Voting

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Voting is a method of decision making wherein a group such as a meeting or an electorate attempts to gauge its opinion—usually as a final step following discussions or debates. Alternatives to voting include consensus decision making (which works to avoid polarization and the marginalization of dissent) and betting (as in an anticipatory democracy).

Contents

[edit] Process of voting

Most forms of democracy discern the will of the people by a common voting procedure:

  • Individual registration and qualification,
  • Opening the Election for a set time period,
  • Registration of voters at established voting locations,
  • Distribution of ballets with preset candidates, issues, and choices (including the write-in option in some cases),
  • Selection of preferred choices (oftentimes in secret, called a secret ballet),
  • Secure collection of ballets for unbiased counting, and
  • Proclamation of the will of the voters as the will of the people for their government.

[edit] Reasons for voting

In a democracy, voting commonly implies election, i.e. a way for an electorate to select among candidates for office. In politics voting is the method by which the electorate of a democracy appoints representatives in its government.

A vote, or a ballot, is an individual's act of voting, by which he or she express support or preference for a certain motion (e.g. a proposed resolution), a certain candidate, or a certain selection of candidates. A secret ballot, the standard way to protect voters' political privacy, generally takes place at a polling station. (Compare postal ballot). The act of voting in most countries is voluntary, however some countries, such as Australia, Belgium and Brazil, have compulsory voting systems.

Though voting is usually recognized as one of the main characteristics of democracy, a country's having an election featuring the populace casting votes does not necessarily mean the country is democratic. Many authoritarian governments have "elections" but the candidates are pre-chosen and approved by elites, there is no competition, voter qualifications are restrictive, and voting is often a sham.

Some people think that whenever votes are recorded in a medium which is invisible to humans, electors lose any possibility to verify how their votes are collected and tallied up to produce the final result, thus they need to have an absolute faith in the accuracy, honesty and security of the whole electoral apparatus. This is said to be particularly true for electronic elections because, for people who didn’t program them, computers act just like black boxes and their operations can truly be verified only by knowing the input and comparing the expected output with the actual output [1], but under a secret ballot system, there is no known input, nor is there any expected output with which to compare electoral results [2]. On the other hand, this is a problem to some degree with every form of a secret ballot; it is impossible for an individual voter to personally follow the custody or his or her vote once it is placed into the ballot box.

[edit] Types of votes

Different voting systems use different types of vote. Suppose that the options in some election are Alice, Bob, Charlie, Daniel, and Emily.

In a voting system that uses a single vote, the voter can select one of the five that they most approve of. "First past the post" uses single votes. So, a voter might vote for Charlie. This precludes him voting for anyone else.

An improvement on the single vote system is to have run-off elections, or repeat first past the post, however, the winner must win by 50% plus one, called a simple majority. If subsequent votes must be used, often a candidate, the one with the fewest votes or anyone who wants to move their support to another candidate, is removed from the ballot.

In a voting system that uses a multiple vote, the voter can vote for any subset of the alternatives. So, a voter might vote for Alice, Bob, and Charlie, rejecting Daniel and Emily. Approval voting uses such multiple votes.

In a voting system that uses a ranked vote, the voter has to rank the alternatives in order of preference. For example, they might vote for Bob in first place, then Emily, then Alice, then Daniel, and finally Charlie. Many voting systems use ranked votes. See preference voting.

In a voting system that uses a scored vote (or range vote), the voter gives each alternative a number between one and ten (the upper and lower bounds may vary). See range voting.

[edit] Fair voting

Kenneth Arrow lists five characteristics of a fair voting system. However, Arrow's impossibility theorem shows that it is impossible for any voting system to have all 5 characteristics at the same time.

Casting a vote expresses an implied willingness to participate in a common process with some shared outcome. Those who feel unable to express their limits or boundaries of tolerance in a voting system may be more likely to resist or fight or fail to support decisions made through it (more of an issue with parties or policies). Those who feel unable to express their real preferences may lack all enthusiasm for the choices or for the eventually chosen representative or leader. Any vote balances both kinds of considerations.

One common issue, especially in first-past-the-post systems, is that of the protest vote: one might "waste one's vote" on a minor party to send a signal of strong preference for a candidate or party that cannot win, or of intolerance for the "more mainstream" options. However it is difficult to tell from the vote alone whether one is positively inclined to the minor party or negatively inclined to the major party. Russia offers its electors a "None of the Above" option, so that protest votes can be properly tallied. Other jurisdictions may record the incidence of (apparently deliberately) spoiled ballot papers.

Also, it is often not clear whether the voter really understands how his or her vote is counted in the voting system, especially with the more complex types. This often leads to issues with the results. Ballot design and the use of voting machines have particular importance, given this issue. Optimally participants in a vote should perceive the results, especially of a political vote, as fair. If fairness appears lacking, resistance to the results may lead at best to confusion, at worst to violence and even civil war, in the case of political rivals.

In an effort to make balloting cheaper and more transparent, Brazil introduced electronic voting in all levels of elections, gradually since 1994. By 2002 general elections, all voting in Brazil was cast on electronic system, with paper ballots being used only in last case emergencies (such as black-outs). Argentina followed in 14 September 2003, for a gubernatorial election. This pilot test involved 500,000 voters distributed among 20 constituencies in the eastern Argentine province of Buenos Aires.

Criteria. It may be premature to try to choose the best method of voting if we have not yet agreed on the criteria by which the methods are to be judged. The criterion most commonly accepted is that the method should choose the candidate or policy that would defeat all others in a series of individual contests. This is what our usual balloting system does, looking only at the voter’s positive choices. Pairwise comparisons is a good implementation of that aim.

Maybe that should not be the sole criterion, however. Another possible goal would be to protect minorities from what has been called the “militant majority.” A town meeting is one implementation of democracy that often does this. Such a meeting would probably not choose the initially most popular candidate if that candidate was totally unacceptable to a significant minority. A candidate would probably be chosen who had slightly fewer supporters but many fewer enemies. A blackball or veto provision also protects minority rights, though at great cost to majority rule.

It may be desirable then that an ideal voting system should consider who people oppose as well as who they support. These are not mirror images of each other. The decision makers have latitudes of acceptance, indifference, and rejection, and these may differ in their widths. Many alternatives may fall in the latitude of indifference - they are neither accepted nor rejected. Avoiding the choice that the most people strongly reject may sometimes be at least as important as choosing the one that they most favor.

[edit] Voting and Information

Modern political science has questioned whether average citizens have sufficient political information to cast meaningful votes. A series of studies coming out of the University of Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s argued that voters lack a basic understanding of current issues, the liberal-conservative ideological dimension, and the relative ideological positions of the major parties. Only a handful of sophisticated voters--usually those with education and high levels of political involvement--seemed to understand political debates fully.[1][2]

Though these studies arose from research in the United States, their implications for democracy are severe. However, these conclusions continue to be contested as current scholarly research debates the Michigan studies' findings. A consensus has begun to emerge that voters do not need the high levels of political information that the Michigan studies expected to find in order to participate fully in politics; instead, voters learn to rely on "information shortcuts"--for example, they look at which politicians and interest groups endorse each side of a proposal to get a feel for whether they ought to support it.[3][4]

[edit] See also

Look up vote, voting in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes. 1960. The American voter. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
  2. ^ Converse. 1964. The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In Ideology and Discontent, edited by David Apter. (Summary)
  3. ^ Popkin. 1994. The reasoning voter: Communication and persuasion in presidential campaigns. 2d edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
  4. ^ Lupia and McCubbins. 1998. The Democratic Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Summary)
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