What makes a voting system fair?
What makes a voting system fair?Most will agree that “fairness” of the vote is the most important criteria for a voting system whether paper voting or online voting. “Fairest” vote could be defined as the vote which best represents the wish of the majority of the electorate.
Many things can affect fairness of the vote. For example:
* the openness of the contest to willing candidates
* the ease with which people can vote and gain access to information on candidates
* the vote counting method
* the integrity of the vote harvest, vote counting and result reporting
* the existence and transparency of an audit trail
* ease with which voters can confirm that their vote was recorded and counted correctly, and
* the time, cost and resources required to run a vote.
The choice between an online voting system, paper voting system or hybrid voting system can affect all these aspects of the vote fairness. As the manager of BigPulse.com, a firm that has specialized in high security online voting for ten years, my bias is clearly declared towards online voting and in some cases hybrid voting.
Security and protection of anonymity are the hardest to get right in any voting system, requiring many years of testing in electronic voting systems. However a properly tested online voting system can offer many advantages for security, transparency, accessibility, flexibility and cost.
A flexible online voting system will cater for many vote counting methods. The choice of vote counting method is an important consideration in fairness, for example first-past-the- post voting (FPTP) , Single Transferable Vote (STV), Instant-runoff voting (IRV) or range voting – and each method can produce different winners.
However it is not always clear which voting counting method provides the best measurement of majority opinion as there is not always a definitive mathematical answer to this question.
For example a single round vote FPTP contest with three or more candidates can produce a winner which never wins in a paired contest with any other candidate, while it is possible that a losing candidate in a FPTP vote contest may win in any paired contest. Most people will agree that in this case the FPTP result is not fair and an alternative voting method that comes closer to emulating the paired result is fairer. Preferential voting, that is, ranked voting methods and FPTP with multiple rounds of voting tend to reduce this risk of eliminating candidates that do better in paired contests.
Maximizing the degree of proportional representation and minimizing the incentive for strategic voting are two important measures of fairness. Proportional representation means the elected candidates represent the natural divisions within the electorate. Strategic voting means voting for what you think is the best possible or likely outcome even if it means not voting according to your true preferences – for example in a contest with three or more candidates, voters can be tempted to guess how others will vote and attempt to vote in a manner that gives the best likely result, rather than voting their true preferences.
A degree of proportional representation is possible in contests with more than one winner, the more winners the more proportional it can be. In this case the form of preferential or ranked voting known as Single Transferable Vote is fairer than FPTP because the Single Transferable Vote is much better than FPTP at producing proportional representation. However in a single winner contest (known as instant-runoff in the case of Single Transferable Vote), neither system can produce proportional representation, although Single Transferable Vote may be considered fairer in the sense that it leaves the door open to proportional representation.
If elimination of strategic voting is the criteria of fairness then the fair choice between FPTP and instant-runoff is not quite so obvious as it depends on the number of candidates and how many rounds of voting can be tolerated with FPTP voting. For example, if only one candidate is eliminated after each round of voting then, from the perspective of strategic voting, the FPTP vote is just as fair as instant run off and also allows people to simply vote their first preference in each round of voting.
However FPTP is inferior to instant-runoff when more than one candidate is eliminated after any round of FPTP voting. Also with multiple round FPTP voting, voter fatigue, cost and time delay may all impact on fairness. For example a contest with 10 candidates can require up to nine rounds of voting using FPTP if it is to match the fairness of an instant runoff vote. The instant-runoff vote requires only one round of voting.
For more information : online elections, online voting system, online voting software
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