I sent this out yesterday, but I forgot that my send address had changed. Joe Weinstein made a lot of the same points I make below.
Alex wrote: > This seems to retain the advantages of 3-level approval, but > gives voters more flexibility. There is a slightly stronger > incentive to insincerely rate somebody equal to favorite, but > using a wide scale should substantially mitigate that. It should be better, but in a close election the distortion caused by additional candidates still matters. What if your second-favorite candidate loses to your least favorite because you (and many others like you) rate the compromise candidate a 9 or 8? The best strategy would generally still be to give every candidate a 10 or a 0. If we want to make a ranked election that plays like approval, then we should use the "majority choice approval" or "Bucklin done right" or whatever it's being called. It's a really good idea, and moreover there's no reason we can't expand it out from 3 slots to 10 or however many we like. So the system would be: - Voters can rank candidates in first place, second place, and on down, as far as they like. Tied rankings are permitted. Counting procedure: 1) Count the first place votes. If any candidate has a majority, the candidate with the most votes is the winner. 2) If no candidate has a majority, then count the first and second place votes for each candidate. If any candidate has a majority, the candidate with the most votes is the winner. 3) Repeat 2) until a winner is declared or all votes have been counted. If all votes are counted, the candidate with the most votes wins (or alternatively, have some other election a-la Demorep). In the end, this system plays out a lot like Approval voting, only the multiple levels give the voters a chance to hedge their bets a bit in a close multi-candidate race. -Adam ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
