Voting matters — To advance the understanding of preferential voting systems

Issue 29, October 2011

(Complete issue in PDF, 402KB.)

Editorial

There are five items in this issue:

• The first paper, by James Green-Armytage, describes four voting procedures for electing a single candidate from ranked preferences of voters. The four procedures differ very slightly from one another, and all are notable for electing the Condorcet winner when there is one and for strongly limiting the opportunity to benefit from strategic voting.
• In the second paper, David Hill explains the virtues, in terms of representativeness and the minimization of wasted votes, of having voters rank parties and using transfers in the vote counting, if party lists are to be used to elect a set of representatives.
• In the third paper, Peter Emerson makes a case for using the matrix vote to elect a collection of leaders and, with the same ballot, to name a person to each leadership position.
• The fourth paper is a discussion by Svante Janson of the virtues of using an exact Droop quota rather than a rounded Droop quota.
• The fifth and final item is Markus Schulze's review of Voting Theory for Democracy, by Thomas Colignatus.

Papers with citations

1. James Green-Armytage: Four Condorcet-Hare Hybrid Methods for Single-Winner Elections. (p1-14, PDF 252KB)
2. I.D. Hill: Party Lists and Preference Voting. (p15-19, PDF 43KB)
3. Peter Emerson: The Matrix Vote: Electing an All-Party Coalition Cabinet . (p20-31, PDF 143KB)
4. Svante Janson: Another Note on the Droop Quota and Rounding (p32-34, PDF 31KB)
5. Markus Schulze: Review -- Voting Theory for Democracy (p35-37, PDF 31KB)