[EM] Modeling voting situations

[Joseph Malkevitch]

Those of us who believe in democracy wonder about if there are ways to make the version we live under work better. While the American Constitution was a remarkable document for its day, it tolerated slavery and woman could not vote. Over the years it has been amended to try to make American democracy "work" better. In my lifetime, however, twice the winner of the popular vote for President was not elected. Some defend the Electoral College but I think it would be more democratic to substitute a better method to elect the President.

Americans vote in a wide range of situations - President, members of the House of Representatives, Senators, state officials, local officials, what to serve at a club picnic, etc.. It probably makes sense for the ballot type and decision method for different settings to be different. For some situations a single winner makes sense and for others a ranking might be valuable, and sometimes several choices from the choice of selections, perhaps to choose a committee is made.


Different ballot types come with different pros and cons. When I first became a teacher I tried to grade examination papers as uniformly and fairly as possible. But for a large class with many questions I could not grade all the questions in one sitting and it became clear to me that the way I graded some questions changed with time - some answers seemed to deserve little partial credit but if about 70 percent of the made that "silly" error perhaps I should adjust how many points I took off for that error. With time I graded papers so I did not know the name of whose paper I was grading (but sometimes students papers clued me about whose paper it was by distinctive handwriting ); I tried to grade all papers on question 4 in one time slot and take off the same amount for identical or similar errors; before starting my grading I tried to develop a rubric for how much to take off for each error, but often students made errors I did not anticipate; etc. These steps made paper grading take more time but I felt students deserved these steps on my part.

Here are some notes I prepared for some voting/election for a course I taught

https://web.york.cuny.edu/~malk/gametheory/tc-2022-brief-voting-methods.pdf

https://web.york.cuny.edu/~malk/gametheory/tc-2022-voting-methods.pdf

Lots of similar and related materials that I taught over a period of many years

https://web.york.cuny.edu/~malk/gametheory/index.html

https://web.york.cuny.edu/~malk/modeling/index.html

I am choosing not to vote in the poll because I am not clear on what the choices are  and how to express my views.

In my classes on fairness I ask students to, for example, take a list of say 10 fruits they probably have tasted and for each pair of fruits say which they prefer, without a tie. It is not uncommon for many students to do so in a way that violates transitivity. When shown the violation they sometimes make changes. Some people argue that in choice situations where a Condorcet winner does exist that there may be "better" choices from some points of view. As we know for group decision making there may be no Condorcet winner

Cheers,

Joe

——————————————
Joseph Malkevitch

Email:
jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu
Web page:
http://york.cuny.edu/~malk/
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