In that earlier article, I introduced a technical term, votelet. As an example of its use, in ranked voting systems an entire ranked list of candidates that a voter might submit would be called a voteplex but the individual entries in such a list are called votelets. In common usage, vote tends to be used ambiguously meaning either votelet or voteplex. By using these two new words and avoiding use of the word "vote" as a noun, we can distinguish clearly between these two potential meanings.
Armed with this more precise terminology, in this series of articles, we call a voting system balanced provided that, whenever the voting system provides a votelet in favor of a candidate, the system also makes available a different votelet expressing opposition to that candidate. The concept of balance is that the voting system provides votelets in opposing pairs so that the effect on the election by a votelet can be exactly canceled by another voter who chooses the opposite votelet. But also important in a balanced system is that voters must have the option of remaining neutral with respect to individual candidates, choosing neither to support or oppose. For balance to exist, there must be a center of balance.
Surely at this late date, trying to change the name to something other than Balanced Voting would only lead to additional confusion. Still, there seems no harm in suggesting an alternative name that I could well have chosen instead of balanced; my suggestion is to use the term, Unbiased Voting, in place of Balanced Voting.
A voting system that pr
events voters from even distinguishing between indifference and opposition clearly is not taking a particularly clear reading on voter opinion. To treat voter opinions fairly, without bias, a voting system cannot treat voter indifference as opposition. To do this could create an unwarranted bias against little-known candidates who would receive the most indifference. That our elections practice this failure is huge a gift to the biggest parties (whose candidates experience little if any indifference). This is a major factor in why our two-party duopoly persists.
If a voting system were to take account of voter opposition but fails to distinguish between support and indifference then that system likewise creates bias, but in this case to favor little-known candidates. In an earlier article, these two forms of bias were called positive and negative respectively, rather than biased. The bias is reinforced each time a voter fails to make an assignment and a default value (other than the truly neutral value at the center of available scores) is applied.
It is an easy mistake, but a big one, to brush aside these distinctions as inconsequential. The mistake probably results simply from a habit of thinking that, at most, a negligible number of voters could be indifferent to any candidate; our lived experience with the two-party system teaches us that voters are rarely indifferent to either one of the two candidates. But in fact, our two-party system actually illustrates quite the opposite is true when more candidates appear on the ballot.
What actually happens when there were more than just two candidates? Voters mostly ignore independent and minor party candidates because they know they cannot win election. Media treatment of minor party candidates only reinforces this behavior by ensuring that voters hear very little about other candidates.
In an election with many candidates, voters would likely be unfamiliar and therefore indifferent about very many of them. Interpreting these votes of indifference consistently either as support or opposition, has a great potential for altering election outcomes and, sadly, this kind of voting system misses the very point of democracy. And more sadly, the voting systems we generally use (not to mention nearly every system that is even proposed) exhibits that very flaw (though the mistake of favoring small parties over large ones seems not to happen).
In a retrospective article last July, I reviewed three fundamental properties that a good voting system should have if we are seeking to put an end to two-party politics. One of these properties is that the voting system should be balanced (what I might have called, unbiased). A suitable voting system should be fair so as to avoid any bias either in favor of either unknown or in favor of the well-known candidates. In other words it should take the middle ground of first recognizing when a voter neither supports nor opposes a candidate but prefers to abstain from influencing the decision about that candidate. And of course those voters who show that they wish to be neutral regarding a candidate should not have their votes counted to mean something entirely different.
