Random ballot - Definition and Overview

The random ballot voting method takes the one person one vote principle to an extreme by only counting the vote of one person. In an election or referendum, the ballot of a single voter is selected at random, and that ballot decides the result of the election.

The random ballot method is decisive, in that there is no possibility of a tied vote, assuming that the selected voter has expressed a preference (if not then another ballot can be selected at random). It is unbiased in that the probability of a particular result is equal to the proportion of total support that that result has in all the votes. It is also strategy-free in that there is no advantage in tactical voting.

But it is not deterministic, in that a different random selection could have produced a different result, and it undermines majority rule since there is a substantial possibility that the selected voter may be in the minority.

It is less a practical form of democracy and more a theoretical method designed to explain some of the properties of other voting methods.