Voting

The US voting process hasn’t had an upgrade in centuries. With the rise of social media echo chambers, polarization has become an issue that affects our politics.

Our current winner-takes-all approach leads some to vote for a bad candidate just because “the other is worse”. People often complain voting outside the main candidates is “a wasted vote”. Isn’t there a better way to vote for who you want and not what you think is the most popular?

Here are some alternative voting methods that have been shown to lead to outcomes a majority feel good about:

• Scored Voting
• Ranked Choice Voting
• Approval Voting
• Borda Count
• Quadratic Voting

Score Voting

Just like an Amazon Review, Score Voting allows you to pick multiple items and assign a score to each item.

Pros:

• Simple
• Leads to one of highest rates of voter satisfaction (quantified by Bayesian Regret).
• Flexible enough to seemlessly handle write-in candidates

Cons:

• Has very little political backing

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)

Perhaps the voting method gaining the most traction as a replacement to our current system is Ranked Choice Voting. There are several possible implementations such as Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) and Single Transferable Vote (STV). Ranked Choice Voting allows voters to rank their choices. Then a procedure is followed where each round, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. Second-preference choices are then combined with the first-preference votes. This process continues until a candidate wins a majorty of first-preference votes.

Pros:

• Is gaining traction and awareness
• It’s better than our current system (but anything is)

Cons:

• It’s complicated
• Even after the process, a majority isn’t guaranteed
• Doesn’t completely address vote splitting

Approval Voting

Approval Voting is where a voter can select multiple candidates that they approve of.

Pros:

• Has decent amount of publicity
• Does better than our current system (but anything is)
• Simple

Cons:

• Does not capture the magnitude of a voter’s approval.
• Does not capture negative opinion. Not voting for a candidate is not the same as disliking one.

Borda Count

Borda count is another family of ranked voting system. It is a positional voting system which means preferences are counted at different values. The lowest ranked candidate gets 0 points, the next lowest gets 1, etc., until we reach the highest ranked choice who gets n - 1 points.

Pros:

• On average does better than RCV.

Cons:

• Slightly complicated

Quadratic Voting

In quadratic voting, each voter gets a budget of vote credits that they have the choice in spending in order to vote. The cost to the voter is quadratic in the number of votes it counts as.

Pros:

• Allows voters to show how much an issue matters to them

Cons:

• “Buying” votes from others or other types of collusion may be incentivized

Identity

In addition to all of this, a proof of identity or proof of humanity will help in proving uniqueness of an individual which is important for tasks like voting. This will allow us to vote digitally without needing to worry of vote tampering. But this is a whole topic on its own.