A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an
election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it
is increasingly more common to use electronic voting machines.
Traditionally, a voting machine has been defined by its mechanism, and
whether the system tallies votes at each voting location, or centrally.
Voting machines should not be confused with tabulating machines, which count votes done by paper ballot.
Voting machines differ in usability, security, cost, speed,
accuracy, and ability of the public to oversee elections. Machines may
be more or less accessible to voters with different disabilities.
Tallies are simplest in parliamentary systems
where just one choice is on the ballot, and these are often tallied
manually. In other political systems where many choices are on the same
ballot, tallies are often done by machines to give faster results.
Historical machines
In ancient Athens
(5th and 4th centuries BCE) voting was done by different colored
pebbles deposited in urns, and later by bronze markers created by the
state and officially stamped. This procedure served for elected
positions, jury procedures, and ostracisms.
The first use of paper ballots was in Rome in 139 BCE, and their first
use in the United States was in 1629 to select a pastor for the Salem
Church.
Mechanical voting
Balls
The first major proposal for the use of voting machines came from the Chartists in the United Kingdom in 1838. Among the radical reforms called for in The People's Charter were universal suffrage and voting by secret ballot.
This required major changes in the conduct of elections, and as
responsible reformers, the Chartists not only demanded reforms but
described how to accomplish them, publishing Schedule A, a description of how to run a polling place, and Schedule B, a description of a voting machine to be used in such a polling place.
The Chartist voting machine, attributed to Benjamin Jolly of 19 York Street in Bath,
allowed each voter to cast one vote in a single race. This matched the
requirements of a British parliamentary election. Each voter was to
cast his vote by dropping a brass ball into the appropriate hole in the
top of the machine by the candidate's name. Each voter could only vote
once because each voter was given just one brass ball. The ball
advanced a clockwork counter for the corresponding candidate as it
passed through the machine, and then fell out the front where it could
be given to the next voter.
Buttons
In 1875, Henry Spratt of Kent received a U.S. patent for a voting machine that presented the ballot as an array of push buttons, one per candidate. Spratt's machine was designed for a typical British election with a single plurality race on the ballot.
In 1881, Anthony Beranek of Chicago patented the first voting
machine appropriate for use in a general election in the United States.
Beranek's machine presented an array of push buttons to the voter,
with one row per office on the ballot, and one column per party.
Interlocks behind each row prevented voting for more than one candidate
per race, and an interlock with the door of the voting booth reset the
machine for the next voter as each voter left the booth.
Tokens
The psephograph was patented by Italian inventor Eugenio Boggiano in 1907.
It worked by dropping a metal token into one of several labeled slots.
The psephograph would automatically tally the total tokens deposited in
each slot. The psephograph was first used in a theatre in Rome, where it
was used to gauge audience reception to a play: "good", "bad", or
"indifferent".
Analog computers
Lenna
Winslow's 1910 voting machine was designed to offer all the questions
on the ballot to men and only some to women because women often had partial suffrage,
e.g. being allowed to vote on issues but not candidates. The machine
had two doors, one marked "Gents" and the other marked "Ladies". The
door used to enter the voting booth would activate a series of levers
and switches to display the full ballot for men and the partial ballot
for women.
Dials
By July 1936, IBM had mechanized voting and ballot tabulation for single transferable vote elections. Using a series of dials, the voter could record up to twenty ranked preferences to a punched card, one preference at a time. Write-in votes were permitted. The machine prevented a voter from spoiling
their ballot by skipping rankings and by giving the same ranking to
more than one candidate. A standard punched-card counting machine would
tabulate ballots at a rate of 400 per minute.
Lever machines were commonly used in the United States until the 1990s. In 1889, Jacob H. Myers of Rochester, New York, received a patent for a voting machine that was based on Beranek's 1881 push button machine. This machine saw its first use in Lockport, New York, in 1892.
In 1894, Sylvanus Davis added a straight-party lever and significantly
simplified the interlocking mechanism used to enforce the vote-for-one
rule in each race.
By 1899, Alfred Gillespie introduced several refinements. It was
Gillespie who replaced the heavy metal voting booth with a curtain that
was linked to the cast-vote lever, and Gillespie introduced the lever by
each candidate name that was turned to point to that name in order to
cast a vote for that candidate. Inside the machine, Gillespie worked
out how to make the machine programmable so that it could support races
in which voters were allowed to vote for, for example, 3 out of 5
candidates.
On December 14, 1900, the U.S. Standard Voting Machine Company
was formed, with Alfred Gillespie as one of its directors, to combine
the companies that held the Myers, Davis, and Gillespie patents. By the 1920s, this company (under various names) had a monopoly on voting machines, until, in 1936, Samuel and Ransom Shoup obtained a patent for a competing voting machine.
By 1934, about a sixth of all presidential ballots were being cast on
mechanical voting machines, essentially all made by the same
manufacturer.
Commonly, a voter enters the machine and pulls a lever to close
the curtain, thus unlocking the voting levers. The voter then makes his
or her selection from an array of small voting levers denoting the
appropriate candidates or measures. The machine is configured to prevent
overvotes by locking out other candidates when one candidate's lever is
turned down. When the voter is finished, a lever is pulled which opens
the curtain and increments the appropriate counters for each candidate
and measure. At the close of the election, the results are hand copied
by the precinct officer, although some machines could automatically
print the totals. New York was the last state to stop using these
machines, under court order, by the fall of 2009.
Punched card voting
The Votomatic vote recorder, a punched card voting machine originally developed in the mid-1960s.
Punched card
systems employ a card (or cards) and a small clipboard-sized device for
recording votes. Voters punch holes in the cards with a ballot marking device.
Typical ballot marking devices carry a ballot label that identifies
the candidates or issues associated with each punching position on the
card, although in some cases, the names and issues are printed directly
on the card. After voting, the voter may place the ballot in a ballot
box, or the ballot may be fed into a computer vote tabulating device at
the precinct.
The idea of voting by punching holes on paper or cards originated in the 1890s and inventors continued to explore this in the years that followed.
By the late 1890s John McTammany's
voting machine was used widely in several states. In this machine,
votes were recorded by punching holes in a roll of paper comparable to
those used in player pianos, and then tabulated after the polls closed using a pneumatic mechanism.
Punched-card voting was proposed occasionally in the mid-20th century,
but the first major success for punched-card voting came in 1965, with
Joseph P. Harris' development of the Votomatic punched-card system. This was based on IBM's Port-A-Punch technology. Harris licensed the Votomatic to IBM. William Rouverol built the prototype system.
The Votomatic system
was very successful and widely distributed. By the 1996 Presidential
election, some variation of the punched card system was used by 37.3% of
registered voters in the United States.
In an optical scan voting system,
or marksense, each voter's choices are marked on one or more pieces of
paper, which then go through a scanner. The scanner creates an
electronic image of each ballot, interprets it, creates a tally for each
candidate, and usually stores the image for later review.
The voter may mark the paper directly, usually in a specific
location for each candidate. Or the voter may select choices on an
electronic screen, which then prints the chosen names, and a bar code or
QR code summarizing all choices, on a sheet of paper to put in the
scanner.
Hundreds of errors in optical scan systems
have been found, from feeding ballots upside down, multiple ballots
pulled through at once in central counts, paper jams, broken, blocked or
overheated sensors which misinterpret some or many ballots, printing
which does not align with the programming, programming errors, and loss
of files. The cause of each programming error is rarely found, so it is not known how many were accidental or intentional.
In a DRE voting machine
system, a touch screen displays choices to the voter, who selects
choices, and can change their mind as often as needed, before casting
the vote. Staff initialize each voter once on the machine, to avoid
repeat voting. Voting data are recorded in memory components, and can be
copied out at the end of the election.
Some of these machines also print names of chosen candidates on paper for the voter to verify, though less than 40% verify. These names on paper are kept behind glass in the machine, and can be used for election audits and recounts if needed. The tally of the voting data is printed on the end of the paper tape. The paper tape is called a Voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). The VVPATs can be tallied at 20–43 seconds of staff time per vote (not per ballot).
For machines without VVPAT, there is no record of individual
votes to check. For machines with VVPAT, checking is more expensive than
with paper ballots, because on the flimsy thermal paper in a long
continuous roll, staff often lose their place, and the printout has each
change by each voter, not just their final decisions.
Problems have included public web access to the software, before
it is loaded into machines for each election, and programming errors
which increment different candidates than voters select. The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany found that with existing machines could not be allowed because they could not be monitored by the public.
Successful hacks have been demonstrated under laboratory conditions.
Location of tallying
Optical scans can be done either at the place of voting,"precinct", or in another location. DRE machines always tally at the precinct.
Precinct-count voting system
A
precinct-count voting system is a voting system that tallies ballots at
the polling place. Precinct-count machines typically analyze ballots as
they are cast. This approach allows for voters to be notified of voting
errors such as overvotes and can prevent spoilt votes.
After the voter has a chance to correct any errors, the precinct-count
machine tallies that ballot. Vote totals are made public only after the
close of polling. DREs and precinct scanners have electronic storage of
the vote tallies and may transmit results to a central location over
public telecommunication networks.
A central count voting system is a voting system that tallies ballots
from multiple precincts at a central location. Central count systems
are also commonly used to process absentee ballots.
Central counting can be done by hand, and in some jurisdictions,
central counting is done using the same type of voting machine deployed
at polling places, but since the introduction of the Votomatic
punched-card voting system and the Norden Electronic Vote Tallying
System in the 1960s, high speed ballot tabulators have been in
widespread use, particularly in large metropolitan jurisdictions.
Today, commodity high-speed scanners sometimes serve this purpose, but
special-purpose ballot scanners are also available that incorporate
sorting mechanisms to separate tallied ballots from those requiring
human interpretation.
Voted ballots are typically placed into secure ballot boxes
at the polling place. Stored ballots and/or Precinct Counts are
transported or transmitted to a central counting location. The system
produces a printed report of the vote count, and may produce a report
stored on electronic media suitable for broadcasting, or release on the
Internet.
Electronic voting (also known as e-voting) is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots.
Depending on the particular implementation, e-voting may use standalone electronic voting machines (also called EVM) or computers connected to the Internet (online voting). It may encompass a range of Internet
services, from basic transmission of tabulated results to full-function
online voting through common connectable household devices. The degree
of automation
may be limited to marking a paper ballot, or may be a comprehensive
system of vote input, vote recording, data encryption and transmission
to servers, and consolidation and tabulation of election results.
A worthy e-voting system must perform most of these tasks while
complying with a set of standards established by regulatory bodies, and
must also be capable to deal successfully with strong requirements
associated with security, accuracy, integrity, swiftness, privacy, auditability, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability and ecological sustainability.
In general, two main types of e-voting can be identified:
e-voting which is physically supervised by representatives of
governmental or independent electoral authorities (e.g. electronic
voting machines located at polling stations);
remote e-voting via the Internet (also called i-voting) where the
voter submits his or her vote electronically to the election
authorities, from any location.
Electronic
voting technology intends to speed the counting of ballots, reduce the
cost of paying staff to count votes manually and can provide improved
accessibility for disabled voters. Also in the long term, expenses are
expected to decrease.
Results can be reported and published faster.
Voters save time and cost by being able to vote independently from their
location. This may increase overall voter turnout. The citizen groups
benefiting most from electronic elections are the ones living abroad,
citizens living in rural areas far away from polling stations and the
disabled with mobility impairments.
It has been demonstrated that as voting systems become more complex and include software, different methods of election fraud
become possible. Others also challenge the use of electronic voting
from a theoretical point of view, arguing that humans are not equipped
for verifying operations occurring within an electronic machine and that
because people cannot verify these operations, the operations cannot be
trusted. Furthermore, some computing experts have argued for the
broader notion that people cannot trust any programming they did not
author.
The use of electronic voting in elections remains a contentious
issue. Some countries such as Netherlands and Germany have stopped using
it after it was shown to be unreliable, while the Indian Election
commission recommends it. The involvement of numerous stakeholders
including companies that manufacture these machines as well as political
parties that stand to gain from rigging complicates this further.
Critics of electronic voting, including security analyst Bruce Schneier,
note that "computer security experts are unanimous on what to do (some
voting experts disagree, but it is the computer security experts who
need to be listened to; the problems here are with the computer, not
with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting
application)... DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit
trails... Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny"
to ensure the accuracy of the voting system. Verifiable ballots are
necessary because computers can and do malfunction, and because voting
machines can be compromised.
Many insecurities have been found in commercial voting machines, such as using a default administration password.
Cases have also been reported of machines making unpredictable,
inconsistent errors. Key issues with electronic voting are therefore the
openness of a system to public examination from outside experts, the
creation of an authenticatable paper record of votes cast and a chain of custody for records.
And, there is a risk that commercial voting machines results are
changed by the company providing the machine. There is no guarantee that
results are collected and reported accurately.
There has been contention, especially in the United States, that electronic voting, especially DRE voting, could facilitate electoral fraud
and may not be fully auditable. In addition, electronic voting has been
criticised as unnecessary and expensive to introduce. While countries
like India
continue to use electronic voting, several countries have cancelled
e-voting systems or decided against a large-scale rollout, notably the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom due to issues in reliability of EVMs.
Moreover, people without internet access and/or the skills to use
it are excluded from the service. The so-called digital divide
describes the gap between those who have access to the internet and
those who do not. Depending on the country or even regions in a country
the gap differs. This concern is expected to become less important in
future since the number of internet users tends to increase.
The main psychological issue is trust. Voters fear that their
vote could be changed by a virus on their PC or during transmission to
governmental servers.
Expenses for the installation of an electronic voting system are
high. For some governments they may be too high so that they do not
invest. This aspect is even more important if it is not sure whether
electronic voting is a long-term solution.
New South Wales 2021 iVote failures
During
the 2021 NSW Local Government Elections the online voting system
"iVote" had technical issues that caused some access problems for some
voters. Analysis done of these failures indicated a significant chance
of the outages having impacted on the electoral results for the final
positions. In the Kempsey ward, where the margin between the last
elected and first non-elected candidates was only 69 votes, the
electoral commission determined that the outage caused a 60% chance that
the wrong final candidate was elected. Singleton had a 40% chance of
having elected the wrong councillor, Shellharbour was a 7% chance and
two other races were impacted by a sub-1% chance of having elected the
wrong candidate. The NSW Supreme Court ordered the elections in Kempsey,
Singleton and Shellharbour Ward A to be re-run. In the 2022 Kempsey
re-vote the highest placed non-elected candidate from 2021, Dean Saul,
was instead one of the first councillors elected. This failure caused the NSW Government to suspend the iVote system from use in the 2023 New South Wales state election.
Electronic voting systems for electorates have been in use since the 1960s when punched card
systems debuted. Their first widespread use was in the US where 7
counties switched to this method for the 1964 presidential election. The newer optical scan voting systems allow a computer to count a voter's mark on a ballot. DRE voting machines which collect and tabulate votes in a single machine, are used by all voters in all elections in Brazil and India, and also on a large scale in Venezuela and the United States. They have been used on a large scale in the Netherlands but have been decommissioned after public concerns.
In Brazil, the use of DRE voting machines has been associated with a
decrease in error-ridden and uncounted votes, promoting a larger
enfranchisement of mainly less educated people in the electoral process,
shifting government spending toward public healthcare, particularly
beneficial to the poor.
These systems can include a ballot marking device or electronic ballot marker that allows voters to make their selections using an electronic input device, usually a touch screen system similar to a DRE. Systems including a ballot marking device can incorporate different forms of assistive technology. In 2004, Open Voting Consortium demonstrated the 'Dechert Design', a General Public Licenseopen source paper ballot printing system with open source bar codes on each ballot.
A direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machine records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter (typically buttons or a touchscreen); that processes data with computer software; and that records voting data and ballot images in memory components.
After the election it produces a tabulation of the voting data stored
in a removable memory component and as a printed copy. The system may
also provide a means for transmitting individual ballots or vote totals
to a central location for consolidating and reporting results from
precincts at the central location. These systems use a precinct count
method that tabulates ballots at the polling place. They typically
tabulate ballots as they are cast and print the results after the close
of polling.
In 2002, in the United States, the Help America Vote Act
mandated that one handicapped accessible voting system be provided per
polling place, which most jurisdictions have chosen to satisfy with the
use of DRE voting machines, some switching entirely over to DRE. In
2004, 28.9% of the registered voters in the United States used some type
of direct recording electronic voting system, up from 7.7% in 1996.
In 2004, India adopted Electronic Voting Machines
(EVM) for its elections to its parliament with 380 million voters
casting their ballots using more than one million voting machines. The Indian EVMs are designed and developed by two government-owned defence equipment manufacturing units, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL). Both systems are identical, and are developed to the specifications of Election Commission of India.
The system is a set of two devices running on 7.5 volt batteries. One
device, the voting Unit is used by the voter, and another device called
the control unit is operated by the electoral officer. Both units are
connected by a five-metre cable. The voting unit has a blue button for
each candidate. The unit can hold 16 candidates, but up to four units
can be chained, to accommodate 64 candidates. The control unit has three
buttons on the surface – one button to release a single vote, one
button to see the total number of votes cast till now, and one button to
close the election process. The result button is hidden and sealed. It
cannot be pressed unless the close button has already been pressed. A
controversy was raised when the voting machine malfunctioned which was
shown in Delhi assembly. On 9 April 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the ECI to increase voter-verified paper audit trail
(VVPAT) slips vote count to five randomly selected EVMs per assembly
constituency, which means ECI has to count VVPAT slips of 20,625 EVMs
before it certifies the final election results.
Public network DRE voting system
A
public network DRE voting system is an election system that uses
electronic ballots and transmits vote data from the polling place to
another location over a public network.
Vote data may be transmitted as individual ballots as they are cast,
periodically as batches of ballots throughout the election day, or as
one batch at the close of voting.
Public network DRE voting system can utilize either precinct count or
central count method. The central count method tabulates ballots from
multiple precincts at a central location.
Smartphones
are the mainstream for online voting used by the Japanese private
sector, but e-voting is not possible due to the law in public office
elections in Japan.
Internet voting systems have gained popularity and have been used for
government and membership organization elections and referendums in Estonia, and Switzerland as well as municipal elections in Canada and party primary elections in the United States and France. Internet voting has also been widely used in sub-national participatory budgeting processes, including in Brazil, France, United States, Portugal and Spain.
Security experts have found security problems in every attempt at online voting, including systems in Australia, Estonia, Switzerland, Russia, and the United States.
It has been argued political parties that have more support from
the less fortunate—who are unfamiliar with the Internet—may suffer in
the elections due to e-voting, which tends to increase voting in the
upper/middle class. It is unsure as to whether narrowing the digital
divide would promote equal voting opportunities for people across
various social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. In the long run, this
is contingent not only on internet accessibility but also depends on
people's level of familiarity with the Internet.
The effects of internet voting on overall voter turnout are
unclear. A 2017 study of online voting in two Swiss cantons found that
it had no effect on turnout, and a 2009 study of Estonia's national election found similar results. To the contrary, however, the introduction of online voting in municipal elections in the Canadian province of Ontario resulted in an average increase in turnout of around 3.5 percentage points.
Similarly, a further study of the Swiss case found that while online
voting did not increase overall turnout, it did induce some occasional
voters to participate who would have abstained were online voting not an
option.
A paper on “remote electronic voting and turnout in the Estonian
2007 parliamentary elections” showed that rather than eliminating
inequalities, e-voting might have enhanced the digital divide
between higher and lower socioeconomic classes. People who lived
greater distances from polling areas voted at higher levels with this
service now available. The 2007 Estonian elections yielded a higher
voter turnout from those who lived in higher income regions and who
received formal education.
Still regarding the Estonian Internet voting system, it was proved to
be more cost-efficient than the rest of the voting systems offered in
2017 local elections.
Cost range per ballot (in euro) for the 2017 Local Elections
Voting system
Minimum
Maximum
Advance voting in county centres
5.48
5.92
Advance voting in ordinary polling stations
16.24
17.36
Early voting in county centres
5.83
6.30
Election day voting in county centres
4.97
5.58
Election day voting in ordinary polling stations
2.83
3.01
Internet voting
2.17
2.26
Electronic voting is perceived to be favored moreover by a certain
demographic, namely the younger generation such as Generation X and Y
voters. However, in recent elections about a quarter of e-votes were
cast by the older demographic, such as individuals over the age of 55.
Including this, about 20% of e-votes came from voters between the ages
of 45 and 54. This goes to show that e-voting is not supported
exclusively by the younger generations, but finding some popularity
amongst Gen X and Baby Boomers as well.
In terms of electoral results as well, the expectation that online
voting would favor younger candidates has not been borne out in the
data, with mayors in Ontario, Canada who were elected in online
elections actually being slightly older on average than those elected by
pencil and paper.
Online voting is widely used privately for shareholder votes,
and other private organizations.
The election management companies do not promise accuracy or privacy.
In fact one company uses an individual's past votes for research, and to target ads.
Corporations and organizations routinely use Internet voting to
elect officers and board members and for other proxy elections. Internet
voting systems have been used privately in many modern nations and
publicly in the United States, the UK,
Switzerland and Estonia. In Switzerland, where it is already an
established part of local referendums, voters get their passwords to
access the ballot through the postal service. Most voters in Estonia can
cast their vote in local and parliamentary elections, if they want to,
via the Internet, as most of those on the electoral roll have access to
an e-voting system, the largest run by any European Union
country. It has been made possible because most Estonians carry a
national identity card equipped with a computer-readable microchip and
it is these cards which they use to get access to the online ballot. All
a voter needs is a computer, an electronic card reader, their ID card
and its PIN, and they can vote from anywhere in the world. Estonian e-votes can only be cast during the days of advance voting. On election day itself people have to go to polling stations and fill in a paper ballot.
Hybrid systems
There
are also hybrid systems that include an electronic ballot marking
device (usually a touch screen system similar to a DRE) or other assistive technology to print a voter verified paper audit trail, then use a separate machine for electronic tabulation. Hybrid voting often includes both e-voting and mail-in paper ballots.
Internet voting can use remote locations (voting from any
Internet capable computer) or can use traditional polling locations with
voting booths consisting of Internet connected voting systems.
Analysis
ISG TopVoter, a machine designed specifically to be used by voters with disabilities
Electronic voting systems may offer advantages compared to other
voting techniques. An electronic voting system can be involved in any
one of a number of steps in the setup, distributing, voting, collecting,
and counting of ballots, and thus may or may not introduce advantages
into any of these steps. Potential disadvantages exist as well including
the potential for flaws or weakness in any electronic component.
Charles Stewart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
estimates that 1 million more ballots were counted in the 2004 US
presidential election than in 2000 because electronic voting machines
detected votes that paper-based machines would have missed.
In May 2004 the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report titled "Electronic Voting Offers Opportunities and Presents Challenges",
analyzing both the benefits and concerns created by electronic voting. A
second report was released in September 2005 detailing some of the
concerns with electronic voting, and ongoing improvements, titled
"Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic
Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed".
Electronic ballots
Electronic voting systems may use electronic ballot to store votes in computer memory.
Systems which use them exclusively are called DRE voting systems. When
electronic ballots are used there is no risk of exhausting the supply of
ballots. Additionally, these electronic ballots remove the need for
printing of paper ballots, a significant cost.
When administering elections in which ballots are offered in multiple
languages (in some areas of the United States, public elections are
required by the National Voting Rights Act of 1965),
electronic ballots can be programmed to provide ballots in multiple
languages for a single machine. The advantage with respect to ballots
in different languages appears to be unique to electronic voting. For
example, King County, Washington's demographics require them under U.S. federal election law to provide ballot access in Chinese.
With any type of paper ballot, the county has to decide how many
Chinese-language ballots to print, how many to make available at each
polling place, etc. Any strategy that can assure that Chinese-language
ballots will be available at all polling places is certain, at the very
least, to result in a significant number of wasted ballots.
(The situation with lever machines would be even worse than with paper:
the only apparent way to reliably meet the need would be to set up a
Chinese-language lever machine at each polling place, few of which would
be used at all.)
Critics argue
the need for extra ballots in any language can be mitigated by
providing a process to print ballots at voting locations. They argue
further, the cost of software validation, compiler trust validation,
installation validation, delivery validation and validation of other
steps related to electronic voting is complex and expensive, thus
electronic ballots are not guaranteed to be less costly than printed
ballots.
Accessibility
A Hart eSlate DRE voting machine with jelly buttons for people with manual dexterity disabilities
Electronic voting machines can be made fully accessible for persons
with disabilities. Punched card and optical scan machines are not fully
accessible for the blind or visually impaired, and lever machines can be
difficult for voters with limited mobility and strength. Electronic machines can use headphones, sip and puff, foot pedals, joy sticks and other adaptive technology to provide the necessary accessibility.
Organizations such as the Verified Voting Foundation have criticized the accessibility of electronic voting machines and advocate alternatives. Some disabled voters (including the visually impaired) could use a tactile ballot,
a ballot system using physical markers to indicate where a mark should
be made, to vote a secret paper ballot. These ballots can be designed
identically to those used by other voters. However, other disabled voters (including voters with dexterity disabilities) could be unable to use these ballots.
Cryptographic verification
The
concept of election verifiability through cryptographic solutions has
emerged in the academic literature to introduce transparency and trust
in electronic voting systems.
It allows voters and election observers to verify that votes have been
recorded, tallied and declared correctly, in a manner independent from
the hardware and software running the election. Three aspects of
verifiability are considered:
individual, universal, and eligibility. Individual verifiability allows
a voter to check that her own vote is included in the election outcome,
universal verifiability allows voters or election observers to check
that the election outcome corresponds to the votes cast, and eligibility
verifiability allows voters and observers to check that each vote in
the election outcome was cast by a uniquely registered voter.
Voter intent
Electronic voting machines are able to provide immediate feedback to the voter detecting such possible problems as undervoting and overvoting which may result in a spoiled ballot. This immediate feedback can be helpful in successfully determining voter intent.
Transparency
It has been alleged by groups such as the UK-based Open Rights Group
that a lack of testing, inadequate audit procedures, and insufficient
attention given to system or process design with electronic voting
leaves "elections open to error and fraud".
In 2009, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany
found that when using voting machines the "verification of the result
must be possible by the citizen reliably and without any specialist
knowledge of the subject." The DRE
Nedap-computers used till then did not fulfill that requirement. The
decision did not ban electronic voting as such, but requires all
essential steps in elections to be subject to public examinability.
In 2013, researchers from Europe proposed that the electronic voting systems should be coercion evident.
There should be a public evidence of the amount of coercion that took
place in a particular elections. An internet voting system called "Caveat Coercitor" shows how coercion evidence in voting systems can be achieved.
A fundamental challenge with any voting machine
is to produce evidence that the votes were recorded as cast and
tabulated as recorded. Election results produced by voting systems that
rely on voter-marked paper ballots can be verified with manual hand
counts (either valid sampling or full recounts). Paperless
ballot voting systems must support auditability in different ways. An
independently auditable system, sometimes called an Independent
Verification, can be used in recounts or audits. These systems can
include the ability for voters to verify how their votes were cast or
enable officials to verify that votes were tabulated correctly.
A discussion draft argued by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) states, "Simply put, the DRE architecture’s inability to provide
for independent audits of its electronic records makes it a poor choice
for an environment in which detecting errors and fraud is important."
The report does not represent the official position of NIST, and
misinterpretations of the report has led NIST to explain that "Some
statements in the report have been misinterpreted. The draft report
includes statements from election officials, voting system vendors,
computer scientists and other experts in the field about what is
potentially possible in terms of attacks on DREs. However, these
statements are not report conclusions."
A Diebold Election Systems, Inc. model AccuVote-TSx DRE voting machine with VVPAT attachment
Various technologies can be used to assure DRE voters that their
votes were cast correctly, and allow officials to detect possible fraud
or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the tabulated results.
Some systems include technologies such as cryptography (visual or
mathematical), paper (kept by the voter or verified and left with
election officials), audio verification, and dual recording or witness
systems (other than with paper).
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, the creator of the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail
(VVPAT) concept (as described in her Ph.D. dissertation in October 2000
on the basic voter verifiable ballot system), proposes to answer the
auditability question by having the voting machine print a paper ballot
or other paper facsimile that can be visually verified by the voter
before being entered into a secure location. Subsequently, this is
sometimes referred to as the "Mercuri method." To be truly voter-verified,
the record itself must be verified by the voter and able to be done
without assistance, such as visually or audibly. If the voter must use a
bar-code scanner or other electronic device to verify, then the record
is not truly voter-verifiable, since it is actually the electronic
device that is verifying the record for the voter. VVPAT is the form of
Independent Verification most commonly found in elections in the United States and other countries such as Venezuela.
End-to-end auditable voting systems
can provide the voter with a receipt that can be taken home. This
receipt does not allow voters to prove to others how they voted, but it
does allow them to verify that the system detected their vote correctly.
End-to-end (E2E) systems include Punchscan, ThreeBallot and Prêt à Voter. Scantegrity is an add-on that extends current optical scan voting systems with an E2E layer. The city of Takoma Park, Maryland used Scantegrity II for its November 2009 election.
Systems that allow the voter to prove how they voted are never
used in U.S. public elections, and are outlawed by most state
constitutions. The primary concerns with this solution are voter intimidation and vote selling.
An audit system can be used in measured random recounts to detect
possible malfunction or fraud. With the VVPAT method, the paper ballot
is often treated as the official ballot of record. In this scenario, the
ballot is primary and the electronic records are used only for an
initial count. In any subsequent recounts or challenges, the paper, not
the electronic ballot, would be used for tabulation. Whenever a paper
record serves as the legal ballot, that system will be subject to the
same benefits and concerns as any paper ballot system.
To successfully audit any voting machine, a strict chain of custody is required.
The solution was first demonstrated (New York City, March 2001)
and used (Sacramento, California 2002) by AVANTE International
Technology, Inc.. In 2004 Nevada was the first state to successfully
implement a DRE voting system that printed an electronic record. The
$9.3 million voting system provided by Sequoia Voting Systems included more than 2,600 AVC EDGE touchscreen DREs equipped with the VeriVote VVPAT component. The new systems, implemented under the direction of then Secretary of State Dean Heller
replaced largely punched card voting systems and were chosen after
feedback was solicited from the community through town hall meetings and
input solicited from the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Inadequately secured hardware can be subject to physical tampering. Some critics, such as the group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet"
("We do not trust voting machines"), charge that, for instance, foreign
hardware could be inserted into the machine, or between the user and
the central mechanism of the machine itself, using a man in the middle attack technique, and thus even sealing DRE machines may not be sufficient protection.
This claim is countered by the position that review and testing
procedures can detect fraudulent code or hardware, if such things are
present, and that a thorough, verifiable chain of custody would prevent the insertion of such hardware or software. Security seals are commonly employed in an attempt to detect tampering, but testing by Argonne National Laboratory and others demonstrates that existing seals can usually be quickly defeated by a trained person using low-tech methods.
Software
Security experts, such as Bruce Schneier, have demanded that voting machine source code should be publicly available for inspection. Others have also suggested publishing voting machine software under a free software license as is done in Australia.
One method to detect errors with voting machines is parallel testing, which are conducted on the Election Day with randomly picked machines. The ACM
published a study showing that, to change the outcome of the 2000 U.S.
Presidential election, only 2 votes in each precinct would have needed
to be changed.
Cost
Cost of
having electronic machines receive the voter's choices, print a ballot
and scan the ballots to tally results is higher than the cost of
printing blank ballots, having voters mark them directly (with
machine-marking only when voters want it) and scanning ballots to tally
results, according to studies in Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.
Adoption worldwide
Electronic voting by country
varies and may include voting machines in polling places, centralized
tallying of paper ballots, and internet voting. Many countries use
centralized tallying. Some also use electronic voting machines in
polling places. Very few use internet voting. Several countries have
tried electronic approaches and stopped because of difficulties or
concerns about security and reliability.
Electronic voting requires capital spending every few years to
update equipment, as well as annual spending for maintenance, security,
and supplies. If it works well, its speed can be an advantage where many
contests are on each ballot. Hand-counting is more feasible in
parliamentary systems where each level of government is elected at
different times, and only one contest is on each ballot, for the
national or regional member of parliament, or for a local council
member.
Polling place electronic voting or Internet voting examples have taken place in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Estonia,France, Germany, India, Italy, Namibia, the Netherlands ( Rijnland Internet Election System), Norway, Peru, Switzerland, the UK, Venezuela, Pakistan and the Philippines.
In popular culture
In the 2006 film Man of the Year starring Robin Williams,
the character played by Williams—a comedic host of political talk
show—wins the election for President of the United States when a
software error in the electronic voting machines produced by the
fictional manufacturer Delacroy causes votes to be tallied inaccurately.
In Runoff, a 2007 novel by Mark Coggins, a surprising showing by the Green Party candidate in a San Francisco Mayoral election forces a runoff
between him and the highly favored establishment candidate—a plot line
that closely parallels the actual results of the 2003 election. When the
private-eye protagonist of the book investigates at the behest of a
powerful Chinatown businesswoman, he determines that the outcome was
rigged by someone who defeated the security on the city's newly
installed e-voting system.
"Hacking Democracy" is a 2006 documentary film shown on HBO.
Filmed over three years, it documents American citizens investigating
anomalies and irregularities with electronic voting systems that
occurred during America's 2000 and 2004 elections, especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems and culminates in the hacking of a Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida.
The central conflict in the MMO video game Infantry resulted from the global institution of direct democracy
through the use of personal voting devices sometime in the 22nd century
AD. The practice gave rise to a 'voting class' of citizens composed
mostly of homemakers and retirees who tended to be at home all day.
Because they had the most free time to participate in voting, their
opinions ultimately came to dominate politics.
Map showing the electoral systems used to elect candidates to the lower or sole (unicameral) house of national legislatures, as of January 2022.
An electoral system or voting system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums
are conducted and how their results are determined. Electoral systems
are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections
may take place in business, non-profit organisations and informal organisations. These rules govern all aspects of the voting process: when elections occur, who is allowed to vote, who can stand as a candidate, how ballots are marked and cast, how the ballots are counted, how votes translate into the election outcome, limits on campaign spending,
and other factors that can affect the result. Political electoral
systems are defined by constitutions and electoral laws, are typically
conducted by election commissions, and can use multiple types of elections for different offices.
Some electoral systems elect a single winner to a unique
position, such as prime minister, president or governor, while others
elect multiple winners, such as members of parliament or boards of
directors. When electing a legislature,
areas may be divided into constituencies with one or more
representatives or the electorate may elect representatives as a single
unit. Voters may vote directly for an individual candidate or for a list
of candidates put forward by a political party or alliance. There are many variations in electoral systems, the most common being Party-list proportional representation, first-past-the-post voting, plurality block voting, the two-round (runoff) system and ranked voting (STV or Instant-runoff voting). Mixed systems and some other electoral systems attempt to combine the benefits of non-proportional and proportional systems.
Map showing the main types electoral systems used to elect candidates to the lower or sole (unicameral) house of national legislatures, as of January 2022.
Countries using first-past-the-post for legislatures.
Plurality voting
is a system in which the candidate(s) with the highest number of votes
wins, with no requirement to get a majority of votes. In cases where
there is a single position to be filled, it is known as first-past-the-post; this is the second most common electoral system for national legislatures, with 58 countries using it for this purpose,
the vast majority of which are current or former British or American
colonies or territories. It is also the second most common system used
for presidential elections, being used in 19 countries.
In cases where there are multiple positions to be filled, most
commonly in cases of multi-member constituencies, there are several
types of plurality electoral systems. Under block voting
(also known as multiple non-transferable vote or plurality-at-large),
voters have as many votes as there are seats and can vote for any
candidate, regardless of party, a system used in eight countries. In limited voting voters are given fewer votes than there are seats to be filled. Gibraltar is the only territory where this system is in use). Under single non-transferable vote
(SNTV) voters can vote for only one candidate, with the candidates
receiving the most votes declared the winners; this system is used in Kuwait, the Pitcairn Islands and Vanuatu. In party block voting,
voters can only vote for the list of candidates of a single party, with
the party receiving the most votes winning all seats. This is used in
five countries as part of mixed systems.
The Borda Count
is a ranked voting system intended to elect broadly acceptable options
or candidates, rather than those preferred by a majority.
Under the Borda Count, lower rakings are given lower weighting. This
system is used to elect the ethnic minority representatives seats in the
Slovenian parliament. The Dowdall system, a multi-member constituency variation on the Borda count, is used in Nauru
for parliamentary elections and sees voters rank the candidates. First
preference votes are counted as whole numbers; the second preference
votes divided by two, third preferences by three; this continues to the
lowest possible ranking. The totals for each candidate determines the winners.
Majority systems
Countries by electoral system used to (directly) elect their Head of State (President)
Majority voting is a system in which candidates must receive a
majority of votes to be elected, either in a runoff election or final
round of voting (although in some cases only a plurality is required in
the last round of voting if no candidate can achieve a majority). There
are two main forms of majoritarian systems, one conducted in a single
round of voting using ranked voting
and the other using multiple elections, to successively narrow the
field of candidates. Both are primarily used for single-member
constituencies.
Majoritarian voting can be achieved in a single election using instant-runoff voting (IRV), whereby voters rank candidates in order of preference; this system is used for parliamentary elections in Australia and Papua New Guinea.
If no candidate receives a majority of the vote in the first round, the
second preferences of the lowest-ranked candidate are then added to the
totals. This is repeated until a candidate achieves over 50% of the
number of valid votes. If not all voters use all their preference votes,
then the count may continue until two candidates remain, at which point
the winner is the one with the most votes. A modified form of IRV is
the contingent vote
where voters do not rank all candidates, but have a limited number of
preference votes. If no candidate has a majority in the first round, all
candidates are excluded except the top two, with the highest remaining
preference votes from the votes for the excluded candidates then added
to the totals to determine the winner. This system is used in Sri Lankan presidential elections, with voters allowed to give three preferences.
The other main form of majoritarian system is the two-round system,
which is the most common system used for presidential elections around
the world, being used in 88 countries. It is also used in 20 countries
for electing the legislature.
If no candidate achieves a majority of votes in the first round of
voting, a second round is held to determine the winner. In most cases
the second round is limited to the top two candidates from the first
round, although in some elections more than two candidates may choose to
contest the second round; in these cases the second round is decided by
plurality voting. Some countries use a modified form of the two-round
system, such as Ecuador
where a candidate in the presidential election is declared the winner
if they receive 40% of the vote and are 10% ahead of their nearest
rival, or Argentina (45% plus 10% ahead), where the system is known as ballotage.
An exhaustive ballot
is not limited to two rounds, but sees the last-placed candidate
eliminated in each round of voting. Due to the potentially large number
of rounds, this system is not used in any major popular elections, but
is used to elect the Speakers of parliament in several countries and
members of the Swiss Federal Council.
In some formats there may be multiple rounds held without any
candidates being eliminated until a candidate achieves a majority, a
system used in the United States Electoral College.
Proportional systems
Countries by proportional electoral system (lower house or unicameral legislature):
Proportional representation
is the most widely used electoral system for national legislatures,
with the parliaments of over eighty countries elected by various forms
of the system.
Party-list proportional representation
is the single most common electoral system and is used by 80 countries,
and involves voters voting for a list of candidates proposed by a
party. In closed list systems voters do not have any influence over the candidates put forward by the party, but in open list
systems voters are able to both vote for the party list and influence
the order in which candidates will be assigned seats. In some countries,
notably Israel and the Netherlands,
elections are carried out using 'pure' proportional representation,
with the votes tallied on a national level before assigning seats to
parties. However, in most cases several multi-member constituencies are
used rather than a single nationwide constituency, giving an element of
geographical representation; but this can result in the distribution of
seats not reflecting the national vote totals. As a result, some
countries have leveling seats to award to parties whose seat totals are lower than their proportion of the national vote.
In addition to the electoral threshold
(the minimum percentage of the vote that a party must obtain to win
seats), there are several different ways to allocate seats in
proportional systems. There are two main types of systems: highest average and largest remainder.
Highest average systems involve dividing the votes received by each
party by a series of divisors, producing figures that determine seat
allocation; for example the D'Hondt method (of which there are variants including Hagenbach-Bischoff) and the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method.
Under largest remainder systems, parties' vote shares are divided by
the quota (obtained by dividing the total number of votes by the number
of seats available). This usually leaves some seats unallocated, which
are awarded to parties based on the largest fractions of seats that they
have remaining. Examples of largest remainder systems include the Hare quota, Droop quota, the Imperiali quota and the Hagenbach-Bischoff quota.
Single transferable vote (STV) is another form of proportional representation; in STV, voters rank candidates in a multi-member constituency rather than voting for a party list; it is used in Malta and the Republic of Ireland. To be elected, candidates must pass a quota (the Droop quota
being the most common). Candidates that pass the quota are elected. If
necessary to fill seats, votes are reallocated from the least successful
candidates, as well as surplus votes from successful candidates, until
all seats are filled by candidates who have passed the quota or until
there are only as many remaining candidates as the number of remaining
seats.
Mixed systems
Countries using a mixed electoral system (lower house or unicameral legislature): Non-compensatory
In non-compensatory, parallel voting systems, which are used in 20 countries,
members of a legislature are elected by two different methods; part of
the membership is elected by a plurality or majority vote in
single-member constituencies and the other part by proportional
representation. The results of the constituency vote have no effect on
the outcome of the proportional vote.
In compensatory mixed-member systems the results of the proportional vote are adjusted to balance the seats won in the constituency vote. The mixed-member proportional systems,
in use in eight countries, provide enough compensatory seats to ensure
that parties have a number of seats approximately proportional to their
vote share.
Other systems may be insufficiently compensatory, and this may result in overhang seats,
where parties win more seats in the constituency system than they would
be entitled to based on their vote share. Variations of this include
the Additional Member System, and Alternative Vote Plus,
in which voters cast votes for both single-member constituencies and
multi-member constituencies; the allocation of seats in the multi-member
constituencies is adjusted to achieve an overall seat allocation
proportional to parties' vote share by taking into account the number of
seats won by parties in the single-member constituencies.
Mixed single vote
systems are also compensatory, however they usually use a vote transfer
mechanism unlike the seat linkage (top-up) method of MMP and may or may
not be able to achieve proportional representation. An unusual form of
mixed-member compensatory representation using negative vote transfer, Scorporo, was used in Italy from 1993 until 2006.
Some electoral systems feature a majority bonus system
to either ensure one party or coalition gains a majority in the
legislature, or to give the party receiving the most votes a clear
advantage in terms of the number of seats. San Marino
has a modified two-round system, which sees a second round of voting
featuring the top two parties or coalitions if there is no majority in
the first round. The winner of the second round is guaranteed 35 seats
in the 60-seat Grand and General Council. In Greece the party receiving the most votes was given an additional 50 seats, a system which was abolished following the 2019 elections.
In Uruguay, the President and members of the General Assembly
are elected by on a single ballot, known as the double simultaneous
vote. Voters cast a single vote, voting for the presidential, Senatorial
and Chamber of Deputies candidates of that party. This system was also
previously used in Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.
Primary elections
Primary elections
are a feature of some electoral systems, either as a formal part of the
electoral system or informally by choice of individual political
parties as a method of selecting candidates, as is the case in Italy. Primary elections limit the risk of vote splitting by ensuring a single party candidate. In Argentina
they are a formal part of the electoral system and take place two
months before the main elections; any party receiving less than 1.5% of
the vote is not permitted to contest the main elections. In the United
States, there are both partisan and non-partisan primary elections.
Indirect elections
Some
elections feature an indirect electoral system, whereby there is either
no popular vote, or the popular vote is only one stage of the election;
in these systems the final vote is usually taken by an electoral college. In several countries, such as Mauritius or Trinidad and Tobago, the post of President is elected by the legislature. In others like India, the vote is taken by an electoral college consisting of the national legislature and state legislatures. In the United States, the president is indirectly elected using a two-stage process; a popular vote in each state elects members to the electoral college
that in turn elects the President. This can result in a situation where
a candidate who receives the most votes nationwide does not win the
electoral college vote, as most recently happened in 2000 and 2016.
Systems used outside politics
In
addition to the various electoral systems in use in the political
sphere, there are numerous others, some of which are proposals and some
of which have been adopted for usage in business (such as electing
corporate board members) or for organisations but not for public
elections.
Historically, weighted voting
systems were used in some countries. These allocated a greater weight
to the votes of some voters than others, either indirectly by allocating
more seats to certain groups (such as the Prussian three-class franchise), or by weighting the results of the vote. The latter system was used in colonial Rhodesia for the 1962 and 1965 elections.
The elections featured two voter rolls (the 'A' roll being largely
European and the 'B' roll largely African); the seats of the House
Assembly were divided into 50 constituency seats and 15 district seats.
Although all voters could vote for both types of seats, 'A' roll votes
were given greater weight for the constituency seats and 'B' roll votes
greater weight for the district seats. Weighted systems are still used
in corporate elections, with votes weighted to reflect stock ownership.
Compulsory voting, enforced. Compulsory voting, not enforced. Compulsory voting, enforced (only men). Compulsory voting, not enforced (only men). Historical: the country had compulsory voting in the past.
Electoral rules place limits on suffrage and candidacy. Most countries's electorates are characterised by universal suffrage, but there are differences on the age at which people are allowed to vote,
with the youngest being 16 and the oldest 21. People may be
disenfranchised for a range of reasons, such as being a serving
prisoner, being declared bankrupt, having committed certain crimes or
being a serving member of the armed forces. Similar limits are placed on
candidacy (also known as passive suffrage), and in many cases the age
limit for candidates is higher than the voting age. A total of 21
countries have compulsory voting, although in some there is an upper age limit on enforcement of the law. Many countries also have the none of the above option on their ballot papers.
In systems that use constituencies, apportionment
or districting defines the area covered by each constituency. Where
constituency boundaries are drawn has a strong influence on the likely
outcome of elections in the constituency due to the geographic
distribution of voters. Political parties may seek to gain an advantage
during redistricting by ensuring their voter base has a majority in as many constituencies as possible, a process known as gerrymandering. Historically rotten and pocket boroughs, constituencies with unusually small populations, were used by wealthy families to gain parliamentary representation.
Some countries have minimum turnout requirements for elections to
be valid. In Serbia this rule caused multiple re-runs of presidential
elections, with the 1997 election re-run once and the 2002 elections
re-run three times due insufficient turnout in the first, second and third attempts to run the election. The turnout requirement was scrapped prior to the fourth vote in 2004. Similar problems in Belarus led to the 1995 parliamentary elections going to a fourth round of voting before enough parliamentarians were elected to make a quorum.
Reserved seats
are used in many countries to ensure representation for ethnic
minorities, women, young people or the disabled. These seats are
separate from general seats, and may be elected separately (such as in
Morocco where a separate ballot is used to elect the 60 seats reserved
for women and 30 seats reserved for young people in the House of
Representatives), or be allocated to parties based on the results of the
election; in Jordan
the reserved seats for women are given to the female candidates who
failed to win constituency seats but with the highest number of votes,
whilst in Kenya
the Senate seats reserved for women, young people and the disabled are
allocated to parties based on how many seats they won in the general
vote. Some countries achieve minority representation by other means,
including requirements for a certain proportion of candidates to be
women, or by exempting minority parties from the electoral threshold, as
is done in Poland, Romania and Serbia.
History
Pre-democratic
In ancient Greece and Italy, the institution of suffrage already existed in a rudimentary form at the outset of the historical period. In the early monarchies
it was customary for the king to invite pronouncements of his people on
matters in which it was prudent to secure its assent beforehand. In
these assemblies the people recorded their opinion by clamouring (a
method which survived in Sparta as late as the 4th century BCE), or by the clashing of spears on shields.
Early democracy
Voting has been used as a feature of democracy since the 6th century BCE, when democracy was introduced by the Athenian democracy.
However, in Athenian democracy, voting was seen as the least democratic
among methods used for selecting public officials, and was little used,
because elections were believed to inherently favor the wealthy and
well-known over average citizens. Viewed as more democratic were
assemblies open to all citizens, and selection by lot, as well as rotation of office.
Generally, the taking of votes was effected in the form of a
poll. The practice of the Athenians, which is shown by inscriptions to
have been widely followed in the other states of Greece, was to hold a
show of hands, except on questions affecting the status of individuals:
these latter, which included all lawsuits and proposals of ostracism,
in which voters chose the citizen they most wanted to exile for ten
years, were determined by secret ballot (one of the earliest recorded
elections in Athens was a plurality vote that it was undesirable to win, namely an ostracism vote). At Rome the method which prevailed up to the 2nd century BCE was that of division (discessio).
But the system became subject to intimidation and corruption. Hence a
series of laws enacted between 139 and 107 BCE prescribed the use of the
ballot (tabella),
a slip of wood coated with wax, for all business done in the assemblies
of the people.
For the purpose of carrying resolutions a simple majority of votes was
deemed sufficient. As a general rule equal value was made to attach to
each vote; but in the popular assemblies at Rome a system of voting by
groups was in force until the middle of the 3rd century BCE by which the
richer classes secured a decisive preponderance.
Most elections in the early history of democracy were held using plurality voting or some variant, but as an exception, the state of Venice in the 13th century adopted approval voting to elect their Great Council.
The Venetians' method for electing the Doge was a particularly convoluted process, consisting of five rounds of drawing lots (sortition)
and five rounds of approval voting. By drawing lots, a body of 30
electors was chosen, which was further reduced to nine electors by
drawing lots again. An electoral college
of nine members elected 40 people by approval voting; those 40 were
reduced to form a second electoral college of 12 members by drawing lots
again. The second electoral college elected 25 people by approval
voting, which were reduced to form a third electoral college of nine
members by drawing lots. The third electoral college elected 45 people,
which were reduced to form a fourth electoral college of 11 by drawing
lots. They in turn elected a final electoral body of 41 members, who
ultimately elected the Doge. Despite its complexity, the method had
certain desirable properties such as being hard to game and ensuring
that the winner reflected the opinions of both majority and minority
factions. This process, with slight modifications, was central to the politics of the Republic of Venice throughout its remarkable lifespan of over 500 years, from 1268 to 1797.
Development of new systems
Jean-Charles de Borda proposed the Borda count in 1770 as a method for electing members to the French Academy of Sciences. His method was opposed by the Marquis de Condorcet, who proposed instead the method of pairwise comparison that he had devised. Implementations of this method are known as Condorcet methods. He also wrote about the Condorcet paradox, which he called the intransitivity of majority preferences. However, recent research has shown that the philosopher Ramon Llull
devised both the Borda count and a pairwise method that satisfied the
Condorcet criterion in the 13th century. The manuscripts in which he
described these methods had been lost to history until they were
rediscovered in 2001.
Later in the 18th century, apportionment methods came to prominence due to the United States Constitution, which mandated that seats in the United States House of Representatives had to be allocated among the states proportionally to their population, but did not specify how to do so. A variety of methods were proposed by statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Daniel Webster.
Some of the apportionment methods devised in the United States were in a
sense rediscovered in Europe in the 19th century, as seat allocation
methods for the newly proposed method of party-list proportional
representation. The result is that many apportionment methods have two
names; Jefferson's method is equivalent to the D'Hondt method, as is Webster's method to the Sainte-Laguë method, while Hamilton's method is identical to the Hare largest remainder method.
The single transferable vote (STV) method was devised by Carl Andræ in Denmark in 1855 and in the United Kingdom by Thomas Hare in 1857. STV elections were first held in Denmark in 1856, and in Tasmania in 1896 after its use was promoted by Andrew Inglis Clark. Party-list proportional representation began to be used to elect European legislatures in the early 20th century, with Belgium the first to implement it for its 1900 general elections.
Since then, proportional and semi-proportional methods have come to be
used in almost all democratic countries, with most exceptions being
former British and French colonies.
Single-winner revival
Perhaps
influenced by the rapid development of multiple-winner electoral
systems, theorists began to publish new findings about single-winner
methods in the late 19th century. This began around 1870, when William Robert Ware proposed applying STV to single-winner elections, yielding instant-runoff voting (IRV). Soon, mathematicians began to revisit Condorcet's ideas and invent new methods for Condorcet completion; Edward J. Nanson combined the newly described instant runoff voting with the Borda count to yield a new Condorcet method called Nanson's method. Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, proposed the straightforward Condorcet method known as Dodgson's method.
He also proposed a proportional representation system based on
multi-member districts, quotas as minimum requirements to take seats,
and votes transferable by candidates through proxy voting.
Ranked voting electoral systems eventually gathered enough support to be adopted for use in government elections. In Australia, IRV was first adopted in 1893 and STV in 1896 (Tasmania). IRV continues to be used along with STV today.
In the United States in the early-20th-century progressive era, some municipalities began to use ranked voting and Bucklin voting, although Bucklin is no longer used in any government elections, and has even been declared unconstitutional in Minnesota.
Since the turn away from Bucklin, STV was adopted by more than 20
cities in the U.S. and many cities elsewhere, and by Ireland and Malta
for their national elections.
The use of game theory to analyze electoral systems led to discoveries about the effects of certain methods. Earlier developments such as Arrow's impossibility theorem had already shown the issues with Ranked voting systems. Research led Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn to formally define and promote the use of approval voting in 1977.
Political scientists of the 20th century published many studies on the
effects that the electoral systems have on voters' choices and political
parties,and on political stability. A few scholars also studied which effects caused a nation to switch to a particular electoral system.
The study of electoral systems influenced a new push for electoral reform beginning around the 1990s, when proposals were made to replace plurality voting in governmental elections with other methods. New Zealand adopted mixed-member proportional representation for the 1996 general elections, having been approved in a 1993 referendum. After plurality voting was a key factor in the contested results of the 2000 presidential elections in the United States, various municipalities in the United States began to adopt instant-runoff voting,
although some of them subsequently returned to their prior method.
However, attempts at introducing more proportional systems were not
always successful; in Canada there were two referendums in British
Columbia in 2005 and 2009 on adopting an STV method, both of which failed. In the United Kingdom, a 2011 referendum on adopting IRV saw the proposal rejected.
In other countries there were calls for the restoration of
plurality or majoritarian systems or their establishment where they have
never been used; a referendum
was held in Ecuador in 1994 on the adoption the two round system, but
the idea was rejected. In Romania a proposal to switch to a two-round
system for parliamentary elections failed only because voter turnout in the referendum was too low. Attempts to reintroduce single-member constituencies in Poland (2015) and two-round system in Bulgaria (2016) via referendums both also failed due to low turnout.
Electoral systems can be compared by different means. Attitudes
towards systems are highly influenced by the systems' impact on groups
that one supports or opposes, which can make the objective comparison of
voting systems difficult. There are several ways to address this
problem:
One approach is to define criteria mathematically, such that any
electoral system either passes or fails. This gives perfectly objective
results, but their practical relevance is still arguable.
Another approach is to define ideal criteria that no electoral
system passes perfectly, and then see how often or how close to passing
various methods are over a large sample of simulated elections. This
gives results which are practically relevant, but the method of
generating the sample of simulated elections can still be arguably
biased.
A final approach is to consider practical criteria, and then
assign a neutral body to evaluate each method according to these
criteria or evaluate the performance of countries with these electoral
systems. The practical criteria include political fragmentation, voter turnout, wasted votes, complexity of vote counting, and barriers to entry for new political movements. The quality of electoral systems can be measured on outcomes, such as voter turnout, and reduced political apathy.
This approach can look at aspects of electoral systems, which the other
two approaches miss, but both the definitions of these criteria and the
evaluations of the methods are still inevitably subjective.
Arrow's theorem and the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem prove that no single-winner system using ranked voting can meet all such criteria simultaneously, while Gibbard's theorem
proves the same for all single-winner deterministic voting methods.
Instead of debating the importance of different criteria, another method
is to simulate many elections with different electoral systems, and
estimate the typical overall happiness of the population with the
results, their vulnerability to strategic voting, their likelihood of electing the candidate closest to the average voter, etc.
According to a 2006 survey of electoral system experts, their preferred electoral systems were in order of preference:
