Research Hit: Making Voting More Effective for Better Decisions

Voting is something many of us do regularly as adults in different ways. But the most common way is plurality voting — that is one vote for one person that can only be cast once.

However, there are different ways to vote. Popular shows such as American Idol use multivoting whereby the audience members have 10 votes to share as they see fit. They can use all ten for one candidate or distribute them as they wish across candidates.

Another method is ranked-choice whereby choices should be ranked in the order one sees as best.

The question though is what is best? This is the question researchers at the University of Washington wanted to find out but specifically into what method enables better decision making. In many decision-making bodies such as in business or government simple plurality voting is used.

To do this the researchers used 93 teams of graduates in an anti-terrorism exercise modelled on teams used post 9/11. 31 teams each used the different voting methods. They first read information on three suspects and voted on who they thought was the greatest threat — they then discussed the suspects after the vote, and then voted again.