Re: [election-services] Election Counting Method types (Joe's action item)

[Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall@berkeley.edu>]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall
<joehall@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 9:21 AM, David RR Webber (XML) <david@drrw.info> wrote:
>> Joe,
>> Someone volunteered you to assist with list of election counting methods!
>> Here's what I have so far in schemaeze.  Is this enough for now?

After consulting with Rob Richie of FairVote---an NGO here in the US
that champions, in part, forms of alternative voting---the U.S. only
uses a few types of counting methods, notably:

* plurality voting (a/k/a "first past the post")
* cumulative voting (where each voter can allocate a fixed number of
votes to a slate of candidates)
* limited voting (a multi-candidate plurality election where voters
have fewer votes than the number of candidates that can be elected)
* instant-runoff voting (single-winner ranked-choice voting)

There are many variations of the above; for example, some plurality
elections require a certain threshold to be met before a
candidate/issue can win or they require a partisan or non-partisan
runoff (usually if no one wins a majority after the first election).

FairVote keeps a slightly out-of-date (leaves out Port Chester, NY use
of cumulative voting) list here:

http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=2101

David, in terms of your schema-ese, the only one that seems to be
missing from my bullet list above is limited voting.  Of course, I'm
not sure what most of the three-letter abbreviations are without some
xs:annotation elements in there (despite having worked at NASA, my
backronym-ing abilities are just slightly enhanced). ::)

best, Joe

--
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate
UC Berkeley School of Information
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
http://josephhall.org/