Voting Systems Tutorial

Software	Object oriented language with good GUI tools
Covers	Simulation programming, graphic interface development
Skills Required	Programming, interest in politics, interest in education.
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ?? Programming ???

Brief Description

The aim of the project is to enable people play to with a computer system to explore how different voting systems work, and learn about their advantages and disadvantages and political consequences, such as handing absolute power to parties that don't have anything like majority support (for instance Britain), or encourage fragmentation of parties into lots of small groupings (for instance Israel), or make it difficult for new or small parties to get anywhere (for instance Britain), or favour the least-unpopular candidate over the one preferred by the most people (but perhaps most disliked by everyone else).

The central part of this will be a system that enables the user to explore different scenarios where different candidates or parties are preferred by different numbers of people, and see who gets elected, or how many seats different parties get in parliament, according to different electoral systems. Ideally this would include enabling people to look at examples from real elections as well as play with hypothetical numbers.

Ideally this would be tested with users both to see how usable the system is, and to see what people successfully learn about electoral systems.

Variants

This could be done as a web-based system where the users interact with a website, so all the interesting computation runs on the server in a program written in a server side language like PHP, that generates an HTML + CSS interface.

The nature of the system might be a bit different if the aim is to develop an educational game, or a tutorial where the program supports learning from written explanations of how different voting systems work, or a tutoring system where the instruction is built into the system, and isn't just linear text. How can this be gamified?

A rather different project would be a system for electronic voting for student elections, or trade union elections, that could be installed and used by any organization big enough to need it but not actually the government. This should have options for different voting systems. Some consideration needs to be given to security and voter identity checking; alternatively the project could focus on how to do appropriate security.

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