The Plurality Method

In this video, we introduce the Plurality Method of voting, that is, the "Vote Your Favorite" or "First Past the Pole." We discuss potential weaknesses of this method and the need for preferential voting.
This is lecture 17 (part 2/2) of the lecture series offered by Dr. Andrew Misseldine for the course Math 1030 - Contemporary Mathematics at Southern Utah University. A transcript of this lecture can be found at Dr. Misseldine's website or through his Google Drive at: drive.google.c...
This lecture is based upon Math in Society by David Lippman (www.opentextbo..., Excursions in Modern Mathematics by Peter Tannenbaum, and Dr. Misseldine's own notes. Please post any questions you might have below in the comment field and Dr. Misseldine (or other commenters) can answer them for you. Please also subscribe for further updates.

[@Mathmusics_yt]

Hello, Andrew! I just sent you an email.

[@nealmccorkle3681]

thank you for this coverage on corruption voting.

[@Misseldine]

I hope to post some more videos of the math of voting sometime in the future.

[@nealmccorkle3681]

@@Misseldine I hope to come across it sometime in the future lol. I currently support the final five method.

[@Misseldine]

@@nealmccorkle3681 personally, I am a proponent of range voting as it is simple to implement, people pretty much already do it when they shop, and it avoids nearly all of the fairness violations that ordinal voting sees. But frankly I think it would be a huge step forward to use any voting method besides plurality.

[@nealmccorkle3681]

@@Misseldine Range voting fails to address what I find to be the biggest issue of plurality. It encourages voters to either strongly support or strongly oppose candidates. Emotional voting would be the rule of the day.

[@Misseldine]

@@nealmccorkle3681 I would argue that quality is an asset of the voting method, not a defect. If a voter feels so strongly about the outcome of an election so that they vote one candidate full marks and all other candidates with no marks, that represents their sincere vote. If they are voting emotionally like that, then that is a sincere vote. Personally, I do not see anything wrong with emotional voting. Voting should be emotional because we attach emotion to things that matter. But poetry aside, a voter electing to vote only in the extremes is a voter acting within their value system. There was a department chair election a few years ago within my department for which three of my colleagues ran for the chairship. I had convinced my dean that the election should be conducted using range voting, and a 5 point range was decided. All three of my colleagues would have been fantastic chairs, but the candidate that I thought would be the best received 5 stars and the worst candidate receive 1 star. I put the two candidates at the extremes of the range because that is how I ranked them. Your top choice should always receive full marks and your last choice should always receive no marks. Whether you do it intentionally or not, every ballot cast does that relative to the outcome of the election, it just comes down to how loud you want your vote to be. It has more impact on the final result to utilize the full range of the vote. Thus, it is smart for voters to use the full range. For the third candidate, I think I gave them 4 points. I thought the candidate was a strong choice, but lesser than my top choice. No ordinal vote, that is, only considering my ranking 1st, 2nd, 3rd, would be able to reflect my preference that two candidates were neck-in-neck with a distant third. My gap between 1st and 2nd was not congruent to the gap between 2nd and 3rd. A total ranking itself is insufficient to see my real preference. On the other hand, if a voter's gap between 1st and 2nd is the full range, whether they cast their vote emotionally or strategically, that sounds like a sincere vote to me. Thus, I would defend that range voting does encourage voters to vote sincerely even if many voters cast extreme votes.