[EM] How choice of voting systems depend on amount of participants

[Richard Fobes]

On 10/8/2014 1:01 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
 > That's not quite what I was thinking about. More like this:
 >
 > 1. Hold an election.
 > 2. If candidate X has a majority, you're done; elect X.
 > 3. Otherwise, wait k weeks and
 > 4. Go to 1.
 >
 > ...
 > Or was that how the Electoral College was originally intended to work?

If you change the word "weeks" to "hours" then that's the way the 
Electoral College was designed to work.  The same law is still in 
effect.  However, modern conventions (which include indirect ways of 
blocking "third" parties) have prevented the need to go beyond step 2.

Richard Fobes



On 10/8/2014 1:01 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 10/07/2014 10:42 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
>> On 10/6/2014 11:47 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>>> ...
>>> I seem to recall someone mentioning a US region that used majority
>>> voting: there were rounds of voting until someone got an outright
>>> majority, and the rounds kept on for as long as needed. I don't recall
>>> the details, though.
>>
>> This is how the "electoral college" works when voting for U.S.
>> President, or at least the way it was set up to work. Under current
>> conditions, with each state giving all its electoral votes to either the
>> Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate (and never any
>> electoral votes to a third-party candidate), in recent decades there has
>> always a winner on the first round of voting. If there were not a
>> majority winner, then the contest would be (and has been, three or four
>> times) transferred to the U.S. House of Representatives, with each state
>> getting one vote (but with no indication as to how that one vote (per
>> state) is assigned).
>
> That's not quite what I was thinking about. More like this:
>
> 1. Hold an election.
> 2. If candidate X has a majority, you're done; elect X.
> 3. Otherwise, wait k weeks and
> 4. Go to 1.
>
> So the elections keep going until the voters decide that someone
> deserves a majority. (The person who was elected last time stays in
> office until that happens.)
>
> Or was that how the Electoral College was originally intended to work?
>
>
>