Talk:Positional voting

New section regarding voting system criteria
It evaluates positional voting as a class of systems against numerous and established voting system criteria to highlight which ones are met and which are not; including examples of problem cases.Mencor (talk) 11:05, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Major edit to expand the Voting and Counting section
This expansion also includes the subject of truncation and a simple example of positional voting. Mencor (talk) 09:14, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Major edit to include Tennessee election example
The standard Tennessee election example is incorporated into many of the pages relating to competing voting systems. It is now included here too so as to enable more comparisons to be made between rival systems. The five systems featured here are:
 * Plurality (when expressed as a positional voting system)
 * Binary number system (geometric progression of weightings)
 * Nauru method (harmonic progression of weightings)
 * Borda count (arithmetic progression of weightings)
 * Anti-plurality (when expressed as a positional voting system)

Mencor (talk) 15:19, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Major edit to upgrade the quality of this article
There is more to positional voting than the Borda count where weightings form an arithmetic progression. Other standard mathematical sequences such as geometric and harmonic progressions may also be employed in positional voting systems provided preference weightings descend monotonically in rank order. The definition and description of such sequences are now incorporated into the ‘points distribution’ section. The new section following it provides a comparison and evaluation of these standard mathematical progressions. The weightings used in positional number systems are also addressed.Mencor (talk) 07:26, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Replacement of stub by article
It now incorporates validity criteria for positional voting systems, types of point distributions and references. Feedback welcome. Mencor (talk) 14:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Approval voting not a positional voting system.
The article had the claim in it that Approval voting is a positional voting system. This is apparently based on the idea that one can take a marked Approval ballot and arrange the candidates in a rank order and assign points based on the approved ranks getting one vote an the unapproved zero vote. However, then, the different voting patterns have different weights for ranks. All have weight 1 for first ranks, all have weight 0 for last rank, but there is no general assignment of weights for the intermediate ranks. In a positional system there are, the weights do not vary with the votes.

The original editor may have been misled by the existence of papers comparing Approval with positional voting systems, but those papers would have been claiming a tautology if Approval were a positional voting system. My thanks to User:Tomruen for coming across this when he removed the Positional tag from the Range voting article. If Approval were a Positional voting system, so to, by the same argument, would be Range. --Abd (talk) 21:59, 23 December 2007 (UTC)