Simon would have said
What question do we expect to answer by holding an election? Elections are how we select our government, but they aren’t the only way to do that. We hold elections because we believe they tell us something about who has the right to control our government in a way that appointments or heredity does not. But different voting methods answer different questions.
Visualizing our voting systems can help give us a sense of how the questions each system asks shape the answers we get. By playing around with what happens depending on where candidates are relative to each other, you can get a sense of what incentives our voting system gives to the people we elect. We’re going to explore different systems by simulating many elections and seeing how the results change depending on where the average voter is.
This diagram shows a single election. The colored circles represent the positions of the candidates and voters in some abstract space. Imagine that the Y axis measures how focused the candidate is on environmental protection, and the X axis measures their position on some other issue like corporate tax rates. Voters prefer candidates that are closer to them. Clicking anywhere on this diagram simulates a new election where the average voter is where you clicked. What that means is that if we averaged together the positions of all of the voters they would be at that point, but if you click on the same point a few times you’ll see that the position of each voter can change.
