RE: Article "U.S. presidential election: the problem is with majority voting not the electoral college" (The Conversation website)
For some reason, the writer suggests a ranked system that does not use numbers but instead you get to classify the candidates as being great, good, average, poor or terrible.
And uses the term majority voting, because the term plurality is apparently too technical and a downer. As most U.S.-ians think a person with the most votes has a majority, even if it is less than half the votes, the term majority voting is merely taking the common mistake and extending it one step further. Soon perhaps all elected politicians will be described as majority politicians!
Once the voters have rated the candidates, the percentage of voters that used each descriptor for the candidate is added from great going down to terrible. The candidate that has a majority of his or her votes being good or better reviews wins compared to a candidate that has a majority made up of average or better reviews.
How this is better than using numbers eludes me. In fact it limits the options to only five. if you use numbers you can use number 1 to 20 to rank 20 candidates. With only five classifications, you must start to double up on values if you want to rank more than five candidates.
I am not sure how to combine the majority calculation with numbers used to rank candidates but probably it could be done if you wanted to.
The system is designed to prevent the unfair effects of vote-splitting.
Appears to work only for election of a single member.
A curiosity for sure.
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