Negative vote
Negative vote, also called Balanced Plurality Voting (BPV) is a modification of FPTP, in which voters can choose to either support a single candidate, or vote against a single candidate.
It was originally proposed by George A.W. Boehm in 1976 in an essay[1] sent to various social choice theorists, which referenced the plot of the 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing, in which a candidate wins the US presidency despite being a bumbling crook,[2][3]:187 proposing that voters be given the option to vote against a candidate like Wintergreen rather than for someone else.
It was then promoted and analyzed by Steven Brams in a series of papers[4][5]
Notes
The common argument Negative vote advocates make is that in a two-faction election, partisans of both sides will "cancel each other out" by putting positive votes on their own side's candidates and negative votes on the other side's candidates, allowing candidates "in the middle" to win with some votes from centrist voters and no opposition from the partisans, who will be more focused on stopping the other side.
Cardinal method advocates tend to argue that negative vote still preserves most of the worst features of FPTP, in that it doesn't allow a voter to support multiple candidates, and can still incentivize Favorite Betrayal.
References
- ↑ Boehm, George A. W. (1976), One Fervent Vote against Wintergreen (Unpublished mimeograph)
- ↑ "About". Negative Vote. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
- ↑ Poundstone, William (2009-02-17). Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-8090-4892-2.
- ↑ Brams, Steven (1976). "One Man, n Votes, Module in Applied Mathematics". Mathematical Association of America, Ithaca: Cornell University.
- ↑ Brams, Steven J. (1977), Henn, Rudolf; Moeschlin, Otto (eds.), "When is it Advantageous to Cast a Negative Vote?", Mathematical Economics and Game Theory, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 141, pp. 564–572, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-45494-3_45, ISBN 978-3-540-08063-3, retrieved 2020-04-19