Week 0: Introduction

Hello readers! My name is Jonah Stein and I have been a student at BASIS Independent Brooklyn since its founding in 2014. For my senior project, I will be focusing on the realm of voting theory. The concept of coming to a “fair” decision among a group of voters with diverse opinions may seem relatively straight forward, but it is actually very complex. The most commonly employed method to make decisions is that of plurality, where the choice that the most voters prefer is the one that is chosen. However, although simple, there are many flaws in this method such as ignoring people’s second, third, and fourth preferences. To amend some of these issues, there have been many new voting systems proposed that involve voters ranking their choices, or in the most common case, candidates, in order of preference. In many of the elections that have employed these preferential voting systems, the election organizers have often truncated the ballots – limiting the number of candidates that each voter can rank. This is referred to as forced ballot truncation. There are no clear reasons as to why election designers force truncate ballots, but, regardless, it would be important for them to know the potential effects that it could have on the results. This senior project seeks to outline those effects by exploring how 4 preferential voting systems, with diverse decision mechanisms, respond to forced ballot truncation. To do this, I will be simulating roughly 100,000 elections and analyzing how the results are affected by removing the tail end of preferences, effectively accounting for forced ballot truncation. I will also be working with Eric Pacuit, a professor at the University of Maryland, to design the simulation and deepen my analysis of the results to come to stronger conclusions. At the end of the project, I will hopefully contribute helpful data points to the field, with my findings detailed in a research paper. If you are interested in learning more about my project, click here.