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Topic: Plurality voting

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	Plurality-Majority Systems
		The main purpose of these systems is to represent the majority or plurality of voters in a district, and (with the exception of at-large voting) to ensure representation of local geographical areas.
		However, because this is a winner-take-all system, at-large voting shares most of the same problems as single-member district plurality voting, including the misrepresentation of parties, manufactured majorities, low voter turnout, high levels of wasted votes, and denial of fair representation to third parties, racial minorities and women.
		However, it is still a winner-take-all voting system and so it shares all the basic problems of this approach to voting, including the misrepresentation of parties, manufactured majorities, gerrymandering, high levels of wasted votes, and denial of fair representation to third parties, racial minorities and women.
	www.mtholyoke.edu /acad/polit/damy/BeginnningReading/plurality.htm (1955 words)

	Plurality Voting System
		Yet, we can say with confidence that everyone knows what plurality Voting is. It is the election method used in every democracies in the world, for all national and local elections.
		Election method experts can state with certainty that plurality voting is a very bad choice for most if not all elections we use it for.
		Citizens often vote according to the heart in the first round, knowing that they can get the least-bad of the two main candidate elected in the second round.
	www.masquilier.org /republic/election/plurality.php (682 words)

	First Past the Post electoral system - Electotest
		In this vote, the candidates for the capital are Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville.
		First-past-the-post encourages the tactical voting technique known as "compromising": voters are encouraged to vote for one of the two options most likely to win, even if it is not their most preferred option.
		If enough voters vote using this tactic, the first-past-the-post system becomes a form of runoff voting where the first round is held in the court of public opinion.
	wikitest.electorama.com /wiki/Plurality_voting (1937 words)

	PlanetMath: Range Voting
		Range voting is a single-winner voting system in which each vote consists of one numerical score from 0 to U awarded to each candidate, where U is some positive number.
		Approval voting [3] is the degenerate form of range voting in which there are only two allowed scores: 0 and 1.
		In contrast, plurality voting (the “name one candidate as your vote” system) is in this respect the least-democratic possible system since voters express the minimum possible amount of information.
	planetmath.org /encyclopedia/RangeVoting.html (1495 words)

	ALTERNATIVE VOTING SYSTEMS
		They are plurality voting (the candidate with the most votes wins) and plurality voting with a runoff (the two candidates with the most votes are paired against each other in a second, or runoff, election; the candidate with the most votes in the runoff election wins).
		A rational voter will vote for a second choice if his or her first choice appears to be a long shot--as indicated, for example, by the polls--but the voter's calculus and its effects on outcomes is not yet well understood for either approval voting or the other procedures discussed herein (Nurmi, l987; Merrill, l988).
		Although cumulative voting offers a means for parties to guarantee their approximate proportional representation, it requires good predictive abilities and considerable organizational efforts on the part of parties to ensure that their supporters concentrate their voters in the proper manner.
	bcn.boulder.co.us /government/approvalvote/altvote.html (6123 words)

	Center for Voting and Democracy
		Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a well-tested voting method that corrects the defects in plurality elections and two-round runoff elections, the two most widely used voting systems in the country.
		Instant runoff voting allows all voters to vote for their favorite candidate without fear of helping elect their least favorite candidate, and it ensures that the winner enjoys true support from a majority of the voters.
		Plurality voting, used in most American elections, does not meet these basic requirements for a fair election system that promotes wide participation, and traditional runoff elections are costly to the taxpayer and often suffer from low voter turnout.
	www.fairvote.org /irv/talking.htm (578 words)

	Better Voting Methods
		Problem #2 is that Plurality voting can “punish” voters for voting for their favorite candidate, and it encourages voters to “vote for the lesser of two evils.” In the Florida example, the Nader voters were punished by having Bush win when they would have preferred Gore.
		The pressure on voters to vote for one of the two frontrunners leads to additional problems: Problem #3 is that voting results are not an accurate indicator of voters’ true preferences, because many voters vote strategically, rather than voting according to their sincere preferences.
		Approval Voting is the cheapest and easiest alternative to implement, it frees voters to vote for their favorite candidates, and it also makes good choices of winners.
	www.votebuddy.org /votemeth.htm (2590 words)

	Through the Magnifying Glass: Plurality v Majority Voting (Site not responding. Last check: )
		The reasons for changing the election rules might have ranged from choosing plurality voting because it is the most common winner method to avoiding the need to waste time and energy to conduct runoff elections for any of the officer positions.
		Plurality voting is the most common winner method used in the world today.
		Some may argue that the plurality method works well in our congressional and senatorial races, but we are talking about a two-party system which bascially ensures that most of the votes cast will be for the top two candidates (Republican or Democrat).
	blog.case.edu /james.chang/2006/08/14/plurality_v_majority_voting (788 words)

	Illuminations: Will the Best Candidate Win?
		Plurality voting is the method most familiar to students.
		A quick way for students to verify that their totals are reasonable is to determine the total number of votes, that is, three points per voter times forty voters, and verify that this result matches their total number of points.
		Comparing the technique of sequential pairwise voting with a single elimination tournament, with byes, may help students understand the method, but care should be taken to distinguish between the two.
	illuminations.nctm.org /LessonDetail.aspx?ID=L386 (2069 words)

	Green Party of the United States
		Instant runoff voting allows for better voter choice and wider voter participation by accommodating multiple candidates in single seat races and assuring that a "spoiler"-effect will not result in undemocratic outcomes.
		In plurality voting -- as used in most U.S. elections -- candidates can win with less than a majority when there are more than two candidates running for the office.
		If a candidate does not receive a clear majority of votes on the first count, a series of runoff counts are conducted, using each voterâ€™s top choice indicated on the ballot.
	www.democracyinaction.com /dia/organizations/Greens/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=161 (627 words)

	Center for Voting and Democracy
		For example, in plurality voting if two similar candidates split a majority of the vote, in a plurality election, a candidate strongly opposed by a majority of the voters can be elected.
		Approval voting is unlikely to work in practice as it is supposed to work in theory.
		As far as we know, approval voting is not used in any public elections in the United States or elsewhere, although in the former Soviet Union a form of "disapproval voting" was used: voters crossed out all candidates they disapproved of.
	www.fairvote.org /irv/approval.htm (522 words)

	A Survey of Basic Voting Methods
		This is because rather than picking the candidate who is their sincere favorite, most voters are likely to instead vote for the one of the perceived front-runners whom they prefer, since this is the best chance they have of their vote making a positive difference.
		For one thing, where plurality often forces people to choose between voting for a candidate whom they perceive to be viable and a candidate whom they strongly agree with, approval allows people to do both.
		If I vote for my own long-odds favorite first, and my preferred compromise candidate second, the strength of my vote as it affects the race between the frontrunners is less than someone else in a similar situation who left their sincere favorite off the ballot.
	fc.antioch.edu /~james_green-armytage/vm/survey.htm (6352 words)

	Approval Voting
		Unlike plurality voting (PV) -- the most common method in practice today -- where voters pick the single candidate they feel is the most qualified for the position, approval voting allows voters to choose all candidates they feel are qualified.
		Because everyone can vote for as many candidates as they wish, voting for candidates unlikely to win is no longer "throwing away your vote." Also, approval voting, by its nature, makes it difficult to vote against a candidate, reducing the effectiveness of negative campaigning.
		In short, the jump from Plurality Voting to Approval Voting would be a small effort with a big improvement; the jump from Approval Voting to a more complex method would be a big effort with a small improvement.
	www.tursiops.cc /idhop/av (1236 words)

	Election Selection: Science News Online, Nov. 2, 2002
		Yet voting theorists argue that plurality voting is one of the worst of all possible choices.
		In races with two strong candidates, plurality voting is vulnerable to the third-party spoiler—a weaker candidate who splits some of the vote with one of the major candidates.
		Plurality voting separates people on both sides of the fence from those sitting on it, so that decision makers can be elected.
	www.sciencenews.org /20021102/bob8.asp (8902 words)

	Freeman Voting
		There is a strong tendency for nations using this choose-one voting, (also called "Plurality Voting"), to develop into two-party systems.
		Nations that use this voting system and so much as allow more than one party are, almost invariably, two-party democracies (if "two-party democracy" even makes sense).
		A vote not from the heart is a vote wasted.
	groups.msn.com /FreemanVoting (354 words)

	The mathematics of voting (Site not responding. Last check: )
		One milk-lover proposed a plurality vote, in which each person casts a single vote for their first choice.
		Plurality voting, one of the most common democratic systems, fails to respect reflectional symmetry.
		Admittedly, this is more complex than plurality voting and cannot be used with current American voting machines (though it is used in Australia).
	jmvidal.ece.sc.edu /822/papers/econ-voting.html (712 words)

	TeacherSource . Math . Plurality Voting \| PBS
		Use the Plurality and Plurality with Elimination methods to determine the winner of an election and to rank a series of four football teams.
		Plurality with Elimination requires a preference ballot, and it is carried out in rounds.
		After each round of voting, the candidate with the fewest number of first place votes is eliminated, and a new round of voting is done with the remaining candidates.
	www.pbs.org /teachersource/mathline/concepts/voting/activity2.shtm (436 words)

	Restore Voting Rights of AS Active Military
		Plurality voting minimizes costs to ASG and also provides active duty service members with an opportunity to participate fully in the federal election process.
		Although plurality voting resolves the costs of primary elections,” Faleomavaega said, “ASG asked for further time to review my second bill and out of deference to the Governor and the Fono I asked to postpone the hearing that was scheduled for July of last year.”
		Simply put, this bill will establish voting by plurality for the office of the Delegate until such time as the American Samoa Legislature provides for primary elections and majority voting if so desired.
	www.house.gov /list/press/as00_faleomavaega/restorevotingrights.html (547 words)

	May the Best Man Lose - - science news articles online technology magazine articles May the Best Man Lose (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Approval voting, the simplest of the alternative methods, dates back to at least the 13th century, when Venetians used it to help elect their magistrates.
		The advantages of an approval vote— and the perils of plurality voting— are most apparent in contests like the Louisiana governor's race of 1991.
		Saari laments the "indeterminacy" of the approval vote, the fact that the outcome is not fixed only by the voters' preferences but also depends on their voting strategies.
	www.discover.com /issues/nov-00/features/featbestman (3514 words)

	Introduction
		The Vermont Commission to Preference Voting stated that "the fundamental problem with plurality election rules is that they allow a candidate that is the least preferred choice of a majority of the voters to be declared the winter"(Vermont Commission to Study Preference Voting, 1999).
		To utilize IRV voting, the ballots would be set up so that people would vote for their candidates in the order which they would prefer them to be elected, allowing them to not only show the candidate they would prefer to win, but the candidate they would want least to win as well.
		The person who received the fewest first place votes would be declared defeated, and the second place votes from voters who voted for the defeated candidate would be added to the totals for the top two candidates (Center for Voting and Democracy, 1999).
	www.uvm.edu /~vlrs/doc/pluralityvoting.htm (933 words)

	Voting Simulation Visualizations
		Otherwise, the candidate with the least first-ranked votes is eliminated, and the ballots ranking that candidate highest are reassigned to the next-highest non-eliminated candidate.
		Notice that in Plurality voting, the addition of the red candidate has caused the blue region to expand to the right: blue has gained an unfair advantage because red and green are splitting the vote.
		With Borda voting, the result is the opposite: the presence of the red candidate is actually helpful to the green candidate, expanding the green winning region slightly.
	zesty.ca /voting/sim (1571 words)

	Approval & Disapproval Voting
		They would vote strategically by attempting to inflict the most harm on opponents (vote NO on everybody except their favorites).
		The negative votes wouldn't be a factor in determining the winner, but would only be there for politicians and media to analyze and evaluate.
		Therefore, NO vote totals would tend to be real expressions of negative voter opinion, although probably lower total numbers than if the referendum for each candidate was answered isolated from the others (not compared).
	www.rayrob.org /library/RFR/CRV/approval_&_disapproval_voting.htm (1125 words)

	RangeVoting.org - Plurality system
		Once that happens, the remaining two parties tend to become similar ("tweedledum and tweedledee") because it is strategically desirable for each to "grab the central ground." That leads to even-further-reduced voter choice (beyond the reduction we already had from having only 2 parties) and long periods of boredom.
		However, the long periods of boredom are interspersed with exciting periods of randomly directed and sometimes dangerous extremism, whenever one of the parties suffers a vote split with a temporarily rising popular third party, causing the less-popular and more extreme main-party competitor to be elected.
		The plurality system is so bad that (computer simulations indicate) replacing it by range voting would improve society by a comparable or greater amount than the entire invention of democracy in the first place.
	rangevoting.org /Plurality.html (271 words)

	Tom Moertel's Weblog
		One such method is Approval Voting, a simple extension to plurality voting.
		Approval voting eliminates most of the problems with plurality voting, and yet it is almost entirely compatible with the existing voting infrastructure within the United States.
		Condorcet voting (sometimes referred to as Ranked Pairs voting, after the name of one popular variant) appears to be the best approximation of the voting ideal.
	blog.moertel.com /articles/2004/9 (1000 words)

	The limitations of Plurality Voting: An illustration \| groups.drupal.org
		The limitations of Plurality Voting: An illustration
		Plurality voting's drawback, as you've noted, is that it artificially forces users into options that may not suit them well, and may also mask important data.
		The polls themselves must be written VERY carefully to avoid begging-the-question, and that tends to lead to ballot-bloat, with each response trying to encompass a particular combination of votes rather than a discrete vote.
	groups.drupal.org /node/271 (159 words)

	RangeVoting.org - Center for Range Voting - front page
		In the old "plurality voting" system, the clones "split the vote" and lose.
		"Approval voting" is an improvement over these systems because it allows voters to vote for all the candidates that they approve – with no built-in penalty for approving a third-party candidate.
		But range voting is even better, since it experimentally yields much greater support for 3rd parties than "approval voting." Having more parties should also decrease the importance of gerrymandering, and increase interest and turnout.
	www.rangevoting.org (946 words)

	Comparison of VoteFair Ranking with plurality, majority, instant-runoff, Condorcet, and Borda-count methods
		In contrast, plurality voting -- which is used in almost all U.S. elections — declares Clifford to be the winner (because he receives the most first-preference votes).
		Majority voting — which is used in U.S. Presidential elections -- would not produce any winner because none of the candidates receives a majority (more than half the votes).
		To better appreciate the differences in voting methods, here is a tally table that summarizes the pairwise preferences of all the voters.
	www.votefair.org /compare.html (680 words)

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