Making wasted votes count: Turnout,transfers, and preferential voting in practice |
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Affiliation: | 1. Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics, Norwegian Center for Taxation, Norway;2. Centre for Applied Research at NHH, Norwegian Center for Taxation, Norway;3. Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Accounting, Auditing and Law, Norwegian Center for Taxation, Norway;4. Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science, Norwegian Center for Taxation, Norway;1. Department of Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, United Kingdom;2. Department of Economics and Statistics “Cognetti de’ Martiis”, Università di Torino, Italy |
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Abstract: | Proponents of electoral reform champion the single transferable vote (STV) or aligned forms of preferential voting (AV, IRV, RCV) as a method to improve participation among and representation of the general public. Voters provide an ordinal ranking among alternatives on the ballot, and ballots not used to elect a candidate are transferred to another favored alternative. Preferential voting is intended to encourage both citizen participation in an election and sincere voting. Yet the empirical evidence about the effects of preferential voting in the scholarly literature is scant. Elections of members to the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of national parliament in Ireland, provide a wealth of data on preferential voting. Data from four recent Irish elections (1997, 2002, 2007, and 2011) are analyzed to assess the effectiveness of STV on reducing wasted votes. The number of nontransferable ballots, votes not used for any candidate, is large and increases as the need for lower level preferences (that is, later counts or rounds) grows. Voter turnout does not correspond to preferential voting in predictable ways; turnout declines as the number of candidates elected increases. Although preferential voting systems have much to offer, their effects need to be evaluated. |
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Keywords: | Voting Elections Single transferable vote Preferential voting Voter turnout |
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