[EM] Cumulative Voting implementation

Bart Ingles bartman at netgate.net
Wed Aug 18 13:44:02 PDT 1999


I had always assumed that Cumulative Voting required number-voting
equipment to be feasible, but it just occurred to me that standard "X"
voting equipment is all that is required.  You simply divide the number
of candidates on the ballot by the number of candidates that a voter
selects, to get the fractional vote for each candidate.

So if a voter selects only one candidate out of five, that candidate
gets five votes.  If the voter selects two candidates, each candidate
gets 2-1/2 votes.

This is not quite the same as point-based cumulative voting, since there
is no way for a voter to give unequal weight to different candidates,
but it probably doesn't make strategic sense to divide the points
unequally anyway, at least in most situations.

This seems less vulnerable to strategy than Limited Voting.  Am I the
last person to think of this?  Does it even sound feasible?



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