Yes–No Voting

In Chapter 1, we considered voting systems in which the voters were choosing among several candidates or alternatives. In the present chapter, we deal with quite a different voting situation—the one in which a single alternative, such as a bill or an amendment, is pitted against the status quo. In theses systems each voter responds with a vote of “yea” or “nay.” A yes-no voting system is simply a set of rules that specifies exactly which collections of “yea” votes yield passage of the issue at hand.