Strengths and Drawbacks of Voting Methods for Political Elections

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Strengths and Drawbacks of Voting Methods for Political Elections Eric Erdmann University of Minnesota Duluth Department of Mathematics and Statistics Abstract Our current method of electing government officials, plurality voting, has both drawbacks and strengths. One of the drawbacks is vote splitting which was identified as a problem as early as the 1912 United States presidential election. In this election a Democrat won because two Republican candidates split the Republican vote. A strength of plurality voting is its simplicity. In this report various drawback s and strengths of voting methods will be discussed and analyzed, including the combination of criteria that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem states no rank-ordered voting method can satisfy. Several cities around the country have experimented recently with instant runoff voting (IRV). Some of these cities have experienced dissatisfaction with this method and have eliminated it after only a few elections. Some reasons for this quick turnaround will be discussed in terms of the drawbacks of instant runoff voting. Another voting method used in political elections, the Borda count, will be discussed. Teaming is a serious drawback of this method. A basic version of range voting is presented in this report. It is related to product ratings which are widely used on the internet. This type of range voting appears to have less serious drawbacks than plurality, IRV and the Borda count, but it has not been used for political elections. Tied political elections in the United States have led to costly runoffs and ballot recounts. For instance, the 2008 United States Senate election in Minnesota cost the state over $12 million. In this report, the results of simulations that counted the frequency of tied elections for plurality, instant runoff voting and range voting are presented. It is found
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