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User:Scott Ritchie

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Wikipedia:Babel
enThis user is a native speaker of the English language.
This user is a participant in WikiProject Voting systems.

I am a Wikipedia editor and this is my user page. This is not a Wikipedia article, but rather a place for me to organize thoughts on articles I'm working on.

I was an active participant in the Davis Wiki when it was taking off, before it later turned into a broader local wiki movement. I also occasionally edit Wiktionary, where I have another user page.

I'm here to help make good articles about things that matter to me. I really don't care much about the internal politics of Wikipedia beyond that.

This link will show you my recent wiki edits.

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Welp, that's what happens when I stop babysitting an article for 2 years.

Current works in progress

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I would most like to see these articles reach "good" status:

  • Electoral district
  • Plurality-at-large voting
  • Plurality voting system
    • This probably needs a complete rework...
    • Section on the spoiler effect and how primaries and runoff voting were designed as partial workarounds.
    • Because of duverge's law and the resulting tendency towards two-party system, additional parties in countries using the plurality voting system are frequently given the moniker of third party. Perhaps even have a section on "third" parties.
    • Organization: After discussing how counting/voting works, discuss the spoiler effect, then explain tactical voting, then explain how it affects third parties, then explain duverge's law, then explain the modifications to the system that try and workaround the spoiler problem (primaries/separate nomination processes, top two runoff)
      • Under tactical voting, show example of California recall election, which had no primaries, and how x% of the people didn't vote for the two obvious frontrunners (compare with the % that voted third party in the governor's election just before. Similarly, Russian example.
        • See if you can find a citation showing tactical voting in plurality is not only more common than other systems, but also more acceptable socially (people even criticize honest third party voters for throwing away their vote.)
  • Liberal Paradox
  • Instant-runoff voting
  • Gerrymandering
    • Note that STV makes gerrymandering harder in Ireland
    • Note that in Germany wasted party-votes only occur if party <5%
  • Cumulative voting
    • note unusual incentive to give bad polling information to make the opponents overextend themselves.
    • "Finally, cumulative voting has a pro-incumbent bias in both partisan and non-partisan elections. Supporters of a party or interest group are likely to discourage challenges to incumbents favoring their position and not to risk giving votes to the challengers who do run." [1]
    • Individual game theory strategy is to get voters to dump all their points on you, reducing some of the incentive for cooperation among candidates...
  • Droop Quota
  • Representation (politics)
  • Single Transferable Vote:
    • under the rational choice voter model, the greater likelihood of an individual voter affecting election results due to lower numbers of wasted votes in STV may increase turnout
    • reduced negative campaigning may increase turnout
    • increased positive campaigning may increase turnout
    • "There can be some variance among STV systems as to the order in which votes are transferred, and this may affect results (see counting/...)"
    • tactical voting
    • some STV methods allow a pushover strategy
    • when incomplete rankings are allowed, there is an advantage to balancing votes within a party in order to give two candidates a roughly equal number of votes, both winning with less than a quota.
  • Arrow's theorem
    • Paragraphs are too dense, needs a clear organization and better section titles.
  • General ticket
    • This article is a bit confusing about how voting was actually conducted, and moreover what is called a general ticket in the US: is it when a single congressmen is elected in a statewide election? Does this happen when there are also districts? Or is it when there's a statewide multiple-winner block voting election for them? What about the article on plural district?

These are related to the Voting Systems WikiProject and the Campaigns and Elections WikiProject.

Election vocabulary

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The following words are common in usage and can be very confusing to a reader:

  • constituency - can mean a district for holding an election, OR the people in said district, OR a subset of those people, OR a group of supporters for even non-elected people
  • electoral district - always means a district for holding an election. This is a nice term since it's unambiguous, however this term isn't used much outside of the US
  • electorate - Can mean "constituency" in the people sense (especially in US), however in Australian English it can mean "constituency" in the district sense
  • riding - has the same meaning as electoral district in Canada, but is considered slang
  • ward - an electoral district for local government, OR a region for party bosses in the US
Currently, the article at constituency seems to be confusing all 3 of the definitions it has - perhaps we should have several different articles. Then again, they're rather related, so maybe we should have one or two.

Somewhat less important to me articles

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