Voting Methods and Fairness Principles

Introduction and Outline

It’s just the greatest number of votes wins the election, right? Not so fast.

While a simple counting of votes can be an effective method in some situations, the theory of designing voting methods is a lot more complicated (and intriguing) than that. When one asks, “which voting method is the best,” this is both a mathematical and a philosophical question, not to mention a question that lends itself to interesting pedagogical opportunities in a math classroom. In this article I’m going to break this question into…