An analytic-plus-empirical assessment of five Borda count variants (differing in how they weight partial ballots and extend the points vector) against the voting-failure criteria of social choice theory. It proves which majority, Condorcet, monotonicity, no-show, truncation, and compromise failures each variant can exhibit, then measures their real-world frequency across 421 U.S. ranked-choice elections from 2004-2023, showing Borda variants nearly eliminate majority and monotonicity failures at the cost of more truncation and compromise failures than instant-runoff voting.
A social-choice study evaluating five variations of the Borda count as alternatives to instant-runoff (ranked-choice) voting. The Borda count assigns each candidate points by ballot rank (n points fo…