Conclusion
Every one of the voting methods evaluated in this paper has its strengths and weaknesses. If nothing else, constituents should be able to see just how much better alternative voting methods are compared to plurality voting. The American political space would be markedly different if voters were incentivized to vote honestly rather than strategically in American elections.
Wilson’s Fountain is a business-like approach to democracy reform, targeting the markets ignored by gerrymandering and attempting to capture them through a brand new way of nominating candidates. It will be up to citizens, rather than theorizing academics, to decide which of these voting methods is best suited to the contest. In the end, you, the constituent, get to pick your candidate and the system through which they are selected.
Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE)
VSE measures the percent satisfaction of a certain number of simulated voters over a large number of simulated elections. Studies around VSE use units known as utilities to measure how much a voter would like it if a given candidate won an election. These utilities are applied to the simulated candidates and are used to measure how satisfied simulated voters are with the results of an individual election. When done millions of times, these simulated elections can reveal just how likely different voting methods are to produce winners that satisfy the wishes of a majority of voters (Ogren, 2025).
While VSE is a powerful tool to evaluate the effectiveness of voting methods, it does have some limitations. Primarily, while it is able to accurately tabulate how likely a particular voting method is to elect the wrong leaders, it does not take into account how complicated a method is or how likely voters are to behave strategically rather than with sincerity (how likely they are to try to “game the system”). Moreover, many of these models only consider the methods’ application to single winner elections. Although this presents problems for our particular case, the similarities between different voting methods between single and multi-winner elections mean that VSE should still be considered.
Condorcet Committee Principle
The Condorcet Principle is one of the most widely used principles in the evaluation of single-winner election methods. A “Condorcet Winner” in a single-winner election is the candidate that would beat all other candidates in head to head matchups. Since we’re examining multi-winner principles, however, our “Condorcet Winner” turns into a “Condorcet Committee,” which is a collection of winning candidates who would defeat all other candidates in head to head matchups.
Pivotal Voter Satisfaction Incentive (PVSI)
This measurement works similarly to VSE in that it estimates the results of voting methods through simulations. However, instead of measuring how satisfied voters are with the results of the simulated voting methods, it measures how likely voters are to use particular strategic behaviors. Take the below graph as an example of how voters are likely to respond to particular voting methods.
Mutual Majority Criterion
The Mutual Majority Criterion is a stricter version of the Majority Criterion, which can only be satisfied in the event that a winning candidate is supported by a majority of participating voters. The Mutual Majority Criterion, on the other hand, assumes that there is a subset group of candidates which is preferred to all other candidates by a majority of voters. For our system to satisfy this, at least one of the two potential nominees moving onto the next round would have to be from that group (Fairvote, 2025). If a majority of voters are supportive of “Forward Party” candidates, for instance, the criterion would be satisfied if at least one of the two potential nominees who move on are from the Forward Party.
Proportionality
A proportional electoral system is one that accurately reflects the wishes of certain voting groups according to the proportion of their share of the total vote.
Ways to Game the System
The Spoiler Effect
This occurs when there are two candidates with a good chance of winning a contest. One candidate may be less popular but overlap ideologically with one or both of the dominant candidates. Under this scenario, the “spoiler” candidate draws votes from those candidates with a similar ideology, potentially changing the results of the contest so that a candidate without majority support is elected (Raleigh, 2024).
Strategic Voting
Strategic Voting is when constituents vote for a candidate not because of their affinity for them, but because of the hope that they will influence the election in a particular way (GoodParty, 2025). In practice, this usually means that Americans are forced to vote for “lesser evil” candidates rather than the candidate that they like because of their fear of another candidate. This is a major reason why candidates not backed by party elites have trouble breaking into primaries of the two large parties. After all, why would one want to “waste” their vote on a lesser-known candidate if they have no chance of winning? That said, alternative voting methods can lead to the creation of different voting strategies that have varying effects on contest results. Some types of strategies are described below.
Favorite Betrayal
One of the goals of alternative voting methods is to make sure that constituents can honestly express their preference between two favored candidates without helping a less favored candidate. This describes a principle known as the “Favorite Betrayal.” Any system that passes favorite betrayal will allow voters to express themselves more honestly, while others will expose elections to spoiler candidates, leading to a result that does not reflect popular sovereignty.
Bullet Voting
Bullet Voting is a type of strategic behavior where constituents choose to only vote for one candidate despite having the option to vote for multiple candidates.
Burying S
Assuming that there are three potential nominees that a given constituent is going to vote for, burying is when that constituent ranks or scores a weaker third candidate over a stronger second candidate in the hope of helping their favorite candidate of the three (STAR, 2025).