Today’s Topic Is About Voting Systems
When people talk about democracy, they think of voting. At first glance, voting seems to be that every eligible person makes his/her votes on their choices and specific organizations count the votes and declare the choice with the most votes would be the winner. But this clearly ignores minority’s opinions. Sometimes the advantage of the majority vote over the minority vote is not overwhelming and the votes can be very similar. So a large number of the population’s benefits and opinions are ignored. The method above is known as plurality voting.
To solve the problem, some people suggest an instant runoff method. Each person ranks each choice and then people compare the number of all people’s no.1 ranking. If one choice appears the least times among all the choices, then its votes will be transferred to the next choice on ranking lists of people who rank this choice as no.1. And after the elimination of this choice, the remaining choices will go through the same process until there is one choice left. But the problem is that some people may cheat on the voting. If they know they are a minority and their first choice will be eliminated and the majority’s first choice is the worst for them among all choices, they will put a not that bad choice as their first choice rather than their most satisfying choice. Hence, such a not that bad choice may eventually beat the majority’s first choice.
The third method is multiple runoff. Firstly people arrange a runoff between the latter half of each person’s preference list about all choices. And transfer the loser choice’s votes to the winner’s and eliminate the loser choice. Repeat the process until there is one choice left. But this method is also criticized for people’s potential cheating as above.
The last choice I will describe is Condorcet voting. Every two possible choices will face a runoff. And all people‘s vote for these two choices and know people’s preference on the whole. After all comparison between two choices, people can know which choice wins the most times and regard this choice as the best choice for all people. That said, if there are 3 choices and A is preferred to B, B is preferred to C, C is preferred to A, then people cannot tell which choice is the best.
In fact, mathematicians have already proved that there isn’t any voting system satisfying a list of principles which reflect people’s expectation of fair voting. And different people will benefit from different systems. Democracy and fairness are complex issues, from what we have learned right now, we can still devise a comparably fair system according to who is voting and what people are voting for.
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