This is a very good question. I have a friend who’s working on making a rigorous definition for “wasted votes” that squares with your rough understanding, and she’s a smart, professional mathematician; if it were trivial, she’d have solved it in 10 minutes.
You are basically right about your understanding and intuition. In particular, under FPTP, “wasted votes” includes anybody who doesn’t support a winner, and some of those who do. But note that in a multi-winner voting method, it’s possible to ensure that a supermajority of votes have some say in picking the winner. For instance, if all ballots are full strict rankings, under STV only 1 Droop quota are wasted; for 19 winners, that would be just 5%.
This is an active area of research and I hope to be able to come back to your comment a year or so from now and have a better answer.
This is a very good question. I have a friend who’s working on making a rigorous definition for “wasted votes” that squares with your rough understanding, and she’s a smart, professional mathematician; if it were trivial, she’d have solved it in 10 minutes.
You are basically right about your understanding and intuition. In particular, under FPTP, “wasted votes” includes anybody who doesn’t support a winner, and some of those who do. But note that in a multi-winner voting method, it’s possible to ensure that a supermajority of votes have some say in picking the winner. For instance, if all ballots are full strict rankings, under STV only 1 Droop quota are wasted; for 19 winners, that would be just 5%.
This is an active area of research and I hope to be able to come back to your comment a year or so from now and have a better answer.
(ps. It’s PLACE, not PACE.)
Oops, typo. Fixed!