Assessment Voting in Large Electorates

TL;DR

Assessment Voting is a two-round procedure that encourages high participation and accurate reflection of majority preferences in large electorates, while maintaining low average voting costs.

Contribution

This paper introduces and analyzes Assessment Voting, a novel two-round voting method that improves majority representation and reduces costs compared to traditional voting systems.

Findings

Large electorates tend to choose the majority's preferred alternative with high probability.

Average voting costs are low under the Assessment Voting procedure.

Assessment Voting outperforms one-round voting in terms of accuracy and cost efficiency.

Abstract

We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at hand, thereby irrevocably exercising their right to vote. In the second round, after the results of the first round have been published, the remaining citizens decide whether to vote for one alternative or to ab- stain. The votes from both rounds are aggregated, and the final outcome is obtained by applying the majority rule, with ties being broken by fair randomization. Within a costly voting framework, we show that large elec- torates will choose the preferred alternative of the majority with high prob- ability, and that average costs will be low. This result is in contrast with the literature on one-round voting, which predicts either higher voting costs (when voting is compulsory) or decisions that often do not represent the preferences of the majority (when voting is voluntary).