Imagine Democratic Fair Choice

Welcome to tonight's election show on WDTN.

Here on World Democratic Television Network we will give you all the latest news of today's first public election of the Secretary General to the United Nations by you, the people of the world!

Some hours ago the last voting booths have been closed, and until now enough votes have been counted to determine the winner with great certainty.

Before joining the officials in performing the last step of the election, let us shortly recall the rules of the sophisticated new voting system which the United Nations adopted last year for this election. Although the system, called "Democratic Fair Choice", requires the voter to make just one or a few simple marks on the ballot, it is based on much more detailed information than most other comparable voting systems.

This is because with your one main vote, called the "direct support vote", you not only voted for your favourite candidate today, but you voted for a whole ranking of all the candidates, with your favourite on top. Perhaps you remember those rankings each of the candidates published a week ago? This is the ranking your "direct support vote" is counted for!

Unless, of course, you made use of the additional possibilities of your ballot: those "approval votes" can be used to mark as many additional candidates as you want, in order to express that you find them acceptable, in case your favourite may not get enough support to win, and to indicate that you prefer all of them to each of the unmarked candidates.

If you used some "approval votes", then the voting computers will have computed your personal ranking of the candidates for you. How do they do this? They will just take your favourite's ranking and lift all your approved candidates to the top, right below your favourite candidate, keeping their relative ranking intact.

We should give an example: Let's suppose you voted direct support for Anna and indicated additional approval for Cecil and Deirdre. What was Anna's published ranking? Ah, here it is: Anna ranked

 1. Anna
 2. Cecil
 3. Bob
 4. Ellen
 5. Deirdre
 6. ...

So, your ranking will look the same, except that Deirdre will be lifted above Bob and Ellen since you indicated approval for her, whereas Cecil is already at the right position:

 1. Anna
 2. Cecil
 3. Deirdre
 4. Bob
 5. Ellen
 6. ...

That's a lot information you provided by just making a few marks, isn't it? This way, you can be quite sure that your vote isn't lost and your interests are taken into account properly even when your favourite will not have enough direct support to win!

But now it's time to join the officials and enter the last phase of the election. Look, they are just about to open the sealed envelopes with which the candidates collectively have determined the "proposing voter"! This is the most thrilling moment of the election! Imagine you will be the one voter whose direct support vote starts the final choice procedure! What a great honour it must be to know that one's individual ranking guided the process of finding a winner with profound majority support, even when this will not be one's favourite candidate!

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