[EM] Voting System - Wiki

[Juho Laatu]

On 19 May 2014, at 08:21, DNOW1 at aol.com wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system
> 
> See the above as a followup to my earlier Divided Majority posting.
> 
> Obviously with 3 or more choices -- ALL election methods have possible problems at the winning boundary.
> 
> An election method is obviously to be used in REAL elections -- having some durational effect
> 
> --- i.e. NOT a zillion replays about the various groups playing nonstop strategy voting games.

This list has a wide scope. There's quite a lot of interest to study the most extreme environments where strategic voting, nomination and gerrymandering is rampant. Large part of the research is also academic in the sense that people want to study the extremes just to see what's there. In real elections not all of the proposed strategies will be problematic for many reasons, like te inability of the parties and strategists to control how the voters will vote, the inability of the strategists to know what the true opinions will be at the election day, the impact of multiple groups and individuals planning (rational and irrational) strategies simultaneously, the impact of voters intentionally avoiding and punishing any foul play or even mentioning that possibility etc. There may however be also elections that are more vulnerable to strategic voting, like in a situation where a very small group of hostile election method experts vote on the same question for third time. But if we talk about typical large public elections, the problems of strategic voting are very different, typivally easier, but not in all cases since also various irrational strategis may pop up.

I note that there may also be elections that are less problmatic than typical political public elections. I mean that political elections are typically quite competitive, and there may well be situations where people are less competitive, e.g. when voting among friends on which restaurant to choose for a dinner, or when judges vote for the best athlete.

I'd be happier if the analysis on his list would more frequently point out which claims are intended to work or be important in public elections and when we are talking about some entirely different environments. Both / all approaches are needed but it would make sense to put more emphasis also on which vulnerabilities and strategies are relevant in typical real life (political) elections.

> 
> Thus -- folks on this list may/should try to get their ideas put into the V.S. wiki 
> 
> -- i.e. must get past the *experts* who review stuff for each wiki.----

Many discussions on this list are original research. Wikipedia does not want to have research stuff in there but only established facts. Therefore typically new material on this list should first be published somewhere, get accepted, an only then put in the Wikipdia. Of course many people in this list are very competent in the area of voting systems, and I hope many of them do contribute also in Wikipedia. But we should be aware that some of the stuff discussed here is simply not yet mature for Wikipedia. Of course one can contribute also by improving the existing Wikipedia articles and even by removing unwanted stuff out of there and by replacing it with better text, i.e. no need to take all the new inventions in but just make the text cover all the already established facts better.

Note that for the purpose of recording all the ideas on this list people do put this stuff occasionally also on the EM web pages in http://electorama.com.

Juho



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