Russ Paielli wrote:
Daniel Bishop dbishop-at-neo.tamu.edu |EMlist| wrote:
For example, consider an election with 12 candidates. Your ballot might look like
_1_ Favorite _2_ Good #1 _2_ Good #2 _2_ Good #3 _3_ Tolerable #1 _3_ Tolerable #2 _3_ Tolerable #3 _3_ Tolerable #4 _4_ Bad #1 _4_ Bad #2 _4_ Bad #3 _5_ Evil
I still fail to see why you think you need the equal rankings. If you really rate a group of candidates exactly equal, why would you care which order you put them in? Just flip a coin. Or perhaps you think you gain some strategic advantage by ranking them equal -- which is precisely one reason I lean toward disallowing it.
And why would you even rank/approve the last candidate?
First of all, I disagree that "ranking" and "approving" should be equivalent. A better approach is to have the voter mark their least favorite approved candidate, and give an approval vote to everyone at that rank or better. That forces the approval votes to be consistent with the rank list, while still letting a voter say "I don't approve of either Bad or Evil, but I'd rather have Bad than Evil".
The point of ranking a last candidate is exactly the same as ranking a first candidate: to express a preference. But your proposal makes voting much harder for people with a strong last preference.
You have a point. I am open to the idea of allowing ranking past the approval cutoff point. The voter interface would be a bit more complicated but perhaps not too bad.
--Russ
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