In the study of electoral systems, a wasted vote may be defined in 2 different ways:
# any vote which is not for an elected candidate.
# any vote which does not help to elect a candidate. The first definition includes only those votes which are for losing candidates (individual or party). The second definition is wider as it also includes surplus votes for winning candidates who would have won anyway without the wasted vote.
An electoral system which reduces the number of wasted votes can be considered desirable on grounds of fairness or on the more pragmatic basis that a voter who feels their vote has made no difference may feel detached from their government or lose confidence in the democratic process. The term "wasted vote" is especially used by advocates of systems like the Single Transferable Vote, or Instant-Runoff Voting which purport to reduce the numbers of such votes.
The term may be considered pejorative by opponents of such systems. Their arguments may either suggest that in any voting system each vote is wasted (unless the result is decided by a single vote), or that no vote is wasted as each one sends a political signal which will be taken into account in preparation for the subsequent election.
In election campaigns, a leading candidate may appeal to voters who support a less-popular candidate to vote instead for them for tactical reasons, on the basis that a vote for their preferred candidate is likely to be wasted. In some electoral systems, it may be plausible for less-popular candidates may make similar appeals to supporters of more-popular candidates. In a plurality voting system, the term "wasted vote" is not usually applied to votes for the second-placed candidate, but rather to votes for candidates finishing third or lower. This is a reflection of Duverger's Law, i.e. the institutionalisation of a two-party system.
Opponents of the concept of a wasted vote point out that voting one's conscience is fundamental to democracy - an example of this is the adoption of major Socialist legislation by more mainstream parties in the United States in order to halt the Socialist party [//www.freepress.org/departments/display/15/2000/130/1/18] .
Example
Consider an election where candidates A, B and C receive 6000, 3100 and 701 votes respectively.
If this is a plurality voting election for a single seat, Candidate A has a plurality of votes and is therefore elected. The wasted votes are:* All 3801 votes for candidates B and C, since these did not elect any candidate
* In the wider definition, 2899 of the votes for candidate A are wasted, since A would still have won with only 3101 votes. Therefore 6700 out of 9801 votes are wasted.
If the same votes for A, B and C are cast in a d'Hondt method election for 12 seats, then the seats are split 8-4-0 for A-B-C. The wasted votes are:* All 701 votes for party C, which won no seats.* In the wide definition, also wasted are:** 399 votes for A, since A would still have won 8 seats with only 5601 votes against 3100 and 701. (With 5600 votes for A, the last seat would go to C).
** 299 votes for B, since only with 2800 votes would B lose the last seat to C.
A majority of votes are always wasted (in the wider sense) in a single-seat election, unless there are exactly 2 candidates and the margin of victory is exactly 1 vote. Multi-seat constituencies reduce the number of wasted votes, particularly with proportional representation.
ee also
* Spoilt vote
References
*
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
Wasted versus effective votes in a single-winner plurality election.
Here the winner has a majority (over 56%) of the votes, but the more interesting data point is that even more of the votes (almost 60%) are wasted. These wasted votes could be removed from the election and it would not change the outcome. When people complain about their vote not making any difference, this is exactly what they mean. Having more wasted votes than effective votes seemed like a good sniff test for a bad election.
Setting aside US presidential elections and the mess that is the electoral college, a majority vote is probably what most people think of (and assume) when they go to the polls. As the recommended method of decision making by Robert’s Rules of Order, it is also the most commonly used threshold for votes in the US Congress.
Although Indiana law does not require that a winning candidate receive a majority of the votes, let's see what it would look like if it did. In the following example, the votes counts are exactly the same as before, but the threshold for election is set at a fixed 50%.
Wasted versus effective votes in a single-winner majority election.
Here, the candidates all have the same percentage of votes, but the ratio of wasted to effective votes has changed. The wasted votes now come to just under 50%, while the effective votes are just over 50% (a majority).1 That actually smells pretty good when compared to the ratio of a plurality election. Unfortunately, a majority threshold is only used in a small number of states, and even then, only in certain circumstances.2
I started thinking about the questions I was asking these votes. What was different about votes below the threshold from the ones above? What was different about votes for the winning candidate from the losing ones? While the definition of a wasted vote that I found in Wikipedia was reasonable and describes the concept accurately, it was not very succinct. I wanted a way to describe a wasted vote in more basic terms. I found those terms in Philosophy.
When I studied logic, two concepts were at the heart of all deductive reasoning: necessity and sufficiency. A good example that my philosophy professor used was an implication involving money:
If I have four quarters, then I have a dollar.
This example was meant to show the difference between the two terms. If I really had four quarters, that was sufficient to say I had a dollar. As long as the first part (the antecedent) was true, the second part (the consequent) was guaranteed to also be true. On the other hand, if I didn’t even have a dollar, then I definitely couldn’t say that I had four quarters. Having a dollar was a necessary condition for having four quarters. If the second part was false, the first part was guaranteed to also be false.
In general, we are good at recognizing sufficient conditions but we often fail to see the necessary ones. Or worse, we conflate the two (especially when there is an advantage in not recognizing the difference).