The 2018 Third Vote Experiment: Implementation Details

This chapter is devoted to the Third Vote experiment conducted during the 2018 elections to the student parliament (StuPa) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). As in the 2017 experiment, the student parties are asked to formulate questions for the Third Vote electoral ballot themselves and to answer the questions of other parties. The submitted questions are then reduced to a reasonable number by several optimization models in order to highlight the differences between the party positions. The main goal of the actual experiment is a comparative evaluation of the criteria for selecting questions that will expose either an increase or a decrease the representative capability of the StuPa as hypothetically elected using the optimized Third Vote questionnaires. Particular attention is paid to preserving the KIT political spectrum as determined by the residuals of party policy profiles after reducing the list of policy issues. To develop the supporting mathematical tools, we introduce a technique for regularizing the matrices of correlations between party policy profiles, which occasionally degenerate (turn into vectors of equal elements, e.g. consisting of ‘Yes’ answers only) while reducing the number of questions, making the correlations indefinite. After these advances, the Third Vote can be considered an election-ready prototype of a voting method.