[EM] Election methods scholarship

[Joseph Malkevitch]

In the United States elections will be held in November 2026 for all 435 seats in House of Representatives and  33 seats in the 100 seat Senate. Oversimplifying a trifle, seats are held by either members of the Democratic or Republican parties. Party primary elections sometimes occur to choose the candidate who will be on the ballot for the party. Many elections involve more than two "alternatives." Nearly all elections in America involve a ballot where the voter votes for exactly one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins - plurality voting. Reformers urge that democracy would be strengthened by using more "expressive" ballots - ordinal ranked ballots, perhaps with indifference, yes/no ballots, approval ballots, etc.. Some communities have moved towards having more "expressive" ballots and in some places votes will occur to allow these more expressive ballets. When more expressive ballots are used and there are 3 or more candidates there are heated debates about what is the "best" method to decide the "winner."

Two widely discussed approaches are based on ideas of Condorcet and Borda. There are many scholarly treatments of these matters. For those who might need a place to start learning about the issues you can look at this web page of Donald Saari

https://www.math.uci.edu/~dsaari/Saari_preprints.htm

The issues are complicated and subtle.

Regards,

Joe


——————————————
Joseph Malkevitch

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