fail (3/2/2021) - The "gilets jaunes", like Brexiteers and Trump supporters, are pushing for direct democracy which they…
Wyoming Rejects Move to Direct Democracy Taxing Authority Wyoming Rejects Move to Direct Democracy Taxing Authority (3/2/2021) - Wyoming’s legislature rejected a resolution to amend the Constitution such that voters would have to…
Are California’s Governor Recall Elections a Needed Check on Power? Are California’s Governor Recall Elections a Needed Check on Power? (2/22/2021) - Gavin Newson recall has pundits arguing voters should only boot a sitting politician for grievous…
Anarchism In Practice Is Often Radically Boring Democracy Anarchism In Practice Is Often Radically Boring Democracy (2/22/2021) - Anarchy may very well be considered as something that is different from the violent, lawless…
Direct Democracy’s Dark Side PODCAST: A Look at Direct Democracy’s Dark Side (2/3/2021) - Democracy Works Podcast provides a different take on the story we’re often told about direct…
election methods
Alaska Preparing For Its First Ever Ranked-Choice Election Alaska Preparing For Its First Ever Ranked-Choice Election (3/6/2021) - The passage of Ballot Measure 2 has changed the way voters in Alaska vote in…
Congress Should Require Members To Be Elected By A Majority Of Votes Congress Should Require Members To Be Elected By A Majority Of Votes (3/6/2021) - Congress can make a simple adjustment to reverse rising polarization: have its members to be…
A Very Detailed Look at New St. Louis Approval Voting System A Very Detailed Look at New St. Louis Approval Voting System (3/5/2021) - Tishaura Jones, Treasurer of St. Louis, Missouri and Cara Spencer, the Alderwoman, advanced from the…
French Citizens’ Convention ‘Direct Democracy’ Designed to Fail French Citizens’ Convention ‘Direct Democracy’ Designed to Fail (3/2/2021) - The "gilets jaunes", like Brexiteers and Trump supporters, are pushing for direct democracy which they…
St. Louis Approval Voting System To Face First Real World Test St. Louis Approval Voting System To Face First Real World Test (3/2/2021) - As St Louisans head to the polls today they will experiment approval voting system that…
A Coin Flip Breaks Tie Vote In Illinois City Primary A Coin Flip Breaks Tie Vote In Illinois City Primary (3/2/2021) - Election for the next 2nd Ward alderwoman of Belvidere, Illinois, ended in a flip coin…

What Voting Methods We Should Use

Voting systems, also known as election methods, have a revolutionary potential that is not grasped by the general public even though there is an entire universe of research on this topic.

Approval Voting Example Election Method
Approval Voting Example

When we were just getting started as a website, Democracy Chronicles founder Adrian Tawfik conducted an exclusive interview series with an international group of election method proponents including prominent signers of the Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates. It is a great example of the diversity of the people involved. The best place to start off is the Democracy Chronicles introduction and then take a look at each of these interviews:

  • Richard Fobes – Election Method Reformer Speaks With DC 
  • Aaron Hamlin – Interview With President of Center for Election Science
  • augustin – Writer Discusses Election Reform and New Website
  • Michael Allen – Election Method Reformer Seeks Radical Changes 
  • Jameson Quinn – Election Expert Discusses Reform in US and Guatemala
  • Michael Ossipoff – Democracy Chronicles Author Discusses Approval Voting
  • Robert Bristow-Johnson – Expert Demands Reducing Money in Elections

Also see the DC Interview With Creator of Wooden Models of Voting Methods with artist Peter A. Taylor. 

internet and voting
Facial Recognition Technology Can Predict A Person’s Political Orientation Facial Recognition Technology Can Predict A Person’s Political Orientation (3/6/2021) - A new study shows that from a person's Facebook profile picture, facial recognition technology can…
Study: 2020 Election Lies Were Pushed By Online Super Spreaders Study: 2020 Election Lies Were Pushed By Online Super Spreaders (3/5/2021) - University of Washington new study looks at how the "massive lie" about a rigged election…
India Fake News Problem Fueled By Digital Illiteracy India Fake News Problem Fueled By Digital Illiteracy (3/3/2021) - For more than 90% of India's population, digital literacy is almost non-existent. This situation is…
Worrying Rise in Online Violent Threats Against Women Journalists Worrying Rise in Online Violent Threats Against Women Journalists (3/2/2021) - Violence against women and girls is one of the most prevalent human rights violations but…
Clubhouse App Thai Pro-Democracy Clubhouse App Lets Thai Pro-Democracy Protesters Speak Freely (2/24/2021) - Clubhouse is an invite-only audio app that is surging in popularity in Thailand as a protest…
China Censors the Internet. So Why Doesn’t Russia? China Censors the Internet. So Why Doesn’t Russia? (2/21/2021) - China and Russia are among the world’s most repressive states. But for some reason China…
proportionality
Why Australia Should Switch To Proportional Representation Why Australia Should Switch To Proportional Representation (2/20/2021) - A key expert argues for a shift toward the proportional representation system used in 89…
Changing Apportionment On Changing Apportionment From Persons to Adult Citizens (2/8/2021) - What would happen if states stopped equalizing districts’ total populations and started equalizing their voting…
Stop Minority Rule Democrats’ Priority in Power Must be to Stop Minority Rule (1/29/2021) - There was an interesting new post on the subject of minority rule by lecturer in…
Proportional Representation in Congress Can Proportional Representation in Congress Save the Country? (1/25/2021) - Election expert argues that change to some form of moderate proportional representation in Congress is…
Improve the Electoral College A Modest Proposal to Save and Improve the Electoral College (7/24/2019) - There is currently a debate in the US about eliminating the Electoral College and replacing…
Trump Claims Census Question on Citizenship Still Alive Trump Claims Census Question on Citizenship Still Alive (7/5/2019) - U.S. President Donald Trump contended Wednesday that the government will still try to ask a…
judicial elections
Estimating Judicial Ideology Study Estimating Judicial Ideology Finds Rise in Polarization (2/9/2021) - Reviewing the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the…
SolarWinds Hack SolarWinds Hack May be Big Setback to Judicial Transparency (1/28/2021) - The vulnerability in SolarWinds resulted in an “apparent compromise” of “highly sensitive non-public documents,” such…
Why Official Records Must be Made Public for Elected Prosecutors Why Official Records Must be Made Public for Elected Prosecutors (2/16/2019) - America’s locally elected prosecutors have authority to reinforce mass incarceration and racial disparities incriminal legal…
Dark Money Dominating State Supreme Court Races Dark Money Dominating State Supreme Court Races (10/31/2018) - Outside groups continue to pour money into state supreme court campaigns, television advertising spending so…
Spend Millions in State Supreme Court Races Dark Money Groups to Spend Millions in State Supreme Court Races (9/20/2018) - The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law will track, analyze, and publish…
State Supreme Court Elections Money Starting to Dominate State Supreme Court Elections (12/29/2017) - Causing the greatest distress is the growing prevalence of so-called “dark money” in state judicial…

Voting Methods Resources Online

The Center for Election Science has great information on voting methods. Also, the Wikipedia page on Voting Systems is the unofficial battleground between proponents of different voting methods. The Declaration of Election-Methods Reform Advocates is a document signed by academics who support moving beyond plurality voting.

A great place to go if you are looking to meet people discussing this neglected subject is Minguo.info which not only promotes better voting methods which would allow better, more honest candidates to be elected at every levels, it is also offering the tools for users to create their own polls using a variety of alternative voting systems. Those polls can be used to discuss policies as well as candidates.

Minguo.info is a non-profit, advertising free, community project which has several, complementary aims. First and foremost, it aims to educate the public about better voting methods. It promotes such better methods like Approval Voting, Emocracy Voting and Score Voting. Plurality voting is also implemented in the web site, certainly not because it’s a good election method, but in order to offer the users the chance to compare our current, broken system with better alternatives (follow these last two links, cast your own ballots and appreciate the difference!). Minguo.info also wants to educate against the use of voting machines in official elections. Ideally, there should be a verifiable paper trail in every election.

Politics tends to divide people, especially given the poor election method used in official elections. However, the advanced polling tools used at minguo.info allows for a more peaceful debate on policies to take place, especially since more nuanced positions have the room to flourish and get the approval of a large majority of the members. Thus, minguo.info is an experiment in internet democracy via constructive policy discussion. It is fairly unique on the web. When the community reaches a critical mass, it will be empowered to use its collaboratively drafted policy document (the Community Manifesto) to reach out to the public, educate it and positively influence public discourse, policy decisions, the democratic process and, hopefully, the outcome of elections.

  • Take a Minguo Poll: What is your opinion on abortions?
  • Take a Minguo Poll: What do you think about nuclear energy?

Voting Methods: The Forgotten Science

According to Eric Pacuit in his essay “Voting Methods” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), a central question the election methods science is that “given a group of people faced with some decision, how should a central authority combine the individual opinions so as to best reflect the ‘will of the group’?” According to Pacuit, “a complete analysis of this question would incorporate a number of different issues ranging from central topics in political philosophy (e.g., how should we define the “will” of the people? what is a democracy?) to the psychology of decision making.”

voting-methodsLittle about election methods science is considered set in stone as opinions are as varied as the wide array of methods that have been proposed around the world. You can actually take a look at the election ballot of every democracy in the world thanks to the University of North Carolina. According to election method advocacy group FairVote:

The nations within our global community display a staggering array of voting systems. In spite of this, one thing is clear — the modern trend is toward using proportional voting systems, as most industrialized nations and all of the newly emerging democracies in the former Eastern Bloc have done, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the lingering winner-take-all, first-past-the-post systems exist in former British colonies, including in the United States.

Modern Giants of Election Methods

Kenneth Joseph Arrow

Kenneth Arrow Election MethodAmerican economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. Arrow’s impact on the economics profession has been tremendous. For more than fifty years he has been one of the most influential of all practicing economists. His most significant works are his contributions to social choice theory, notably “Arrow’s impossibility theorem”, and his work on general equilibrium analysis. He has also provided foundational work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information.

His research also includes collective decision-making, general equilibrium theory, environment and growth and his new research includes information and communication in the economy, networks and markets, as well as new work on environment and growth. The use of mathematical criteria to evaluate voting systems was introduced when Kenneth Arrow showed in Arrow’s impossibility theorem that certain intuitively desirable criteria were actually mutually contradictory, demonstrating the inherent limitations of voting theorems.

Roger Myerson

Is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and has made seminal contributions to the fields of economics and political science. In game theory, he introduced refinements of Nash’s equilibrium concept, and he developed techniques to characterize the effects of communication when individuals have different information. His analysis of incentive constraints in economic communication introduced several fundamental which that are now widely used in economic analysis, including the revelation principle and the revenue-equivalence theorem in auctions and bargaining.Myerson voting Methods

Myerson has also applied game-theoretic tools to political science, analyzing how political incentives can be affected by different electoral systems and constitutional structures. Myerson is the author of Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (1991) and Probability Models for Economic Decisions (2005). He also has published numerous articles in professional journals, includingEconometrica, Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Decisions,American Political Science Review, Mathematics of Operations Research, and International Journal of Game Theory. He is currently president of the Game Theory Society (2012), has been president of the Econometric Society (2009), and has been vice president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999-2002).

Robert J. Weber

Frederic E. Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Educated at Princeton and Cornell, he was a faculty member of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale, and taught in the Yale School of Organization and Management, prior to joining the Kellogg faculty in 1979. His general area of research is game theory, with a primary focus on the effects of private information in competitive settings.

Election voting WeberMuch of his research has been centered on the theory and practice of competitive bidding and auction design. His 1982 paper, “A Theory of Auctions and Competitive Bidding” at Econometrica (co-authored with P.R. Milgrom), is considered a seminal work in the field. He served as an external consultant on a 1985 project leading to revisions in the procedures used to auction petroleum extraction leases on the U.S. outer continental shelf, and he co-organized (with representatives of the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Treasury) the 1992 public forum which led to changes in the way the Treasury auctions its debt issues. Since 1993, he has represented private clients during both the rule-making and bidding phases of the FCC’s sale of licenses of spectrum for the provision of personal communications services.

Steven J. Brams

Steven Brams Election MethodsGame theorist and political scientist at the New York University Department of Politics. Steven J. Brams is a founder and the Chairman of the Advisory Board of Fair Outcomes, Inc. Dr. Brams is a game theorist and political scientist at New York University’s department of politics, and is best known for his work on applying game theory to voting systems and to systems involving fair division.

Dr. Brams is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting and was, along with Alan Taylor, a co-discoverer of the first envy-free solution to the n-person cake-cutting problem. The Brams-Taylor solution to the cake-cutting problem solved what had been one of the most important open problems in contemporary mathematics. With Taylor, he is a co-inventor of the “Adjusted Winner” system, a patented fair-division procedure now being offered by Fair Outcomes, Inc. He is also, along with James F. Ring, a co-inventor of the patent-pending “Fair Buy-Sell” system that is currently being offered by the company. He is the author or co-author of fourteen books, the most recent being Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair Division Procedures (2008).

Here are DC authors who have focused on election methods:

aaron hamlin
Approval Voting Push Approval Voting Push Coming To An American Town Near You (6/4/2019) - We couldn’t do this without your support. On that note, we’ll be visiting several cities across the US in the coming months, and we want to…
St. Louis Approves Approval Voting Campaign Joining St. Louis Approves to Advance Approval Voting Campaign (5/28/2019) - After a landslide victory bringing approval voting to its first U.S. city in 2018, The Center for Election Science has joined to advance an initiative…
Limits of Ranked Choice Voting The Limits of Ranked Choice Voting (2/8/2019) - It’s important to not oversell the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting, which many outlets are doing. Overselling RCV can create unrealistic expectations and sour voters…
Recruiting Board Members at The Center for Election Science Recruiting Board Members at The Center for Election Science (1/21/2019) - We had a big year with our successful campaign that make Fargo the first city to implement approval voting. We want to bring approval voting to…
New Year's Resolutions of the Center for Election Science New Year’s Resolutions at the Center for Election Science (1/2/2019) - This year was a banner year. We hired new staff, spoke on the world stage, and led a successful campaign that made Fargo, North Dakota…
First US City to Adopt Approval Voting Fargo, ND Becomes First US City to Adopt Approval Voting (11/8/2018) - Voters overwhelmingly made their city the first in the US to adopt approval voting, an alternative voting method in which voters can vote for as…
michael ossipoff
You Don't Have a Real Democracy Voting Systems Don’t Matter if You Don’t Have a Real Democracy (2/2/2018) - Why should a better voting-system be allowed, unless the people who own the lawmakers want to cede government to the public? And without verifiable vote-counting,…
New Voting Systems New Voting Systems Can’t Solve the Problems of Democracy (5/27/2017) - There's a widespread assumption that if we just tried a little harder or better, everything would improve, and that it's soon going to happen. I…
Ruling-Rich Won't Impeach Trump Why the Ruling-Rich Won’t Impeach Trump For Now (5/23/2017) - The problem with impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors is the ruling-rich benefit from what he's doing, and he's doing it for them as well…
Democrats Trump Crimes Time is Now For Democrats to Take a Stand on Trump Crimes (5/22/2017) - In these Trump-times, communities need to stick together, to minimize the harm and damage that Trump, his ruling cronies, and his Republican friends (but Democrats…
12 Best Voting-Systems Thorough Comparison of the 12 Best Voting-Systems (5/20/2017) - This is the final article in a series analyzing the 12 best voting-systems. It is a long and detailed comparison of twelve voting-systems by four…
Approval and Score Voting How Approval and Score Voting Compare to the Alternatives (2/15/2017) - Attempts to improve on Approval and Score Voting are always at least somewhat illusory, because, even when some improvement is achieved, it’s accompanied by problems.
richard fobes
Instant Pairwise Elimination Voting Instant Pairwise Elimination Voting Brings Fairness And Better Candidates (3/5/2019) - We, the voters, are frustrated! Until this reform occurs, the people who give the biggest campaign contributions can rather easily pass the corrupt laws they…
Two-Party Divide-and-Conquer Strategy How to Stop the Two-Party Divide-and-Conquer Strategy (10/2/2018) - We must require that a winner must get more than half the votes. Alas, this simple rule cannot be imposed yet. Why? Because virtually all democracies…
A Postwar Monopoly On Un-bombed Factories! What Made America Great? A Postwar Monopoly On Un-bombed Factories! (8/3/2018) - Voters in virtually all democracies (in Europe, Asia, and North America) use primitive single-mark ballots, which only allow a voter to mark a single choice.…
Pairwise Vote Counting Special Oscars Poll Demonstrates Pairwise Vote Counting (2/12/2018) - This NewsHereNow Oscars poll allows you, or anyone who is familiar with the Oscar-nominated movies, to rank the movies using a 1-2-3 ballot. And then…
Wild Election Wild Election Results Brought To You By Single-Mark Ballots (9/27/2016) - Secret revealed! The humorous yet insightful story of how we ended up with Trump and Clinton written by the author of the ebook Ending The…
Considering Oregon's Top Two Primary Elections Vote Against Oregon’s Top Two Primary Election Proposal (10/7/2014) - Those of us in Oregon need to vote against the "top two primary" election because it continues to use single-mark ballots, which are the source…
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