Campaign signs line a residential street in the Toronto-St Paul's federal riding on June 21.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

It is a big year for elections, with about a billion voters in India and the European Union having already exercised their democratic franchise, and with Americans set to vote in a presidential election that has the entire world on tenterhooks.

By Monday, parliamentary elections in Britain and France will have radically altered the makeup of each country’s legislature, with the centre-left Labour Party winning a majority of Westminster seats, and the far-right National Rally expected to win a plurality of National Assembly seats.

If you ask voters in any of these places how they feel about their country’s electoral system, it is unlikely they will have much good to say about it. Most voters take the electoral system as a given and act in consequence.

The truth is, there is no such thing as the perfect electoral system. Democracy may be based on the principle of one person, one vote. But designing an electoral system to suit any individual country’s unique characteristics involves trade-offs. It is debatable whether one electoral system does a better job reflecting the will of voters than another. Capturing the electoral........

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