Hello, I have three papers that may be of interest to members of this list. I would appreciate any comments, and please send them to me off list. PDF's can be downloaded from http://ssrn.com/author=367415 and abstracts are listed below.
best regards, Jeff O'Neill (1) When a Plurality is Good Enough, submitted to Public Choice This paper investigates when a runoff election is desirable and when a plurality result is good enough. A runoff election increases the likelihood that the Condorcet winner will be elected but also entails additional costs. The metric for determining whether a runoff election is desirable will be the probability that the winner of the plurality election would win an ensuing runoff. Models of voter behavior are developed that estimate this probability, which are verified with runoff-election data from United States elections. The models allow governments to make more informed choices in creating rules to decide when to hold runoff elections. (2) Fast Algorithms for Counting Ranked Ballots, to appear in Voting Matters. With a number of voting systems, voters cast ballots by ranking the candidates in order of preference. Voting systems that used ranked ballots - e.g., the single transferable vote and Condorcet methods - have theoretical advantages over simpler voting systems that do not use ranked ballots, but are computationally more intensive. This article shows that, by organinizing ballots into a tree data structure, the computations can be decreased dramatically. For example, with different versions of the single transferable vote, the compuatation times will be decreased ten to twenty fold. (3) Everything that can be Counted Does not Necessarily Count: The Right to Vote and the Choice of a Voting System, to appear in the Michigan State Law Review This article investigates how the choice of a voting system impacts the right to vote. It presents the first comprehensive summary of the usage of alternative voting systems in the United States and also the first comprehensive summary of the caselaw on voting systems. Two aspects of the right to vote are considered: the right to an equally effective vote and the right to a reliable electoral outcome. The right to an equally effective of vote is considered as a generalization and unification of disparate but related rights. The only voting system that clearly violates this right is at-large voting. Commentators have previously criticized the discriminatory effects of at-large voting, but not in the last twenty years. This article takes a fresh look at the legal viability of at-large voting in light of the Supreme Court's more recent jurisprudence. The right to a reliable electoral outcome is a heretofore undefined but eminently reasonable right. If nothing else, the outcome of an election must be meaningful in some sense. From a survey of the Supreme Court's election law jurisprudence, notably the Anderson balancing test, a middle-level review or reasonableness test is proposed to regulate the right to a reliable outcome. This article then applies this right to several voting systems, shows when they would violate this right, and suggests possible remedies. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
