[EM] Cumulative voting class of systems

[Richard Lung]

Cumulative voting class of systems.

A class of votes, originating in the cumulative vote, are essentially 
attempts to endow different weights of vote to candidates, by giving 
them, say, five stars or up to 100 points to distribute among the 
candidates. Such multiple votes count against each other, as Enid 
Lakeman said, so they are self-defeating. Giving the voter a cardinal 
vote is giving the voter an abortive role in the count, because cardinal 
votes are suitable for a collective role, not an individual role.
Whereas an ordinal vote indicates the voters (equal) part in the count, 
whereby successive preferences input successive stages of the 
(collective) count.
Cardinal voting provokes an insincere temptation to “plumping” which 
denies the reality of relative choice, by the tactic of giving maximum 
number of votes and chance of election to one candidate (as an expedient 
against not electing anyone).
The fallacy of cardinal voting systems, from cumulative voting onwards, 
is that they attempt to invest in individual voters what only a 
(cardinal) number of voters can collectively determine, as a community, 
in the count. Each voter can individually order a list of their prefered 
candidates, but the sum of their choices must be left to a (cardinal) 
enumeration of their joint wishes as a whole unit or community.

Simple Plurality is so crude a system, it cannot distinguish between an 
election and an exclusion. For simple, read unfinished. Cardinal voting 
confuses the voting with the counting. Condorcet pairing is for the 
least democratic  (and most dictatorial) outcome of single member 
monopolies. And party lists abolish universal suffrage, for parties or 
their bosses to draw up the lists. Hybrid systems of simple plurality 
with Additional Members for party lists are so degenerate that career 
politicians double count their election with the assistance of "fake" or 
"decoy" parties. AMS or MMP is so comprehensively corrupt or broken a 
system that it is almost interesting (in the proverbial Chinese sense) 
as a case of HOW NOT TO DO IT, to use a Dickensian phrase.

Richard Lung.