The Importance of Voting Systems

By Madeleine Kando

Depending on where you live in the world, voting systems vary greatly. In some countries, people don’t vote at all. They live in dictatorships. In some other countries, voting is restricted to certain parts of the population (usually men). Universal suffrage is shockingly recent. Before World War II, women couldn’t vote in 155 of the 195 countries in the world. Whether you lived in beautiful France, Switzerland, or sunny Spain, women had no voice. Saudi Arabia allowed women to vote only 8 years ago!

Types of Voting Systems

There are two predominant electoral systems in the world: Plurality voting and Proportional Representation.

Plurality Voting (also called “first-past-the-post” or "winner-take-all") awards a seat to the candidate who receives the most votes. It need not be a majority (50%+), so long as the candidate has a larger number of votes than all other candidates. Plurality voting does not represent all (or even most) voters. Since a candidate needs only a plurality of votes, most voters may have voted against the winner. One attempt to improve this non-representation model is a system called Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff.

Proportional Representation makes the percentage of seats reflect the percentage of votes. It is the most widely used system in the world and can be found in almost every country. If a party wins 40% of the vote, it will receive 40% of the seats.

The Single Transferable Vote is an important form of proportional representation. It is used in Ireland, Australia, and Malta for national elections. Other countries use it in local elections, and even some communities in the United States (such as Cambridge, MA) use it today. According to the Democracy Index, the STV is the most democratic system in the world.

Democracy

The whole point of a voting system is to allow citizens to decide who will govern them. The word democracy was first used in ancient Athens. It is a combination of two Greek words: demos (a citizen of a city-state) and kratos (meaning ‘power’ or ‘rule’). It means ‘the rule by the people’.

I Disappeared from the Internet

Tom Kando 

The other day, I tried to log onto my website. First, I just Googled myself, typing in my name. Later, I typed in my website’s name. I got nowhere both ways. 

When I typed in my name, thousands of search results came up, as usual. Many of the first few start with my name followed by various things. Then, scrolling down the first few pages of search results, you encounter more and more slightly distorted entries, some sites with a middle initial, and further down an increasing number of websites with names that resemble mine but have nothing to do with me, many in Japan, Africa and elsewhere. 

So I start clicking on some of the first few entries, those that spell my name correctly, and you know what? Nothing comes up. Instead of opening the website that I click on, Google sends me a terse computerese message telling me that this website and this person do not exist.