Social Choice in the South Seas: Electoral Innovation and the Borda Count in the Pacific Island Countries

Abstract

Many of the small island democracies of the South Pacific are natural laboratories for constitutional and electoral experimentation, but have tended to be ignored by comparative political science research. This article examines one apparently unknown case of electoral innovation from the region: the use of Borda count voting procedures for elections in the Pacific Island states of Nauru and Kiribati. It introduces the basic concept of the Borda count and its relation to other electoral systems, and surveys arguments about the virtues and drawbacks of Borda count electoral systems. It then discusses in some detail the way that the Borda count is used for elections in Nauru and Kiribati, including the political impact of the system, and empirical examples of different types of strategic behaviour at work. It concludes by examining the broader significance of these cases for comparative studies of democracy, elections, social choice, and voting theory.

The global spread of preferential voting: Australian institutional imperialism?

“…In places like PNG, where the harsh logic of game theory actually works quite explicitly in practice, plurality elections are characterised by extremely high levels of electoral violence in some areas, in part because of this basic problem. This is in contrast to the experience of preferential voting elections in the 1960s and 1970s, which elicited much more cooperative strategies, often forged on the basis of traditional tribal alliances (Reilly 2001(Reilly , 2002a.…”

Risk-limiting Audits for Nonplurality Elections

“…In a 5 candidate election, a voter would give 5 points to their first-ranked candidate, 4 to the secondranked, 3 to the third-ranked, and so on. Borda counts are used for some political elections in Slovenia [11], as well as the pacific island nations of Nauru and Kiribati [26], but is most popular in the worlds of sports -e.g., the Heisman Trophy [17] -and academic professional societies.…”

Risk-limiting Audits and the Margin of Victory in Nonplurality Elections

“…In ranked systems, voters rank some or all of the candidates; IRV and Condorcet methods (Fishburn, 1977, Schulze, 1997, Tideman, 1987, Woodall, 1997 are ranked systems. Approval and range voting are used by some professional societies but not yet in major political elections (Brams and Fishburn, 2005), whereas Borda counts are used for some political elections in Slovenia (Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, 2011) and the Pacific island nations of Nauru and Kiribati (Reilly, 2002), as well as in sports -e.g., the Heisman Trophy (The Heisman Memorial Trophy, 2011) -and academic professional societies (Brams and Fishburn, 2005). A Condorcet method proposed by Schulze (2011) is used by the Swedish Pirate Party (for primaries), the Wikimedia Foundation, the Debian project, and the Gentoo project.…”