Make pro/con list of types of voting

[cdparra]

From @subjective on March 16, 2015 23:22

• Arguments for and against each type of voting
• Which is more fair?
• Hypothetical situations, e.g., few people? More than 1000 people?
• Research analyses of the use of different voting systems in social movements and organizations

Copied from original issue: democracy/voting#3

[cdparra]

From @maxgrunberg on March 30, 2015 23:15

Unranked

• Pros o one person, one vote (simple) o Moderation (no extremist positions)
• Cons

o Tactical voting → compromising: "All votes for anyone other than the second place are votes for the winner" o A lot of power is given to the media o The system may promote votes against more so than votes for and will probably result in a two proposal system o Wasted votes o Spoiler effect (split of votes between two similiar proposals) o Risk of the focus on a certain proposal, not much need to read the other proposals, if you have a favorite proposal from the beginning

Ranked/distribution

• Pros o Consensual, more democratic? o closer analysis of the different options o Resistance to tactical voting o Uniqueness of votes
• Cons o spoiler effect, even stronger than in the unranked

[ghost]

Related: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/

[ghost]

Related: http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting-versus-irv/c1mmu

[cdparra]

Regarding existing system, below are three opensource projects oriented to the support of elections. They might have ranked/unranked voting algorithm in their code already implemented (although, embedded in their own web apps, not sure if available through APIs.

• Agora Voting => Source Code | API
• Helios Voting: Source Code
• Textizen (let's likely, but might worth the time looking): source code | API

[ghost]

Example of tactical voting in UK elections: http://voteswap.org/