Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Bullet voting
Summary
Bullet voting, also known as single-shot voting and plump voting, is a voting tactic, usually in multiple-winner elections, where a voter is entitled to vote for more than one candidate, but instead votes for only one candidate.
A voter might do this because it is easier than evaluating all the candidates or as a form of tactical voting. Voters can use this tactic to maximize the chance that their favorite candidate will be elected while increasing the risk that other favored candidates will lose. A group of voters using this tactic consistently has a better chance of one favorite candidate being elected.
Election systems that satisfy the later-no-harm criterion discourage any value in bullet voting. These systems either do not ask for lower preferences (like plurality) or promise to ignore lower preferences unless all higher preferences are eliminated.
Some elections have tried to disallow bullet voting and require the casting of multiple votes because it can empower minority voters. Minority groups can defeat this requirement if they are allowed to run as many candidates as seats are being elected.
Plurality voting only allows a single vote, so bullet voting is effectively mandatory. Voting for more than one candidate is called an overvote and will invalidate the ballot.
In contrast, approval voting allows voters to support as many candidates as they like, and bullet voting can be a strategy of a minority, just as in multiple-winner elections (see below). Such voting would be for their sincere favorite, so it would not result in the same pathologies seen in plurality voting, where voters are encouraged to bullet vote for a candidate who is not their favorite. Bucklin voting and Borda voting used ranked ballots, and both allow the possibility that a second choice could help defeat the first choice, so bullet voting might be used to prevent this.
Instant-runoff voting and contingent vote allow full preferences to be expressed and lower preferences have no effect unless the higher ones have all been eliminated.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.