Voting Procedures Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Voting is a necessary, yet not sufficient, condition of democratic governance. Voting takes a wide variety of forms—from oral expression of opinions in mass gatherings to electronic recording of preferences in computer terminals. Voting procedures comprise a balloting system as well as a method of determining the winner once the ballots have been cast. The modern theory of voting procedures focuses primarily on the latter component, that is, on the methods of determining the winners.

It is common to distinguish between electoral and voting systems. The former refer to methods applied in determining winners in mass elections, such as parliamentary or presidential ones, while the latter focus on committee, parliament, or group decision-making methods. These may result in the choice of one winner (candidate or policy alternative) or a group of them.

Voting procedures can be classified into three groups: (1) binary, (2) positional, and (3) multistage procedures. Binary procedures are based on pairwise comparisons of alternatives. In some procedures, the comparisons are actually performed according to an agenda. The amendment procedure used in the U.S. Congress is based on a binary procedure. According to a predetermined agenda, the alternatives are voted upon in pairs so that the majority loser in each comparison is eliminated, while the pairwise winner proceeds to the next comparison until all alternatives have been voted upon at least once. Sometimes the binary winner is determined on the basis of reported voter preferences, such as by finding out for each alternative how many others it would defeat in pairwise comparisons if all voters voted according to their reported preferences.

The best-known positional procedure is the one-person one-vote, or plurality, method in which each voter can vote for just one alternative and the winner is the alternative that has been given more votes than any of its competitors. Another example is the Borda count, in which each voter indicates a preference ranking and the Borda scores are determined as follows: Assuming that the number of alternatives is K, each voter’s first-ranked alternative’s points are K minus one, second ranked receives K minus two points, and so on, with the last ranked alternative receiving zero points. The Borda score of an alternative is the sum of points received from all voters. The Borda count winner is the alternative with the largest Borda score. Approval voting can also be viewed as a positional procedure. In this system the voter may give each alternative either one or zero votes. The alternative with the largest vote sum is the winner.

Various runoff methods are examples of multistage procedures. The most widespread is the plurality runoff system, used notably in presidential elections in France, as well as in many other countries. This system is typically implemented in two rounds of balloting in which each voter may vote for one and only one candidate. If some candidate receives more than 50 percent of votes in the first round, this candidate is elected and no second round of voting occurs. Otherwise, the two candidates with the most votes on the first round compete in the second round, during which voters again vote for only one candidate. The candidate with the most votes on the second round is the winner.

The primary theoretical tool used in analyzing voting procedures is social choice theory. This theory deals with rules assigning best alternatives to any preference profile, such as a set of individual preferences over alternatives. Voting procedures clearly align with these kinds of rules. Social choice theory suggests a number of criteria for evaluating voting procedures. Of these, perhaps the best-known is the Condorcet winner criterion, which requires that an alternative that would defeat all other alternatives in pairwise majority comparisons (i.e., a Condorcet winner alternative) is to be elected whenever such an alternative exists. Many binary methods satisfy this criterion, whereas many positional methods (e.g., plurality, Borda count, and approval voting) do not. On the other hand, the criterion called consistency is satisfied by many positional systems, but in general not by binary ones. Consistency criterion is defined for two separate voting bodies considering the same alternatives. If both bodies agree on the chosen alternatives when acting separately, consistency requires that they should also come up with the same chosen alternatives when acting together.

The history of research on voting procedures is relatively long, but not continuous. The earliest analytic and comparative studies appeared in the late eighteenth century, when the fundamental discrepancy between two intuitive ideas of winning was discovered: one emphasizes the success of candidates in pairwise comparisons, and the other pays attention to the positions of candidates in the voters’ preference rankings. This discrepancy continues to underlie much of the contemporary debate on virtues of various voting procedures.

Bibliography:

Arrow, Kenneth. Social Choice and Individual Values. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, 1963.
Black, Duncan. Theory of Committees and Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
Brams, Steven J., and Peter C. Fishburn. Approval Voting. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1983.
Fishburn, Peter C. “Condorcet Social Choice Functions.” SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics 33, no. 3 (1977): 469–489.
McLean, Iain, and Arnold B. Urken, eds. The Classics of Social Choice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Miller, Nicholas. Committees, Agendas, and Voting. Langhorn, Pa.: Harwood, 1995.
Nurmi, Hannu. Voting Procedures under Uncertainty. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2002.
Saari, Donald. Basic Geometry of Voting. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995.
Decisions and Elections. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Young, Hobart Peyton. “Social Choice Scoring Functions.” SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics 28, no. 4 (1975): 824–838.

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