Folks,
I realize that this email list is intended for a wide-ranging technical discussion of election methods, and far be it from me to try to discourage "brainstorming" for innovative new ideas. Let me just suggest, however, that it would be useful to distinguish between election methods that could be publicly acceptable within our lifetimes and those that almost certainly will not be.
I believe that Approval is simple enough to be publicly acceptable. IRV may or may not be. As I have pointed out before, IRV will have serious implementation problems due to lack of "summability," but at least its rules are relatively simple, with only minor variations, and no great factions exist within its core advocates.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Condorcet as it is currently understood. Imagine how befuddled the public will be about "dropping defeats" (as opposed to the much simpler idea of dropping candidates). Do we use Schulze, Ranked Pairs, or some other variation? Then there's the "margins vs. winning votes" issue, which is enough all by itself to derail any potential progress once the intolerant dogmatists get involved. (Will Mike declare a jihad on Condorcet if the public prefers margins?)
I've also been reading a lot here about "lottery" methods. I have the utmost respect for those who are discussing them, most of whom are probably smarter than me, but I must confess that I don't have a clue about what they are trying to accomplish. I think it is safe to say, nevertheless, that any method that involves a "lottery" is publicly unacceptable. We don't need a lottery now, so why should we adopt a system that needs one? That's what the public will want to know.
If Condorcet is ever to be publicly acceptable, I think it needs to be simplified. As most of you know, I recently proposed a Condorcet-Approval hybrid method that has actually been suggested before here on EM. It is much simpler than traditional Condorcet algorithms, and I think it could possibly be effective *and* publicly acceptable.
Let me briefly restate the idea:
The voters rank the candidates and also specify an Approval cutoff. The CW wins if one exists, otherwise the least approved candidate is repeatedly eliminated until a CW is obtained.
That's it, folks! Two sentences. Now, *that* could be simple enough to be publicly acceptable. No complicated algorithms understandable only by Ph.D.s are needed. If only the approved candidates are allowed to be ranked, then it becomes even simpler to implement because then the voter need not even specify a separate approval cutoff. If no equal rankings are allowed -- simpler yet. These are all tradeoffs to be discussed, but regardless of the final version it will still be much simpler than, say, Schulze or Ranked Pairs.
I would really like to know what the exceptional folks here on EM think about this proposal. Some of you have provided some feedback already, and I certainly appreciate it. However, I don't sense any excitement about it, and I'd like to know why not. What is the problem with it?
If this proposal is seriously flawed, then I seriously doubt that Condorcet has a chance of ever being used in large-scale public elections in my lifetime.
--Russ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
