Voting System - Evaluating Voting Systems Using Criteria

Evaluating Voting Systems Using Criteria

In the real world, attitudes toward voting systems are highly influenced by the systems' impact on groups that one supports or opposes. This can make the objective comparison of voting systems difficult.

There are several ways to address this problem. Criteria can be defined mathematically, such that any voting system either passes or fails. This gives perfectly objective results, but their practical relevance is still arguable. Another approach is to define ideal criteria that no voting system passes perfectly, and then see how often or how close to passing various systems are over a large sample of simulated elections. This gives results which are practically relevant, but the method of generating the sample of simulated elections can still be arguably biased. A final approach is to create imprecisely defined criteria, and then assign a neutral body to evaluate each system according to these criteria. This approach can look at aspects of voting systems which the other two approaches miss, but both the definitions of these criteria and the evaluations of the methods are still inevitably subjective.