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electowiki is a website focused electoral reform and describing alternative electoral systems. It uses MediaWiki (just like Wikipedia).



About

 * main: About

Different electoral systems have different effects on the quality and timbre of democratic elections. Many electoral activists wish to replace the "choose-one" system used in many jurisdictions (where "choose-one" is often referred to as "first-past-the-post"). Many voting theorists have researched the topic, and support the activists' call for a change. The editors of this wiki support a change too (see "electowiki:EPOV" to learn more).

Movements
There are activism movements for the following:


 * Proportional representation systems, and methods which use similar ranking systems, such as "Instant-runoff voting" (frequently promoted as "Ranked Choice Voting")
 * Approval voting - A simple "choose-many" variation of "choose-one" systems
 * Score voting and cardinal voting systems
 * STAR voting - a variation on score voting which treats each voter's preferences as a ranking in the final elimination round of the election
 * Condorcet methods - systems which ensure that the "pairwise winner" of voters' aggregate preference rankings wins the election

There is a vast literature on the theory behind these systems, and this raises questions:


 * Criteria -- What criteria can you use to judge whether a particular method works well?
 * Strategies -- will different systems encourage voters to use different voting strategies?

To the best of our ability, the electowiki community collects the collective wisdom of scholars and enthusiasts, and works together to create a comprehensive reference for all to use.

Regions
Below are the region categories on electowiki, ordered (roughly) from east to west:
 * Oceania
 * Asia
 * Africa
 * Europe
 * North America
 * South America

Categories

 * main page: Project:Categories

This site gives you a guide to what these things are, on pages in the following categorized as follows:

Electoral systems are the main focus of this wiki. Articles in the "Electoral systems" category describe specific methods for selecting between various choices, their implementation details and features.

Other categories
 * Advocacy is for descriptions about real-world reform: organizations, legislation, lobbying, and arguments for choosing one reform over another.
 * Elections is for articles that analyze real or hypothetical elections under different methods, and examine their properties and outcomes.
 * Forms of government is the level "above" election methods: Representative vs direct democracy, government structure, parliamentary government formation, and even anarchy.
 * Voting mechanics deals with real-world implementation details, such as paper ballots and electronic voting machines.
 * Voting theory deals with the properties of voting methods and the criteria they can meet, scenarios in which they fail, etc.

Other pages
Not all pages on Electowiki are neatly categorized. It is still possible to find them in one of these places:


 * Special:AllPages &mdash; this is a tool to find all of the pages on this wiki.
 * Category:Contents - this is a full hierarchical category tree. Most important pages have been added to a category of some sort

Of course, there's always Special:Search as well.

About the project
electowiki is closely associated with the Election-methods mailing list, but is more broadly for communities of election-minded people.

electowiki is a wiki, which means anybody can get involved, building free content. We offer a license for anybody to copy and modify the work hosted here. To learn more about us or how to edit, see the Community Portal and Frequently Asked Questions.

Some facts about electowiki:
 * This project began in January 2005, with an article started on Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include more detailed information about election methods which are still under development and may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines.
 * electowiki currently has articles in the main collection, as well as many other policy pages, talk pages, and user pages.
 * electowiki.org (hosted by Miraheze) was started in 2018 with content copied over from the old Electorama wiki site in late 2018, and became a much more active wiki.
 * The original home (at wiki.electorama.com) has a more accurate view of page edit histories of prior to September 2018 (with proper links to authors), and (as of this writing in November 2020) may show up in search engines for some searches.
 * Since wiki.electorama.com is more-or-less decommissioned, this wiki (electowiki) has more-or-less superseded the old Electorama wiki.

To learn more about the history of this website, visit electowiki:About. To learn about more about reading (and editing!) this website, see Help:Contents.