User:Lucasvb

Hi, I'm Lucas. I tend to write a lot, especially about democracy and voting systems. I was invited to post some stuff to this wiki to serve as future reference to others.

Contrary to most people who seem to engage with voting system theory, I prefer to take a much more cultural and almost anthropological or philosophical approach to the subject.

My perspective is about what we are trying to achieve by the process of making collective decisions, why such processes are desirable to begin with, and how different voting systems reflect those goals and principles.

My formal, mathematical approach to voting system analysis is based on $N$-dimensional (with $N\geq 4$), absolute political opinion spaces and multidimensional population distributions, and all voters have inherently fuzzy opinions and utilities. To me, candidates, parties and voting systems are merely means to an end, so without having a clear notion of what the end is, we cannot hope to find the best means.

This perspective of mine underlies most of the content I post here.

Opinion pieces

The articles below reflect my own opinions, although I will strive to be as objective as possible on this matter.

(Articles in red haven't been written yet.)

• An upgrade to the spatial model of voters
• Majority and consensus under ordinal and cardinal perspectives

Guides

The following guides attempt to explain (in details) how different voting systems satisfy various personal principles and goals with respect to politics and society.

These are meant as a different and more relatable approach than the arbitrary mathematical criteria or numerical simulation take in the formal literature.

• Is Instant-Runoff Voting the right voting system for you?

Articles

• Reciprocal Score Voting
• Space of possible elections
• Visual explanation of the Condorcet method
• Visual explanation of cardinal voting

Useful links

• Decision theory (a much more appropriate framework to study voting methods than the limited approach in social choice theory)
• Mechanism design
• McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem
• Rank reversals in decision-making
• Multiple-criteria decision analysis
• Multi-attribute utility
• Operations research
• Revelation principle
• Category:Decision-making paradoxes
• Stochastic dominance
• Poisson games
• Peter J. Hammond's published works
• "Extended Poisson Games and the Condorcet Jury Theorem"
• https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-the-nickelback-of-gop-candidates/
• https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/voting-method-pollsters-struggle-as-republicans-field-enough-candidates-to-fill-two-baseball-teams/