I know most of the people on this list have seen a description of Alan Natapoff's ideas on why the electoral college is a good thing, mainly because it magnifies the potential importance of any one vote, especially in close elections. He likens it to the world series where the victor wins the most games rather than the one who gets the most runs. I remain unconvinced by his arguments -- and his sports analogies -- but it does open the door for some interesting election methods. The first I'll call "triad" voting. Votes are randomly grabbed in groups of three. If two people in the triad vote for candidate A and one for B, the entire triad is considered to vote for candidate A. If one votes for A, one for B, and one for C, and there are any undistributed "non-triad" votes, they are added until there is a majority or the votes run out. Any ties remaining are thrown out. The process repeats until the final triad, which either elects someone or has a three-way tie. If there is a three-way tie in the final triad, the person with the greatest number of victories on the previous level would be the winner, continuing down the line (if necessary) to the person with the greatest number of popular votes. I don't want to throw the election to the House! (grin) Another method would be to grab two votes at random. If they are for the same person, that candidate gets a vote in a second pool. If there is a tie, one vote at a time is added until there is a majority or the votes have run out (in the latter case, choose the FPTP winner of the group -- if there is a tie, throw it out). Do the same with the second pool, continuing until there is a single winner or a tie. Popular vote or the previous method would be the tiebreaker. This would seem to fit Mr. Natapoff's criteria for increasing the power of each vote. The problems with this method is the randomness of the result -- it depends on the order the votes are counted -- as well as the "butterfly effect" where a single vote in the right spot can cause an apparent landslide victory or humiliating defeat. In addition, it would weight three 2:1 victories as a winner over two 3:0 victories -- certain votes would be more powerful than others. It would be a kind of sweepstakes vote, where the power of your vote would depend purely on chance. There are probably other voting criteria these methods violate. Still, it would be kind of interesting to simulate it for large groups -- say 3^16 (43,046,721) voters in a presidential election. Perhaps large-scale statistics would take over from short-range randomness (or semi-randomness, if one precinct at a time were considered, with "extra" votes carried to the next precinct. Or if everything were electronically counted, you could use the order of vote). Michael Rouse [EMAIL PROTECTED]
