January 10, 2003
One Man, One Vote, Lousy System?
Is plurality voting, also known as one man, one vote (sorry ladies, I don't mean to be offensive, just historically accurate), the best voting method? Not according to vote theorists:
"It's a terrible system," says Alexander Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and director of research for the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "Almost anything looks good compared to it."
It's certainly the easiest to understand. But what about instant runoff, where each voter ranks all the candidates, and the candidate with the fewest votes is recursively eliminated until only one is left? Or Borda voting, where each voter assigns points to each candidate out of a total possible per voter and the winner is the candidate with the most points? Or how about approval voting, where each voter can vote for as many candidates as he wants? Well, Kenneth Arrow demonstrated that the only voting system that works properly 100% of the time is the one man dictatorship (literally, one man, one vote total), not that either he or I advocate that. And in a two candidate vote, it doesn't matter what system you use - they all work. A good testing ground for any new voting proceedures would be primaries, where there are often a more than two candidates. And maybe the American system of two parties, plurality voting, and winner take all victories all works together such that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at January 10, 2003 12:33 PM | Culture
