Dear Forest! I like your idea very much!
And I think we should also try to more often consider statistical methods to *analyse* election methods, for example to assess their anti-strategic properties or to define some kind of "robustness" measures for methods. Yours, Jobst PS: My DFC-WAP-site is now launched! Perhaps you find a minute of time to test it with some WAP-enabled mobile phone at wap.groucho.info/index.wml Simmons, Forest wrote: > Recently someone asked about the best way to collect ordinal > information. > > Jobst and Ted have recently suggested methods that use the basic > information theoretic principle of encoding the most likely messages > with the smallest code words, and getting approval information as a > bonus. [The most likely messages are party and candidate > preferences.] > > I would like to supplement their suggestions with one inspired by Joe > Weinstein, a statistician who contributed to this EM list before his > wife passed away a few years ago. > > Joe's "election jury duty" idea is based on the idea that in a large > public election, a large enough sample of the voters is sufficient to > determine the winner, and that, once singled out, a random sample of, > say, ten thousand voters charged with deciding the election, would > take this duty as seriously as a jury on a criminal case (since > politicians often turn out to be criminals, anyway), and knowing that > the outcome depended on them, they would study the candidates in > depth, etc. and would be willing to rank the candidates on ballots > more complex than mere plurality ballots, after receiving training. > > My idea is that in a large enough election, the individual pairwise > contests could be farmed out at random to the voters. > > Here in Oregon everbody votes by mail. We get our ballots a month > before the election, so we have weeks to study the issues and > candidates, and fill in the ballots as we make our decisions. > > Even so when the ballots are long, it is hard to learn enough to make > a wise decision on every contest. > > In an election with twenty single winner races, and with several > candidates per race, it is hard to really get to know all of the > candidates, not to mention all of the alternatives on the various > "ballot measures." > > What if all of these races were broken down into pairwise contests, > which in turn, were farmed out randomly so that nobody had to vote on > all of them? > > To be specific, suppose that you had twenty single winner races with > ten candidates each, and no ballot measures. > > Each of the ten candidate races could be broken down into 45 pairwise > contests, so the total number of pairwise contests would be > 20*45=900. > > If there were nine hundred thousand voters, and each of them received > a random selection of ten pairwise contests to weigh in on, then each > pairwise defeat would be based on ten thousand ballots, well above > the statistical sample size requirement for 99% confidence. > > Forest > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for > list info ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
