Voting Methods

Voting methods can be subdivided into three categories: single member, multiple member, and mixed.

Separate discussions will be maintained under each of these categories, and each voting method will be listed in the appropriate category.

Many writers on voting systems like to evaluate them based on their compliance or non-compliance with a number of criteria which can be mathematically defined. These criteria generally all appear to be reasonable, but in fact many of them are incompatible, so that it often appears to be the case that the criteria that someone considers valuable are the ones that are satisfied by the method they advocate. For example, supporters of the Single Transferable Vote and its single-member version, the Alternative Vote/Instant Runoff Voting tend to make a big deal of the later-no-harm criterion, while minimizing the importance of such criteria (which seem far more important to me) as the monotonicity and participation criteria, while Warren Smith (an advocate of Score Voting (also known as Range Voting) has explicitly stated that the later-no-harm criterion is a "silly," "comparatively unimportant," and "largely wrongheaded" criterion on which to judge voting systems. (See this discussion page on the CRV's site.)

Last modified April 28, 2009.