Voting

Information about Voting

“Vote” redirects here. For the Finno-Ugric people, see Votes.
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Voting is a method of decision making wherein a group such as a meeting or an electorate attempts to gauge its opinion—usually as a final step following discussions or debates.

Voting is used in two different ways. First, members of a group may express their individual interests by their votes in order to aggregate them into a single group preference.

Second, members of a jury may express their individual opinions by their votes in order to select that opinion.

Process of voting

Most forms of democracy discern the will of the people by a common voting procedure:
  • Individual registration and qualification,
  • Opening the Election for a set time period,
  • Registration of voters at established voting locations,
  • Distribution of ballots with preset candidates, issues, and choices (including the write-in option in some cases),
  • Selection of preferred choices (oftentimes in secret, called a secret ballot),
  • Secure collection of ballots for unbiased counting, and
  • Proclamation of the will of the voters as the will of the people for their government.

Reasons for voting

In a democracy, voting commonly implies election, i.e. a way for an electorate to select among candidates for office. In politics voting is the method by which the electorate of a democracy appoints representatives in its government.

A vote, or a ballot, is an individual's act of voting, by which he or she express support or preference for a certain motion (e.g. a proposed resolution), a certain candidate, or a certain selection of candidates. A secret ballot, the standard way to protect voters' political privacy, generally takes place at a polling station. (Compare postal ballot). The act of voting in most countries is voluntary, however some countries, such as Australia, Belgium and Brazil, have compulsory voting systems.

Though voting is usually recognized as one of the main characteristics of democracy, a country's having an election featuring the populace casting votes does not necessarily mean the country is democratic. Many authoritarian governments have "elections" but the candidates are pre-chosen and approved by elites, there is no competition, voter qualifications are restrictive, and voting is often a sham.

Some people argue that votes recorded with a medium which is not human-readable (such as with electronic voting_) electors have no ability to verify how their votes are recorded and tallied, requiring faith in the accuracy of the system. With non-electronic voting systems voters voters may have the ability to verify ballots are cast as recorded, but are still unable to follow the chain of custody (such as after it is placed in a ballot box) to verify the final tally of their vote.

While being unable to verify an individual voter's selections in the final tally is generally an inherent flaw with the secret ballot, recent research into end-to-end auditable voting systems (E2E) has the potential to make this possible. E2E systems allow voters capable of comprehending complex cryptography to verify that their vote is included in the tally, all votes were cast by valid voters, and the results are tabulated correctly

Types of votes

Different voting systems use different types of vote. Suppose that the options in some election are Alice, Bob, Charlie, Daniel, and Emily.

In a voting system that uses a single vote, the voter can select one of the five that they most approve of. "First past the post" uses single votes. So, a voter might vote for Charlie. This precludes him voting for anyone else.

An improvement on the single vote system is to have run-off elections, or repeat first past the post, however, the winner must win by 50% plus one, called a simple majority. If subsequent votes must be used, often a candidate, the one with the fewest votes or anyone who wants to move their support to another candidate, is removed from the ballot.

In a voting system that uses a multiple vote, the voter can vote for any subset of the alternatives. So, a voter might vote for Alice, Bob, and Charlie, rejecting Daniel and Emily. Approval voting uses such multiple votes.

In a voting system that uses a ranked vote, the voter has to rank the alternatives in order of preference. For example, they might vote for Bob in first place, then Emily, then Alice, then Daniel, and finally Charlie. Many voting systems use ranked votes.

In a voting system that uses a scored vote (or range vote), the voter gives each alternative a number between one and ten (the upper and lower bounds may vary). See range voting.

Fair voting

Economist Kenneth Arrow lists five characteristics of a fair voting system. However, Arrow's impossibility theorem shows that it is impossible for any voting system which offers more than three options per question to have all 5 characteristics at the same time.

Casting a vote expresses an implied willingness to participate in a common process with some shared outcome. Those who feel unable to express their limits or boundaries of tolerance in a voting system may be more likely to resist or fight or fail to support decisions made through it (more of an issue with parties or policies). Those who feel unable to express their real preferences may lack all enthusiasm for the choices or for the eventually chosen representative or leader. Any vote balances both kinds of considerations.

One common issue, especially in first-past-the-post systems, is that of the protest vote: one might "waste one's vote" on a minor party to send a signal of strong preference for a candidate or party that cannot win, or of intolerance for the "more mainstream" options. However it is difficult to tell from the vote alone whether one is positively inclined to the minor party or negatively inclined to the major party. Russia offers its electors a "None of the Above" option, so that protest votes can be properly tallied. Other jurisdictions may record the incidence of (apparently deliberately) spoiled ballot papers.

Also, it is often not clear whether the voter really understands how his or her vote is counted in the voting system, especially with the more complex types. This often leads to issues with the results. Ballot design and the use of voting machines have particular importance, given this issue. Optimally participants in a vote should perceive the results, especially of a political vote, as fair. If fairness appears lacking, resistance to the results may lead at best to confusion, at worst to violence and even civil war, in the case of political rivals.

In an effort to make balloting cheaper and more transparent, Brazil introduced electronic voting in all levels of elections, gradually since 1994. By 2002 general elections, all voting in Brazil was cast on electronic system, with paper ballots being used only in last case emergencies (such as black-outs). Argentina followed in 14 September 2003, for a gubernatorial election. This pilot test involved 500,000 voters distributed among 20 constituencies in the eastern Argentine province of Buenos Aires.

Criteria. It may be premature to try to choose the best method of voting if we have not yet agreed on the criteria by which the methods are to be judged. The criterion most commonly accepted is that the method should choose the candidate or policy that would defeat all others in a series of individual contests. This is what our usual balloting system does, looking only at the voter’s positive choices. Pairwise comparisons is a good implementation of that aim.

Maybe that should not be the sole criterion, however. Another possible goal would be to protect minorities from what has been called the “militant majority.” A town meeting is one implementation of democracy that often does this. Such a meeting would probably not choose the initially most popular candidate if that candidate was totally unacceptable to a significant minority. A candidate would probably be chosen who had slightly fewer supporters but many fewer enemies. A blackball or veto provision also protects minority rights, though at great cost to majority rule.

It may be desirable then that an ideal voting system should consider who people oppose as well as who they support. These are not mirror images of each other. The decision makers have latitudes of acceptance, indifference, and rejection, and these may differ in their widths. Many alternatives may fall in the latitude of indifference - they are neither accepted nor rejected. Avoiding the choice that the most people strongly reject may sometimes be at least as important as choosing the one that they most favor.

Voting and Information

Modern political science has questioned whether average citizens have sufficient political information to cast meaningful votes. A series of studies coming out of the University of Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s argued that voters lack a basic understanding of current issues, the liberal-conservative ideological dimension, and the relative ideological positions of the major parties. Only a handful of sophisticated voters--usually those with education and high levels of political involvement--seemed to understand political debates fully.[1][2]

Though these studies arose from research in the United States, their implications for democracy are severe. However, these conclusions continue to be contested as current scholarly research debates the Michigan studies' findings. A consensus has begun to emerge that voters do not need the high levels of political information that the Michigan studies expected to find in order to participate fully in politics; instead, voters learn to rely on "information shortcuts"--for example, they look at which politicians and interest groups endorse each side of a proposal to get a feel for whether they ought to support it.[3][4]

See also

References

1. ^ Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes. 1960. The American voter. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2. ^ Converse. 1964. The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In Ideology and Discontent, edited by David Apter. ()
3. ^ Popkin. 1994. The reasoning voter: Communication and persuasion in presidential campaigns. 2d edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
4. ^ Lupia and McCubbins. 1998. The Democratic Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (

External links

Finno-Ugric peoples is used to describe peoples speaking a Finno-Ugric language.

Location

The four largest Finno-Ugric peoples are Hungarians (14,800,000), Finns (6,000,000-7,000,000), Mordvins (1,200,000), and Estonians (1,100,000).
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Votes are people of Votia in Ingria (part of modern day northwestern Russia, roughly (south)west of Saint Petersburg, near, and east of the Estonian border-town of Narva). Their own ethnic name is Vadjalain (plural: Vadjalaizõt).
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Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, politics is observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious
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An election is a decision making process where people choose people to hold official offices. This is the usual mechanism by which modern democracy fills offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government.
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An absentee ballot is a vote cast by someone who is unable or unwilling to attend the official polling station. Numerous methods have been devised to facilitate this. Increasing the ease of access to absentee ballots are seen by many as one way to improve voter turnout, though
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For discussion of abstention of courts in a legal context, see .
Abstention is a term in election procedure for when a participant in a vote either does not go to vote (on election day) or, in parliamentary procedure, is present during the vote, but does
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ballot is a device (originally a small ball - see blackball) used to record choices made by voters. Each voter uses one ballot, and ballots are not shared. In the simplest elections, a ballot may be a simple scrap of paper on which each voter writes in the name of a candidate, but
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ballot box is a temporarily sealed container, usually cuboid though sometimes a tamper resistant bag, with a narrow slot in the top sufficient to accept a ballot paper in an election but which prevents anyone from accessing the votes cast until the close of the voting period.
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Ballot stuffing is the illegal act of one person submitting multiple ballots during a vote in which only one ballot per person is permitted. The name originates from the earliest days of this practice in which people literally did stuff more than one ballot in a ballot box at the
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Early voting, is the process which voters can cast their vote on a single or series of days prior to an election. Early voting can take place remotely, such as by mail, or in person, usually in designated early voting polling stations.
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Election Day Registration, also known as "same-day voter registration," permits eligible citizens to register and vote on Election Day. Election Day Registration significantly increases the opportunity for all citizens to cast a vote and participate in democracy.
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In party-list proportional representation systems, an election threshold is a clause that stipulates that a party must receive a minimum percentage of votes, either nationally or within a particular district, to get any seats in the parliament.
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An elector can be anyone who has a vote in an election:
  • The prince-electors of the "Holy Roman Empire of German Nation", were the highest college in the Imperial diet, of originally seven (eight since 1648, later more) Electors (often thus shortened; Kurfürsten

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None of the Above (NOTA) or against all is a ballot choice in some jurisdictions or organizations, placed so as to allow the voter to indicate his disapproval with all of the candidates in any voting system.
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The paradox of voting, also referred to as Downs paradox is a reference to the fact that for a rational, self-interested voter, the costs of voting will normally exceed the expected benefits. Because the chance of exercising a decisive vote (i.e.
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polling station or polling place (the latter usage being favored in the United States) is where voters cast their ballots in elections.

Since elections generally take place over a one- or two-day span on a periodic basis, often annual or longer, polling stations are
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Postal voting describes the method of voting in an election whereby ballot papers are distributed and/or returned by post to electors, in contrast to electors voting in person at a polling station or electronically via an electronic voting system.
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For the law enforcement usage, see police station.
A precinct is a space enclosed by the walls or other boundaries of a particular place or building, or by an arbitrary and imaginary line drawn around it. There are several different uses for the word.
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preference for a particular individual candidate on a party list by voting for him or her.

In the Netherlands, a country with an open list proportional representation system, this is quite common.
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A Protest vote is a vote cast in an election to demonstrate the caster's unhappiness with the choice of candidates or refusal of the current political system. It can thus be said "conjectural," as the voter would accept others candidates in the same system, or "structural," if the
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A provisional ballot is used to record a vote when there is some question in regards to a given voter's eligibility. A provisional ballot would be cast when:
  • The voter refuses to show a photo ID (in regions that require one)

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A refused ballot, or similar alternative, is a choice available to voters in many elections. This is an alternative for many people to casting a disparaging Spoiled ballot, which is not counted separately from ballots which have been accidentally destroyed.
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secret ballot is a voting method in which a voter's choices are confidential. The key aim is to ensure the voter records a sincere choice by forestalling attempts to influence the voter by intimidation or bribery.
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In voting, a ballot is considered to be spoilt, void, null or informal if it is regarded by the election authorities to be invalid and thus not included in the tally during vote counting. This may be done accidentally or deliberately.
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In voting systems, tactical voting (or strategic voting or sophisticated voting) occurs when a voter supports a candidate other than his or her sincere preference in order to prevent an undesirable outcome.
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A tally (also see tally sticks) is an unofficial private observation of an election count carried out under Proportional Representation using the Single Transferable Vote.
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A ticket refers to a single election choice which fills more than one political office or seat. For example, in the U.S., the candidates for President and Vice President run on the same "ticket", because they are elected together on a single ballot question rather than separately.
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Ticket Splitters are those who vote for candidates from more than one political party when they vote for public offices, voting on the basis of individual personalities and records instead of on the basis of party loyalties.
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A vote center sometimes known as a super precinct is a polling place that combines multiple precincts allowing voters to choose at which location to vote. Voter centers can be used to allow voters to choose from any polling place within a larger jurisdiction, commonly
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Vote pairing (or vote swapping as it has also been called) is the method where a voter in one district agrees to vote tactically for a less-preferred candidate or party who has a greater chance of winning in their district, in exchange for a voter from another district voting
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