Hubert Bray : Voting Rules for Democracy without Institutionalized Parties

This talk will be a fun discussion of the mathematical aspects of preferential ballot elections (in which voters are allowed to express their rankings of all of the candidates). After describing how single vote ballots can lead to an institutionalized two party system by discouraging third party candidates, we will then discuss the various vote counting methods for preferential ballot elections and the characteristics, both good and bad, that these various methods have. We will also touch on Arrow's Paradox, one of the most over-rated "paradoxes" in mathematics, and explain how it is much less relevant to discussions of vote counting methods than is sometimes believed.

• Category: Graduate/Faculty Seminar
• Duration: 01:34:52
• Date:  February 5, 2010 at 4:25 PM
• Tags:   seminar, Graduate/faculty Seminar