Poll Vaulting

Abstract

This chapter provides a set of real-world examples of how the process used for decision-making dramatically affected the outcome and shows how different voting rules would have led to different choices. Examples include the 2000 U.S. presidential election (Bush vs. Gore, with Nader intervening) and the choice of finalist candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Clinton vs. Trump). It also includes a famous vote by 11 wine judges in France in 1976 (sometimes called “Judgment of Paris”), where we have the actual preferences of the judges. American wines won the blind taste-testing, shocking the French and eventually leading to the “democratization of the wine world . . . a watershed in the history of wine.” This chapter shows that even votes by small numbers of people can have significant effects and that the choice of voting method in part determined which wine “won” the contest.