Occupy conducts election methods experiment

[Clay Shentrup]

http://paercom.net/downloads/files/Full-Report.pdf

Excerpts:

The overall results from the range voting variation closely approximated those of the approval 

vote, at least in terms of the order of favorability.  The Green Party received the most points, totaling 

68.88% of the total possible, followed by Independent candidates 59.9%, the Socialist Party 58.51%, 

the Democratic Party 51.01%, the Libertarian Party 34.17%, and the Republican Party at 12.31%.  

7mong write-ins, many cast their ballots for some variation of “none” among other miscellaneous 

options, respectively totaling 4.81% and 6.39%  of the total points possible.

Under the instant runoff method, also known as ranked choice, voters rank candidates in order 

of their favorability.  In our model, participants were asked to rank their top three choices in order of 

preference.  The instant runoff test was the only alternative method in which the winner of the plurality 

vote was among the top two vote-getters.  Though the Democratic Party received the largest amount of 

top choice votes, the Green Party came out in first place after the final elimination round.  As in the 

range voting test, 208 individuals participated in the instant runoff simulation.

...

IRV Tally.  Of the methods we tested, the Instant Runoff Vote is the most difficult to tally.  

Because we did not have sufficient time or resources to create a program to automatically tally the IRV 

results, and because we were wary of employing the available online tallying software, the results were 

tallied by hand.  In future we would prefer to tally these results by hand and test them against an automatic electronic tally.  

[Clay Shentrup]

I got a retweet about it from the founder of Ruck.us.