Week 5: Instant Runoff Paper

This past week, I finished the first draft of my instant runoff/ranked choice voting (RCV) paper, titled "A Comprehensive Overview of Instant Runoff Voting and the Use of Ranked Choice Voting in Cambridge, Massachusetts." I essentially briefly touched on the historical background of RCV in the United States, moved into the pros and cons of ranked choice when compared to the plurality system, and then looked more in-depth into how RCV operated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My overall argument was that ranked choice provides a more accurate depiction of voters’ perspectives than plurality does. I will publish the paper on the site next week, after I am able to make some revisions!

Another task I completed this week that I was especially proud of was that I revised my first paper on plurality and used LaTeX to do it! All of the images, tables, and footnotes were programmed on www.overleaf.com! I have attached some images of this work in this post.

Additionally, I received a total of 52 responses on my voting survey that I sent out last week! I will now use this data for my final paper and presentation.

Because this was quite a busy week, I think I will leave this post at that. I did some brief work on Borda Count during the latter half of this past week, but because I have dedicated this weekend to researching Borda and range voting, I will write all about that in the next post!

For now, see this really cool article on Vox about how different voting methods would have changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. I hope to do something similar with raw election data later on this term! https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/25/13733322/instant-runoff-ranked-voting-2016