Voting system for elections

Barak A. Pearlmutter barak at pearlmutter.net
Mon Jul 25 13:07:01 UTC 2016


> I don't think SPI should be in the business of designing and then
> adopting a bespoke election system.

Indeed, getting voting systems right is highly technical and
mathematical, and remains an active area of research. (Observe the
current presidential election in the USA to see what happens when the
system is poorly designed.) Please please please do not design
something off the top of your head! That has about as much chance of
being a good voting system as someone naive to cryptography cobbling
together a new cryptosystem and the result being secure and efficient.

If we want to adopt a good voting system for proportional
representation, as already pointed out, Condorcet is not a contender,
as Condorcet is for electing a single winner. I would suggest that we
adopt a best-of-breed proportional representation system, namely RRV,
nicely documented and analyzed here: http://rangevoting.org/RRV.html

Cheers,

--Barak.


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