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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.