Main Page
electowiki is a website focused on electoral reform and describing alternative electoral systems. It uses MediaWiki (just like Wikipedia).
About
Different electoral systems have different effects on the quality of democratic elections. Many electoral activists wish to replace the antiquated "choose-one" systems (often referred to as "first past the post") which are used in most of the world's elections with better systems. 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:
- Single-winner systems, such as:
- Approval voting – a "choose-many" variation on the choose-one system
- Condorcet methods – systems which favor candidates who defeat all other candidates in pairwise comparisons
- Instant runoff voting – one of many ranking systems promoted under the name of "Ranked Choice Voting" (or "RCV")
- Score voting – a system where voters can rate each candidate on a numerical scale
- STAR voting – a variant of score with a majority-rule runoff at the end
- Multi-member systems, which offer differing degrees of proportional representation while selecting multiple candidates.
The field of voting theory has had extensive research over the past centuries, including work on:
- Criteria – how can we know whether a method behaves the way we want it to?
- Strategy – how do different systems encourage different behavior?
- Welfare – how well do different systems promote the public good?
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.
Categories
This wiki focuses on electoral systems (a.k.a. social choice functions). Articles in the electoral systems category describe specific systems together with their implementation details and features.
Other categories:
- Advocacy – real-world reforms. Organizations, legislation, and support for voting reform.
- Elections – analyzing real or hypothetical elections using different methods.
- Electoral systems – different rules for selecting representatives.
- Forms of government – representative vs direct democracy, government structure, parliamentary government formation, and even anarchy.
- Voting mechanics – real-world implementation details like paper ballots or electronic voting machines.
- Voting theory – criteria and properties of voting methods.
Regions
Below are the region categories on electowiki ordered (roughly) from east to west:
Other pages
Not all pages on Electowiki are neatly categorized. It is still possible to find them in one of these places:
- Special:AllPages – for all pages on this wiki (including uncategorized pages)
- Category:Contents – a full hierarchical category tree. Most important pages are in some category
Of course, there's always Special:Search as well.
About the project
electowiki is associated with the election-methods mailing list, but all election nerds are welcome here.
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:
- electowiki was launched in January 2005 as the official wiki for the 2003 "Electorama!" project.
- This wiki was created as a home for more detailed information about less-notable methods and articles that are still under development (for Wikipedia and elsewhere) .
- electowiki currently has 790 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.
- 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 more about reading (and editing!) this website, see Help:Contents.