Homayun Motameni - Department of Political Science, Ayatollah Amoli Branch, Islamic Azad University, Amol, Iran
Seyed Mohammad Mohammadi - Department of Political Science, Ayatollah Amoli Branch, Islamic Azad University, Amol, Iran

Voting system as one of the bases of electoral regulation plays a drastic role in attracting citizens’ participation in administration of election process, due to direct interaction with voters. The Islamic Republic of Iran with a religious-republic-based regime, has continually administrated elections in different levels of country management after Islamic revolution. One of the challenges that serially arises in handling varieties of elections in different periods is the problem of invalid or void ballots which causes decrement of valid ballots’ final count, and consequently, degrades the desirability of elections’ statistical outcomes. With the goal of reducing impacts of aforementioned challenge, this research proposes a score-distribution-based voting system with feasibility of assigning score to “plurality-selected” which provides the conditions of fair selection based on preferences for voters by allowing arbitrary score distribution among candidates. Also, the research results indicates that the feasibility of assigning score to “plurality-selected” option potentially reduces the count of invalid and specially, void ballots, and increases the count of final correct votes.

Group decision making, Voting System, Democracy, Electoral Regulation