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Voting System

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A voting system or electoral system is a method by which voters make a choice

between options, often in an election or on a policy referendum.

A voting system enforces rules to ensure valid voting, and how votes are

counted and aggregated to yield a final result. Common voting systems are

majority rule, proportional representation or plurality voting with a number of

variations and methods such as first-past-the-post or preferential voting. The

study of formally defined voting systems is called social choice theory or voting

theory, a subfield of political science, economics, or mathematics.

With majority rule, those who are unfamiliar with voting theory are often

surprised that another voting system exists, or that disagreements may exist over

the definition of what it means to be supported by a majority. Depending on the

meaning chosen, the common "majority rule" systems can produce results that

the majority does not support. If every election had only two choices, the

winner would be determined using majority rule alone. However, when there

are three or more options, there may not be a single option that is most liked or

most disliked by a majority. A simple choice does not allow voters to express

the ordering or the intensity of their feeling. Different voting systems may give

very different results, particularly in cases where there is no clear majority

preference.

Aspects

A voting system specifies the form of the ballot, the set of allowable votes; and

the tallying method, an algorithm for determining the outcome. This outcome

may be a single winner, or may involve multiple winners such as in the election

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of a legislative body. The voting system may also specify how voting power is

distributed among the voters, and how voters are divided into subgroups

(constituencies) whose votes are counted independently.

The real-world implementation of an election is generally not considered part of

the voting system. For example, though a voting system specifies the ballot

abstractly, it does not specify whether the actual physical ballot takes the form

of a piece of paper, a punch card, or a computer display. A voting system also

does not specify whether or how votes are kept secret, how to verify that votes

are counted accurately, or who is allowed to vote. These are aspects of the

broader topic of elections and election systems.

The Electoral Reform Society is a political pressure group based in the United

Kingdom, believed to be the oldest organisation concerned with electoral

systems in the world. The Society advocates scrapping First Past the Post

(FPTP) for all National and local elections arguing that the system is 'bad for

voters, bad for government and bad for democracy'.

Ballot

Different voting systems have different forms for allowing the individual to

express his or her vote. In ranked ballot or "preference" voting systems, such as

Instant-runoff voting, the Borda count, or a Condorcet method, voters order the

list of options from most to least preferred. In range voting, voters rate each

option separately on a scale. In plurality voting (also known as "first-past-the-

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post"), voters select only one option, while in approval voting, they can select as

many as they want. In voting systems that allow "plumping", like cumulative

voting, voters may vote for the same candidate multiple times.

Some voting systems include additional choices on the ballot, such as write-in

candidates, a none of the above option, or a no confidence in that candidate

option.

Candidates

Some methods call for a primary election first to determine which candidates

will be on the ballot.

Weight of votes

Many elections are based on the principle of "one person, one vote", meaning

that every voter's votes are counted with equal weight. This is not true of all

elections, however. Corporate elections, for instance, usually weight votes

according to the amount of stock each voter holds in the company, changing the

mechanism to "one share, one vote". Votes can also be weighted unequally for

other reasons, such as increasing the voting weight of higher-ranked members

of an organization.

Voting weight is not the same thing as voting power. In situations where certain

groups of voters will all cast the same vote (for example, political parties in a

parliament), voting power measures the ability of a group to change the

outcome of a vote. Groups may form coalitions to maximize voting power.

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In some German states, most notably Prussia and Sachsen, before 1918 there

was a weighted vote system known as the Prussian three-class franchise, where

the electorate would be divided into three categories based on the amount of

income tax paid. Each category would have equal voting power in choosing the

electors.

Status quo

Some voting systems are weighted in themselves, for example if a super

majority is required to change the status quo. An extreme case of this is

unanimous consent, where changing the status quo requires the support of every

voting member. If the decision is whether to accept a new member into an

organization, failure of this procedure to admit the new member is called

blackballing.

A different mechanism that favors the status quo is the requirement for a

quorum, which ensures that the status quo remains if voter participation doesn't

exceed the specified threshold. Quorum requirements often depend only on the

total number of votes cast, rather than the number of votes cast for the winning

option. This can sometimes encourage dissenting voters to refrain from voting,

in order to prevent a quorum.

Constituencies

Often the purpose of an election is to choose a legislative body made of multiple

winners. This can be done by running a single election and choosing the

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winners from the same pool of votes, or by dividing up the voters into

constituencies that have different options and elect different winners.

Some countries, like Israel, fill their entire parliament using a single multiple-

winner district (constituency), while others, like the Republic of Ireland or

Belgium, break up their national elections into smaller multiple-winner districts,

and yet others, like the United States or the United Kingdom, hold only single-

winner elections. The Australian bicameral Parliament has single-member

electorates for the legislative body (lower house) and multi-member electorates

for its Senate (upper house). Some systems, like the Additional member system,

embed smaller districts (constituencies) within larger ones.

The way constituencies are created and assigned seats can dramatically affect

the results. Apportionment is the process by which states, regions, or larger

districts are awarded seats, usually according to population changes as a result

of a census. Redistricting is the process by which the borders of constituencies

are redrawn once apportioned. Both procedures can become highly politically

contentious due to the possibility of both malapportionment, where there are

unequal representative to population ratios across districts, and gerrymandering,

where electoral districts are manipulated for political gain. An example of this

were the UK Rotten and pocket boroughs, parliamentary constituencies that had

a very small electorate — e.g. an abandoned town — and could thus be used by

a patron to gain undue and unrepresentative influence within parliament. This

was a feature of the unreformed House of Commons before the Great Reform

Act of 1832.

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History

Voting has been used as a feature of democracy since the 6th century BC, when

democracy was introduced by the Athenian democracy. However, in Athenian

democracy, voting was seen as the least democratic among methods used for

selecting public officials, and was little used, because elections were believed to

inherently favor the wealthy and well-known over average citizens. Viewed as

more democratic were assemblies open to all citizens, and selection by lot

(known as sortition), as well as rotation of office. One of the earliest recorded

elections in Athens was a plurality vote that it was undesirable to "win": in the

process called ostracism, voters chose the citizen they most wanted to exile for

ten years. Most elections in the early history of democracy were held using

plurality voting or some variant, but as an exception, the state of Venice in the

13th century adopted the system we now know as approval voting to elect their

Great Council.

The Venetians' system for electing the Doge was a particularly convoluted

process, consisting of five rounds of drawing lots (sortition) and five rounds of

approval voting. By drawing lots, a body of 30 electors was chosen, which was

further reduced to nine electors by drawing lots again. An electoral college of

nine members elected 40 people by approval voting; those 40 were reduced to

form a second electoral college of 12 members by drawing lots again. The

second electoral college elected 25 people by approval voting, which were

reduced to form a third electoral college of nine members by drawing lots. The

third electoral college elected 45 people, which were reduced to form a fourth

electoral college of 11 by drawing lots. They in turn elected a final electoral

body of 41 members, who ultimately elected the Doge. Despite its complexity,

the system had certain desirable properties such as being hard to game and

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ensuring that the winner reflected the opinions of both majority and minority

factions. This process, with slight modifications, was central to the politics of

the Republic of Venice throughout its remarkable lifespan of over 500 years,

from 1268 to 1797.