Voting Paradoxes and How to Deal with Them

by Hannu Nurmi

Voting paradoxes are unpleasant surprises encountered in elections. They pertain to such phenomena as additional support being detrimental for candidates and not voting leading to better outcomes than voting for some voters. No voting system is immune to all paradoxes and, therefore voting paradoxes are being dealt with by all voting systems currently in use. How they are and how they should be handled is the main subject of this book. The book outlines, explains and classifies a number of paradoxes: Bordas and Condorcets classic ones, several monotonicity and compound majority paradoxes as well as some paradoxes of representation. Both theoretical and practical ways of avoiding them are discussed.

164 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 1999

Reviews

[Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly mathematical treatment of different types of voting paradoxes. This monograph gets pretty deep into the differen ways that voting systems can fail - from the more well-known Condorcet paradox to more obscure ones. Nurmi here comes out in favor of a Borda count as the most robust of voting approaches to different paradoxes and notes that a plurality vote that we have today is not really a viable alternative.