Which voting methods best encourage voters to vote honestly? There are many reasons we care: Dishonest voting artificially distorts vote totals; consider, for instance, voters who prefer third-party candidates to major-party candidates but strategically vote for the more tolerable major-party candidate instead. …

When Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, more commonly known as single-winner Ranked Choice Voting) fails to elect the Condorcet winner, people who prefer other non-Plurality voting methods interpret it as a failure of IRV and say that IRV elected the wrong winner. This happened in the 2022 special election for the…

This is a fantastic study, and I've added it to my list of links for how to learn about voting methods (https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/how-to-learn-about-voting-methods-4e6c0e4d38d9). It's every bit as good as a similar study for the 2016 Presidential election (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352547793_Comparing_voting_methods_2016_US_presidential_election), and the fact that it focuses on a hotly contested nonpartisan election makes…

A bit over two years ago, I got in contact with Jameson Quinn to voice some concerns about how strategic voting was modeled in his Voter Satisfaction Efficiency simulations. He responded back, asking if I’d like to coauthor a paper with him — an opportunity that I jumped on. That…

Materials for everyone, from complete beginners to experts — Unlike every other post on this blog, this one is designed to be accessible to people who have no prior knowledge of voting methods. If this is you, I suggest reading the articles in order (but you’re encouraged to poke around the sites I link to; there’s plenty of good…

Loosely speaking, proportional representation (PR) means having the preferences of the electorate be proportionately reflected in an elected body. These preferences can be about partisanship, ideology, geography, race, religion, or anything else a sizable chunk of the electorate deems important. …

A big selling point Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is that it’s tried and true; it’s used by major US cities like San Francisco and New York, and in Maine, Alaska, Australia, and Ireland. By contrast, Approval Voting is used in just St. Louis and Fargo, STAR Voting isn’t used by…

“How will this affect political culture?” — I recently wrote an evaluation of how much good we can do by working on voting methods reform as an entry for Open Philanthropy's cause exploration prizes. Two takeaways: First, adopting better voting methods matters a lot. …

Last year I wrote about the evidence from Australia on how third parties fare under Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), both the single-winner version, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), and the proportional multi-winner version, Single Transferable Vote (STV). This year there was another election, and it gives us a lot more data…