Voting Rules for Accurate
Democracy

By organizing voters, Instant Runoff Voting ends:
Spoiler candidates and choices limited to the lesser-of-two-evils;
Costly runoffs and winners without majority mandates.

IRV elects leaders in London, Sidney, San Francisco and more.
It elects student leaders at Duke, Harvard, MIT, Stanford...

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Questions on Instant Runoff Voting

1. A card that moves is no bigger than any other vote: True,  False, 
    Does its voter have more votes or power than any other voter: ?  
2. Your backup choice cannot hurt your first choice: True,  False, 
3. Only one candidate can reach a 50% + 1 vote finish line: True,  False, 
4. Who could use Instant Runoff Voting ? 
Answers:  Put your mouse pointer on a question, but do not click it.

Single Transferable Vote Elects Several Reps

For a three-seat election by Single Transferable Vote (STV):

• The finish line marks the height of a quarter of the cards plus one.
• Do not give a card to a candidate who has finished.
• Eliminate the weakest candidates one at a time.
• Move your cards until three candidates win!

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Single Transferable Vote is used in some Australian and Irish elections, at Harvard, MIT, Oberlin, Princeton, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Vassar, at Oxford and Cambridge, in some unions, in the Church of England, and in voting for Hollywood’s Oscars.

It gives each group their fair share of voices on a council.
It often elects more women and minority candidates.
It increases choices for voters and turnout of voters.
It makes more “effective votes,” the number needed to elect the council.

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Questions on Single Transferable Vote

1. Only three candidates can each win 25% plus one vote: True,  False, 
2. What total percent must the three STV reps win ? 
3. Your backup choice cannot hurt your first choice: True,  False, 
4. What is the threshold for winning one of five seats ? 
5. How can groups you know use the Single Transferable Vote ? 

 

Movable Money Votes Pick Public Goods

For Fair Share Voting by Movable Money Votes (MMV):

• Let's say we each put in 1ドル to buy some items.
  You get two 25¢ voting cards and a tall 50¢ card.
• We decide an item needs modest support from 8 of us
  to prove it is a public good worth public money.
  So the finish line marks the height of 8 single cards.
• You may put only one of your cards in a column.
  So you can't dump all your cards on a private item.
   
  Tip: Give your tall 50¢ card to your favorite item.
  This way 4 eager voters can fund a low-cost item.
  So the voters’ number and zeal both count.

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• A costly item must fill several columns.  A column here
  holds 2,ドル so a 4ドル item must fill two columns.
• When an item wins, the treasurer hides its cards, and then
  excludes any item that costs more than all the cards left.
  Then one at a time, we reject the least popular item,
  with the lowest level of cards in its columns.
• Move your cards from a loser to your next choice.
  (If allowed, consider briefly withholding your card(s) from a lower choice so it loses instead of a higher choice.)

  Voting stops when all the items still on the table are paid up.
  Only a few items can win, but all voters can win something!

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Fair Shares Set Budgets

• Each funding level is like another project:
  it needs enough cards to fill it up.
• The “4ドル carton of OJ” has two columns.
  The “6ドル bottle of OJ” has just one more column.
  A supporter must help fill the lower level first.
• One at a time, the weak levels lose and the money
  moves to help your highest ranks still in the running.

(Each funding level of an agency is treated as project.
But an agency starts with [80]% of its recent budgets.
So a member cannot give it zero and “steal a free ride.”)

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Participatory Budgeting lets neighborhood assemblies spend
part of a city’s budget.  Porto Alegre did this first in 1989;
now it is used by hundreds of cities and towns in Latin America.
But most still end it with the old winner-take-all voting methods.

FSV is new!  Try it!  You will build a strong democracy.

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Questions on Fair Share Voting

1. Should we let each member fund private items ? 
2. Should people who pay more taxes or dues get more
    power to spend public money  ?  
    to set public laws  ?  
3. Should a rep’s votes be so clear to voters ? 
4. Could your second choice hurt your first choice ? 
5. How can your groups use Movable Money Votes ? 

Full-Choice Ballots

Only small groups can use cards for voting.  Big groups use paper ballots.  They are often tallied by computer, with samples checked by hand. A ballot printed and checked by its voter, and later by a risk-limiting audit, can catch ballot box and tally frauds and errors.

Check mark ballots badly oversimplify most issues. Such falsely limited choices let voters see only two factions, “us versus them” or “left versus right”. This tends to polarize debates, harden opinions, increase conflicts.

Ranked choice ballots reduce those negative results. They let a voter rank his 1st choice, 2nd choice, 3rd etc. Ranks can reveal a great variety of opinions. Surveys find most voters prefer ranked choice ballots.

Fun votes include dinner-party music, favorite videos and snacks, group vacations, pizza toppings, Ben & Jerry’s, sports stars, actors...

Which wins a plurality?   Hint: 5 chocolates vs. 1 nut.
And the first name on a ballot gets a 2% - 9% boost.

Other pages tell the merits of full-choice ballots and show examples of preference ballots.

For anonymity in tabletop voting, you may put your ballot in a box and pull out another voter’s, then move cards for that voter as someone else moves yours.

Conclusions

The best voting rules are fast, easy and fair.
They strengthen votes and thus mandates.  That means
they organize voters and lift the number supporting:
Center  a Chairperson from a plurality to a majority of voters,
Full Rep  a Council from a plurality to over three quarters,
Budgets  a Budget from a few power blocs to all members,
Center  a Policy from a one-sided to an over-all majority.