This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||
|
-- Stephen C Bosworth ( talk) 01:24, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
There is a link to this article on the Gerrymandering page, but this article doesn't say anything about the relationship between wasted votes and gerrymandering. I believe the term "wasted vote" is the most relevant in the discussion of gerrymandering, or that gerrymandering is certainly the most significant (U.S.) social application of the "wasted votes" concept. There should an overview of how wasted votes are exploited in the process of gerrymandering here in this article along with a link back to the main gerrymandering article. I might revamp the article to include this theme later if nobody makes the edit first. 24.179.114.255 ( talk) 18:36, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
Personally I disagree with the tone of this article in giving some legitimacy to the concept of "wasted votes" as defined herein, especially given the fact that refrences aren't provided. For example, the definitions provided state that a wasted vote may be defined as... rather than something like 'the term wasted vote is often used to describe votes cast that...' et cet. I don't see how the definitions provided actually constitute a wasted vote, and while the term itself doesn't need to be an accurate description of the concept it denotes, I do think the article could do better to present the way in which the term is used and the arguments for and against its legitimacy in various situations. Above all, it would seem that the views of the sources should be prevented, rather than the article itself declaring certain votes as wasted. Provided that refrences can be found, would there be an objection to trying to focus on the debate over the term's usefulness in various situations, and the ways in which it is currently used? I feel the current article is actually taking a side on a controversial position that is neither good for the article nor accurate.-- Δζ ( talk) 01:02, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
I agree. The definitions do not constitute a wasted vote in my opinion. Just having your party lose is not wasting a vote. A wasted vote is one where it would make no difference if you voted or not and one that has no effect on the outcome of the election. 90.155.77.156 ( talk) 14:01, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
92.29.236.253 ( talk) 08:39, 11 October 2012 (UTC)I also agree, on rare occasions we get asked our opinion on who we would like to govern or represent us, a wasted vote is one which does not give that opinion, either by not voting or by trying to vote tactically. 92.29.236.253 ( talk) 08:39, 11 October 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.29.236.253 ( talk) 08:35, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
I do not understand the following quote from the article:
"Opponents of the concept of a wasted vote point out that voting one's conscience is fundamental to democracy - an example of this is the adoption of major Socialist legislation by more mainstream parties in the United States in order to halt the Socialist party [1]."
In what way does the example cited relate to voting one's conscience in a democracy? The two statements seem unrelated, or at least related in a rather abstruse way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.6.97.117 ( talk) 12:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Is wasted vote should be counted? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.149.8.130 ( talk) 18:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
---
I'd like to point out that the last sentence makes no sense and that the link has nothing to do with it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.35.50.189 ( talk) 06:04, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
This whole article should be deleted as the concept of a 'wasted vote' does not exist, so therefore, there should be no explanation for it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wonton29 ( talk • contribs) 14:44, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
With the recent Wisconsin decision and it coverage in the New York Times, it seems to me that the term "Wasted Vote" is now best understood as a part of the model associated with the Efficiency Gap, and that in fact it would make more sense to re-title this article Efficiency Gap. I added a redirect page for Efficiency Gap pointing here, but I think that the whole article should probably be turned inside out.
Clements ( talk) 18:03, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
The definition seems very wrong to me. Most of the time, when people talk about the wasted vote, they're talking about a vote for a 3rd party in a 2-party system. This has nothing to do with gerrymandering. This is, however, related to Duverger's law. The vote is "wasted" because a 3rd party candidate has very small chances of being elected, and your vote thus is very unlikely to impact the results of the election. Fresheneesz ( talk)
I believe there is an error or ambiguity in the University of Chicago Law Review article's definition. Although it calls out "plurality-rule, single-member-district (SMD) elections that are almost universal in American politics," it assumes majority-rule SMDs in its examples. (IIRC, only 11 states use a majority threshold.) If wasted (or as the paper calls "inefficient") votes are those that do not directly contribute to victory, then (assuming plurality elections) wouldn't votes for the winner in excess of the loser's votes+1 be considered wasted since their removal will not change the outcome? Only if the election uses a majority threshold, would the wasted votes be those for the winner in excess of 50%+1. Maybe there should be a different term for wasted votes as used in EG calculations. It seems the authors of that article gloss over the distinction between a plurality threshold and a majority threshold. The confusion might also be caused by a difference of perspective: who is wasting the vote? Are the parties wasting votes, or are the voters? FB1A6E38 ( talk) 01:18, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
Please excuse my Wikipedia naïveté. I have come to what I believe to be a formal definition of wasted (and conversely, effective) votes in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I also have a method for visualizing them. I was thinking of adding this definition/visualization to this page, but since I believe this is a new definition, I have no citation for it. Can I add it anyway? I put together an example of it here:
or get the original Numbers version.
FB1A6E38 ( talk) 22:25, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
I've published a story on Medium that attempts to explain my definition. Since I'm the author and this is probably considered original research, I don't think I should be the one to make changes to the article, but let me know if anyone thinks otherwise. FB1A6E38 ( talk) 17:08, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
I just reverted an addition that described the main idea behind Evaluative Proportional Risk (EPR), a concept in voting recently published by an academic political scientist. I'm not opposed to putting some of these ideas into Wikipedia, however the edit I just reverted was multi-ways ham-handed.
Do other people have thoughts on this matter? If this is a notable new concept, we should figure out how to include it. But it may not be. M.boli ( talk) 22:58, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
Here is the text recently added to the lede (the second version) by Stephen C Bosworth ( talk · contribs):
The voting method called majority judgment (MJ) addresses the problem of qualitative waste. [1] Voters are asked to grade each candidate’s fitness for the office as either Excellent, Very Good, Good, Acceptable, Poor, or Reject. All these evaluations are counted to guarantee that the winner is the one most highly valued by a majority of all the voters. Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR) adapts MJ to elect all the members of a legislative body. [2] Each voter’s representative is the one most highly graded by that voter – no vote is wasted.
This is certainly a more readable and comprehensible summary than the first try. I did some minor copy-edit on the citation, I think you can put it into Wikipedia.
I think you make a good point: many proportional representation systems are partly designed to reduce wasted votes. It could make sense to put a sentence in the lede that notes this fact, and links over to proportional representation. But EPR is hardly unique in this respect.
Which leads to my suggestion: proportional representation is the proper article to describe Evaluative Proportional Representation. In particular, this seems like a kind of cousin to Reweighted Range Voting. The main ideas are a) proportional representation and b) a voter assigns a score to each candidate (which in your system is a 5 point scale). This contrasts with other systems where voters rank their candidates in preference order. I will be happy to try to help integrate this material into Wikipedia. I prefer to keep the discussion on the article talk pages, as opposed to individual editor talk pages or e-mail. M.boli ( talk) 02:07, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Ping @ Stephen C Bosworth: in a separate edit in order to be sure the ping/notice is sent. Please look at Talk:Wasted vote talk page M.boli ( talk) 02:27, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Update: I wiki-linked majority judgment. Neither of us noticed it already has a wiki-page. Is it possible that EPR belongs on the majority judgment page? M.boli ( talk) 12:46, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Ping @ M.Boli: Talk:Wasted vote Thank you both for helping me on this my first contribution, and for expressing your willingness to help integrate my material into Wikipedia. You are right that Reweighted Range Voting (RRV) has some resemblance to EPR. Both allow citizens to rate candidates and then these ratings are counted to elect parties proportionately into the legislature. However, as cogently argued by Balinski & Laraki (p. 283), MJ’s and EPR’s ratings (i.e. the 6 grades from Excellent to Reject) are more meaningful, informative, and discerning than RRV’s 6 ratings (e.g. scores from 5 to 0). Also, the different ways that MJ and EPR count the ratings is simpler than RRV’s. RRV uses the Droop Quota and somewhat arbitrary fractions, while each EPR vote can be counted by anyone who can only add and subtract whole numbers. Also, EPR’s giving different weighted votes in the legislature to each member, assists each voter to guarantee that her vote will not be wasted either quantitatively or qualitatively. EPR’s proportionality is exact while RRV’s is only approximate. Each EPR citizen’s vote is added to the weighted vote in the legislature of the representative she has most highly graded. Among all the multi-winner methods, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted qualitatively. Do you have any suggestions as to how more discussions of MJ and/or EPR might be usefully added to Wikipedia? For example, might I contribute a step by step description of how an EPR election is counted? Might it be carefully compared and contrasts with each of its rivals with regard their delivery of the features desired in an electoral system? ( talk) Stephen C Bosworth ( talk) 01:24, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
18-9-24 Stephen C Bosworth ( talk) 01:24, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
References
{{
cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)
Kolyvansky ( talk · contribs) noticed the ambiguity in the paper: the words in the U of C Law Review article seem to mean votes over 50%+1 count as excess, whereas the worked-out example in that paper uses 50% exactly.
But then the same author Stephanopoulos uses 50%+1 in his New Republic article. And 50%+1 made more intuitive sense to me. So I went with that. But as a practical matter I guess it won't make much numerical difference except in small toy examples. M.boli ( talk) 18:30, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Consider this statement from the page: "If each party wins a number of district elections in rough proportion to that party's electoral popularity, the efficiency gap will be near zero."
Now consider an example: 5 districts, 10 voters per district, two parties A and B, district 1 with all 10 from A, district 2 with all 10 from A, district 3 with 10 from A, district 4 with 10 from A, district 5 with 10 from B. So party A has 20 wasted votes and party B has 5 wasted votes. The difference is 15, so the efficiency gap is 15/50 = 30%. Party A has 40 voters and gets 4 seats, party B has 10 voters and gets 1 seat, so each party wins a number of district elections in proportion to that party's electoral popularity. But the efficiency gap is far from 0. So the quoted statement is false. Unless I made a mistake.
Daniel R. Grayson ( talk) 20:39, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
... in a primary, if you are stuck with an early vote cast for a candidate who then dropped out. Carlm0404 ( talk) 15:45, 8 October 2020 (UTC)
Currently, the following is stated for example calculations:
Consider an election where candidates A, B and C receive 6000, 3100 and 701 votes respectively.
If this is a plurality voting election for a single seat, Candidate A has a plurality of votes and is therefore elected. The wasted votes are:
All 3801 votes for candidates B and C, since these did not elect any candidate In the wider definition, 2899 of the votes for candidate A are wasted, since A would still have won with only 3101 votes. Therefore, 6700 out of 9801 votes are wasted.
Why is there not an example where 2,899 of the votes for candidate A are wasted, none for candidate B are wasted and all for candidate C are wasted? The votes for candidate A reach 50%+1 for candidate B at 3,101, resulting in any more votes for candidate A being wasted in defeating his or her rivals. The votes for candidate B are not wasted, as they are the threshold that candidate A had to overcome. The votes for candidate C are wasted as they have no impact on the race between B and C, resulting in 3,600 wasted votes (2,899 for A and 701 for C) out of 9,801 ballots cast. I suppose counting the votes for candidate C as 'wasted' refers to the position presented in the Incorrect Definition discussion about third parties which are too small to impact the election between the top two candidates. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
65.28.183.104 (
talk) 07:40, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
previously: "...considered a qualitatively wasted if..." edit: "...considered qualitatively wasted if... consider also "...considered a qualitatively wasted vote if..." 2601:283:8200:CC00:B4AF:D7BD:2D98:28B1 ( talk) 05:09, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
The concept used in this article for the normalized efficiency gap was created by a single user (who has since been banned), contains no source or reasoning as to how the formula was created and is of low quality relative to the rest of the article. Would it make sense for this to be rewritten in a more professional way? A Doctor Who ( talk) 00:34, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
This page appears to be being edited by an Australian politician or other actor in relation to a Twitter argument relating to the concept of "wasted votes" in the Australian preferential voting (STV) system. Suggest reversion to previous accurate technical description of "wasted vote". The edits made by the user Austinatorus add to confusion in relation to the term "wasted vote". Particularly the phrase: "In that context, every vote that is added to the final count has been recognised as an expression of the voter's opinion and has therefore not been wasted." The idea of a "final count" may not exist in all voting systems. Even in a preferential voting system such as the Australian House of Representatives STV single-candidate system, all votes that accrue to the final eliminated candidate are "wasted" in the sense of not receiving representation in the final division of seats. TheLoneAmigo ( talk) 12:35, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
Removed the recently-added "wasted vote by country" section.
-- M.boli ( talk) 02:14, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
Material from Wasted vote was split to Efficiency gap on 17:58, 24 May 2022 from this version. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted so long as the latter page exists. Please leave this template in place to link the article histories and preserve this attribution. |
The contents of the Unrepresented voters page were merged into Wasted vote on 10 June 2023. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
Reason: overlapping meaning HudecEmil ( talk) 18:22, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
I don’t support plurality voting, but this page makes false claims about it and “wasted votes” that lack nuance and should elaborate on the different philosophical interpretations. 45.42.157.72 ( talk) 17:01, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||
|
-- Stephen C Bosworth ( talk) 01:24, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
There is a link to this article on the Gerrymandering page, but this article doesn't say anything about the relationship between wasted votes and gerrymandering. I believe the term "wasted vote" is the most relevant in the discussion of gerrymandering, or that gerrymandering is certainly the most significant (U.S.) social application of the "wasted votes" concept. There should an overview of how wasted votes are exploited in the process of gerrymandering here in this article along with a link back to the main gerrymandering article. I might revamp the article to include this theme later if nobody makes the edit first. 24.179.114.255 ( talk) 18:36, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
Personally I disagree with the tone of this article in giving some legitimacy to the concept of "wasted votes" as defined herein, especially given the fact that refrences aren't provided. For example, the definitions provided state that a wasted vote may be defined as... rather than something like 'the term wasted vote is often used to describe votes cast that...' et cet. I don't see how the definitions provided actually constitute a wasted vote, and while the term itself doesn't need to be an accurate description of the concept it denotes, I do think the article could do better to present the way in which the term is used and the arguments for and against its legitimacy in various situations. Above all, it would seem that the views of the sources should be prevented, rather than the article itself declaring certain votes as wasted. Provided that refrences can be found, would there be an objection to trying to focus on the debate over the term's usefulness in various situations, and the ways in which it is currently used? I feel the current article is actually taking a side on a controversial position that is neither good for the article nor accurate.-- Δζ ( talk) 01:02, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
I agree. The definitions do not constitute a wasted vote in my opinion. Just having your party lose is not wasting a vote. A wasted vote is one where it would make no difference if you voted or not and one that has no effect on the outcome of the election. 90.155.77.156 ( talk) 14:01, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
92.29.236.253 ( talk) 08:39, 11 October 2012 (UTC)I also agree, on rare occasions we get asked our opinion on who we would like to govern or represent us, a wasted vote is one which does not give that opinion, either by not voting or by trying to vote tactically. 92.29.236.253 ( talk) 08:39, 11 October 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.29.236.253 ( talk) 08:35, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
I do not understand the following quote from the article:
"Opponents of the concept of a wasted vote point out that voting one's conscience is fundamental to democracy - an example of this is the adoption of major Socialist legislation by more mainstream parties in the United States in order to halt the Socialist party [1]."
In what way does the example cited relate to voting one's conscience in a democracy? The two statements seem unrelated, or at least related in a rather abstruse way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.6.97.117 ( talk) 12:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Is wasted vote should be counted? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.149.8.130 ( talk) 18:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
---
I'd like to point out that the last sentence makes no sense and that the link has nothing to do with it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.35.50.189 ( talk) 06:04, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
This whole article should be deleted as the concept of a 'wasted vote' does not exist, so therefore, there should be no explanation for it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wonton29 ( talk • contribs) 14:44, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
With the recent Wisconsin decision and it coverage in the New York Times, it seems to me that the term "Wasted Vote" is now best understood as a part of the model associated with the Efficiency Gap, and that in fact it would make more sense to re-title this article Efficiency Gap. I added a redirect page for Efficiency Gap pointing here, but I think that the whole article should probably be turned inside out.
Clements ( talk) 18:03, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
The definition seems very wrong to me. Most of the time, when people talk about the wasted vote, they're talking about a vote for a 3rd party in a 2-party system. This has nothing to do with gerrymandering. This is, however, related to Duverger's law. The vote is "wasted" because a 3rd party candidate has very small chances of being elected, and your vote thus is very unlikely to impact the results of the election. Fresheneesz ( talk)
I believe there is an error or ambiguity in the University of Chicago Law Review article's definition. Although it calls out "plurality-rule, single-member-district (SMD) elections that are almost universal in American politics," it assumes majority-rule SMDs in its examples. (IIRC, only 11 states use a majority threshold.) If wasted (or as the paper calls "inefficient") votes are those that do not directly contribute to victory, then (assuming plurality elections) wouldn't votes for the winner in excess of the loser's votes+1 be considered wasted since their removal will not change the outcome? Only if the election uses a majority threshold, would the wasted votes be those for the winner in excess of 50%+1. Maybe there should be a different term for wasted votes as used in EG calculations. It seems the authors of that article gloss over the distinction between a plurality threshold and a majority threshold. The confusion might also be caused by a difference of perspective: who is wasting the vote? Are the parties wasting votes, or are the voters? FB1A6E38 ( talk) 01:18, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
Please excuse my Wikipedia naïveté. I have come to what I believe to be a formal definition of wasted (and conversely, effective) votes in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I also have a method for visualizing them. I was thinking of adding this definition/visualization to this page, but since I believe this is a new definition, I have no citation for it. Can I add it anyway? I put together an example of it here:
or get the original Numbers version.
FB1A6E38 ( talk) 22:25, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
I've published a story on Medium that attempts to explain my definition. Since I'm the author and this is probably considered original research, I don't think I should be the one to make changes to the article, but let me know if anyone thinks otherwise. FB1A6E38 ( talk) 17:08, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
I just reverted an addition that described the main idea behind Evaluative Proportional Risk (EPR), a concept in voting recently published by an academic political scientist. I'm not opposed to putting some of these ideas into Wikipedia, however the edit I just reverted was multi-ways ham-handed.
Do other people have thoughts on this matter? If this is a notable new concept, we should figure out how to include it. But it may not be. M.boli ( talk) 22:58, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
Here is the text recently added to the lede (the second version) by Stephen C Bosworth ( talk · contribs):
The voting method called majority judgment (MJ) addresses the problem of qualitative waste. [1] Voters are asked to grade each candidate’s fitness for the office as either Excellent, Very Good, Good, Acceptable, Poor, or Reject. All these evaluations are counted to guarantee that the winner is the one most highly valued by a majority of all the voters. Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR) adapts MJ to elect all the members of a legislative body. [2] Each voter’s representative is the one most highly graded by that voter – no vote is wasted.
This is certainly a more readable and comprehensible summary than the first try. I did some minor copy-edit on the citation, I think you can put it into Wikipedia.
I think you make a good point: many proportional representation systems are partly designed to reduce wasted votes. It could make sense to put a sentence in the lede that notes this fact, and links over to proportional representation. But EPR is hardly unique in this respect.
Which leads to my suggestion: proportional representation is the proper article to describe Evaluative Proportional Representation. In particular, this seems like a kind of cousin to Reweighted Range Voting. The main ideas are a) proportional representation and b) a voter assigns a score to each candidate (which in your system is a 5 point scale). This contrasts with other systems where voters rank their candidates in preference order. I will be happy to try to help integrate this material into Wikipedia. I prefer to keep the discussion on the article talk pages, as opposed to individual editor talk pages or e-mail. M.boli ( talk) 02:07, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Ping @ Stephen C Bosworth: in a separate edit in order to be sure the ping/notice is sent. Please look at Talk:Wasted vote talk page M.boli ( talk) 02:27, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Update: I wiki-linked majority judgment. Neither of us noticed it already has a wiki-page. Is it possible that EPR belongs on the majority judgment page? M.boli ( talk) 12:46, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Ping @ M.Boli: Talk:Wasted vote Thank you both for helping me on this my first contribution, and for expressing your willingness to help integrate my material into Wikipedia. You are right that Reweighted Range Voting (RRV) has some resemblance to EPR. Both allow citizens to rate candidates and then these ratings are counted to elect parties proportionately into the legislature. However, as cogently argued by Balinski & Laraki (p. 283), MJ’s and EPR’s ratings (i.e. the 6 grades from Excellent to Reject) are more meaningful, informative, and discerning than RRV’s 6 ratings (e.g. scores from 5 to 0). Also, the different ways that MJ and EPR count the ratings is simpler than RRV’s. RRV uses the Droop Quota and somewhat arbitrary fractions, while each EPR vote can be counted by anyone who can only add and subtract whole numbers. Also, EPR’s giving different weighted votes in the legislature to each member, assists each voter to guarantee that her vote will not be wasted either quantitatively or qualitatively. EPR’s proportionality is exact while RRV’s is only approximate. Each EPR citizen’s vote is added to the weighted vote in the legislature of the representative she has most highly graded. Among all the multi-winner methods, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted qualitatively. Do you have any suggestions as to how more discussions of MJ and/or EPR might be usefully added to Wikipedia? For example, might I contribute a step by step description of how an EPR election is counted? Might it be carefully compared and contrasts with each of its rivals with regard their delivery of the features desired in an electoral system? ( talk) Stephen C Bosworth ( talk) 01:24, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
18-9-24 Stephen C Bosworth ( talk) 01:24, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
References
{{
cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)
Kolyvansky ( talk · contribs) noticed the ambiguity in the paper: the words in the U of C Law Review article seem to mean votes over 50%+1 count as excess, whereas the worked-out example in that paper uses 50% exactly.
But then the same author Stephanopoulos uses 50%+1 in his New Republic article. And 50%+1 made more intuitive sense to me. So I went with that. But as a practical matter I guess it won't make much numerical difference except in small toy examples. M.boli ( talk) 18:30, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Consider this statement from the page: "If each party wins a number of district elections in rough proportion to that party's electoral popularity, the efficiency gap will be near zero."
Now consider an example: 5 districts, 10 voters per district, two parties A and B, district 1 with all 10 from A, district 2 with all 10 from A, district 3 with 10 from A, district 4 with 10 from A, district 5 with 10 from B. So party A has 20 wasted votes and party B has 5 wasted votes. The difference is 15, so the efficiency gap is 15/50 = 30%. Party A has 40 voters and gets 4 seats, party B has 10 voters and gets 1 seat, so each party wins a number of district elections in proportion to that party's electoral popularity. But the efficiency gap is far from 0. So the quoted statement is false. Unless I made a mistake.
Daniel R. Grayson ( talk) 20:39, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
... in a primary, if you are stuck with an early vote cast for a candidate who then dropped out. Carlm0404 ( talk) 15:45, 8 October 2020 (UTC)
Currently, the following is stated for example calculations:
Consider an election where candidates A, B and C receive 6000, 3100 and 701 votes respectively.
If this is a plurality voting election for a single seat, Candidate A has a plurality of votes and is therefore elected. The wasted votes are:
All 3801 votes for candidates B and C, since these did not elect any candidate In the wider definition, 2899 of the votes for candidate A are wasted, since A would still have won with only 3101 votes. Therefore, 6700 out of 9801 votes are wasted.
Why is there not an example where 2,899 of the votes for candidate A are wasted, none for candidate B are wasted and all for candidate C are wasted? The votes for candidate A reach 50%+1 for candidate B at 3,101, resulting in any more votes for candidate A being wasted in defeating his or her rivals. The votes for candidate B are not wasted, as they are the threshold that candidate A had to overcome. The votes for candidate C are wasted as they have no impact on the race between B and C, resulting in 3,600 wasted votes (2,899 for A and 701 for C) out of 9,801 ballots cast. I suppose counting the votes for candidate C as 'wasted' refers to the position presented in the Incorrect Definition discussion about third parties which are too small to impact the election between the top two candidates. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
65.28.183.104 (
talk) 07:40, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
previously: "...considered a qualitatively wasted if..." edit: "...considered qualitatively wasted if... consider also "...considered a qualitatively wasted vote if..." 2601:283:8200:CC00:B4AF:D7BD:2D98:28B1 ( talk) 05:09, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
The concept used in this article for the normalized efficiency gap was created by a single user (who has since been banned), contains no source or reasoning as to how the formula was created and is of low quality relative to the rest of the article. Would it make sense for this to be rewritten in a more professional way? A Doctor Who ( talk) 00:34, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
This page appears to be being edited by an Australian politician or other actor in relation to a Twitter argument relating to the concept of "wasted votes" in the Australian preferential voting (STV) system. Suggest reversion to previous accurate technical description of "wasted vote". The edits made by the user Austinatorus add to confusion in relation to the term "wasted vote". Particularly the phrase: "In that context, every vote that is added to the final count has been recognised as an expression of the voter's opinion and has therefore not been wasted." The idea of a "final count" may not exist in all voting systems. Even in a preferential voting system such as the Australian House of Representatives STV single-candidate system, all votes that accrue to the final eliminated candidate are "wasted" in the sense of not receiving representation in the final division of seats. TheLoneAmigo ( talk) 12:35, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
Removed the recently-added "wasted vote by country" section.
-- M.boli ( talk) 02:14, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
Material from Wasted vote was split to Efficiency gap on 17:58, 24 May 2022 from this version. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted so long as the latter page exists. Please leave this template in place to link the article histories and preserve this attribution. |
The contents of the Unrepresented voters page were merged into Wasted vote on 10 June 2023. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
Reason: overlapping meaning HudecEmil ( talk) 18:22, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
I don’t support plurality voting, but this page makes false claims about it and “wasted votes” that lack nuance and should elaborate on the different philosophical interpretations. 45.42.157.72 ( talk) 17:01, 5 April 2024 (UTC)