Reflecting People’s Will: Evaluating elections with computer aided simulations

The aim of this study is evaluate various single winner voting systems with the help of computer aided simulations. The impact of phenomena such as strategic voting, spoiler effect and centre squeeze are studied on various election systems such as First Past the Post, Ranked voting, Approval voting and Score voting. The democratic process gives great moral legitimacy to the winner as they are deemed to be chosen by the people, ergo the election system too needs to accurately reflect the will of all the people. Single winner systems or “winner takes all” systems have the advantage of decisive governments as compared to proportional systems but by its construct exclude parliamentary representation to a large percentage of voters who ended up on the losing side. It is therefore even more important that the single winner system mirror the voters mandate as accurately as possible. I conclude after evaluation that alternate systems such as Instant Runoff or Approval voting could be considered in lieu of the FPTP systems as they have fewer flaws and are more likely to give a truer representation of electorate’s choice.