The purpose of this posting is to answer Demorep's concerns (see below) about the complexity of the Five Slot Ballot, and to advocate another use for it (simpler than my median method that he refers to) as our best chance of making Approval psychologically palatable to citizens of the IRV persuasion. First of all here's the five slot ballot: Candidate | Grade | A | B | C | D | F ---------------------------------------------- Sally F. | ___ | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) Jack H. | ___ | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) Janet R. | ___ | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) Wm. C. | ___ | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) L.A.G. | ___ | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) | ( ) The only simpler ballot that I know of is the Approval ballot. There are many possible ways of scoring this ballot, and for each possible way of scoring the ballot there are many possible ways of using those scores to determine a winner. The most obvious (but not necessarily the best) of these methods is to score the ballots with grade points on a scale of zero to four, and to combine those scores by averaging, so that the candidate with the highest grade point average wins the election. This is just standard Cardinal Ratings (CR) with a resolution of four. This method suffers from strategic conflict between the instrumental and expressive purposes of voting, because the best instrumental strategy is to grade at the extremes of A and F only, which limits variety of expression. In particular, if your preferences are Nader > Gore > Bush , and you believe that Nader has a negligible chance of winning the election compared to Gore and Bush, then your best instrumental strategy is to give Nader and Gore grades of A, while awarding Bush with an F, which conflicts with your expressive inclinations of giving grades of A, C, and F to the three respective candidates. Here's another way of scoring these ballots and determining the winner while resolving this conflict: Grades A, B, and C count as Approval, whereas D, F, and Blank count as Disapproval. The candidate with the highest Approval score wins the election. The voters can freely express distinctions within the approved and disapproved categories without worrying about conflicts with instrumental strategy. This simple method is Approval instrumentally, but with greater than two resolution for expression. Since IRV supporters' main objection to ordinary Approval is its lack of expressivity, this expressive version is the kind of method that might have a chance in overcoming their psychological block. As I have mentioned before the ballot has a slot for every candidate: favorite, compromise front runner, in between, despised front runner, and evil incarnate. For my Green friends the most important distinctions are among favorite and the two front runners; all else is frosting on the cake. What about the folks that want to express Gore and Bush as D and F candidates, but still support Gore instrumentally? No problem; at no extra cost we can turbo charge the method as follows: include the fictitious Least Accepted Grade (LAG) candidate on every ballot. Whatever grade the voter gives to LAG is the lowest grade that will count as approval on that ballot. The default LAG would be C. Some of my Green friends would set the Least Accepted Grade at D, and give Nader an A, Gore a D, and Bush, Buchanan, and so forth, F's. It would count instrumentally as approval for Nader and Gore, but they would have the satisfaction of expressing their relative disgust for Gore. Personally, I would set the LAG at F and leave Gore, Bush, etc. blank, to express my utter contempt for all of the big name candidates except Nader. EM list folk will tend to smile at this method: it's like putting a Volks Wagon engine in a Carmen Ghia. (Well, that's how they come from the factory, isn't it? ;-) Now for the only objection that I have heard to this method: voters might be upset if the official winner based on the approval scores differs from the "expressive winner" (the one with the highest grade point average). We feel bad when the winner of the popular vote doesn't get the electoral vote, which is the one that counts in our current system (next to the supreme court's opinion). Under IRV we would feel bad if the Condorcet Winner wasn't elected. Others would feel bad if the Borda Count winner wasn't elected. Etc. "But IRV doesn't ignore preference ballot information like Approval ignores some of the Five Slot information." Are you sure about that? Think again. At each stage of the instant runoff IRV makes irrevocable decisions about whom to eliminate while ignoring all but the first column of preferences. IRV ignores and throws away perfectly good information right and left. I believe that the Five Slot Approval method would yield agreement between the Approval winner and the expressive winner more often than IRV would pick the Condorcet winner, and more often than the electoral vote agrees with the popular vote in our current system. The candidate with the highest pass/fail computed grade will almost always be the candidate with the highest zero through four grade point average. The law of large numbers works for discrete random variables as well as continuous ones. I'm not claiming that a candidate's grade point average will come out the same by both methods. I only claim that the relative order is very likely to be maintained. At the end of a test with hundreds of questions the determining factor of which student comes out on top is NOT whether or not partial credit is given. We give partial credit only for educational and psychological reasons. We want to encourage more expression on the ballot for similar reasons. Note that the Electoral Vote method is a very drastic and biased discretization, much more prone to distortion than our Grade-to-Approval transformation. Yet it typically yields the popular vote winner. Well it doesn't really matter if these arguments persuade you or not, because the objection can be fixed with a little spritz of Demoguard: If the "expressiveness winner" turns out to be different from the Approval winner, pick the one that the majority prefers in a head-to-head contest as determined by the Five Slot Ballots. Since the head-to-head comparison depends only on order of grades, there is no incentive for inflation or deflation of grades. With this final tweak, the method is still free of incentives for insincere expression. So this method could be considered Majority Completed CR/Approval, in the taxonomy of methods. In my opinion, this is the version of CR/Approval that has the best chance of competing with IRV in the minds of the public. Among methods based on IRV style preference ballots the one with the best chance is Demorep's ACMA with the Minimum Acceptable Candidate feature (as an Approval cutoff marker) for keeping the ballot in the pure ranking category. We could call it MACACMA (Minimum Acceptable Candidate Approval Condorcet Most Approval) if that acronym has not already been staked out by the hamburger chains. Remember, Demorep's method is an Approval completed Condorcet method with an Approval quota at the front end. My version and his differ by how to mark the approval cutoff. He has the voters mark Yes and No, respectively, next to the approved and disapproved candidates, along with their numerical rank. I just have them rank the MAC candidate where they want to leave off the Yes candidates and begin the No candidates. Interestingly, it turns out that no candidate meets Demorep's approval quota (a majority of Yes votes) if and only if the MAC candidate is the Condorcet winner. I hope we can get some good, sellable version of Approval or Condorcet, like one of these, into the public arena before IRV spoils everything. Forest On Thu, 26 Apr 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Mr. Simmons wrote in part- > > Give the win to the candidate with the highest median score, i.e. the > candidate whose list of scores has the highest median. > > ---- > D- There is more than a minor problem involving public education regarding > *ANY* *complex* reform method. > > In other words -- there is a fairly large percentage of dumber than doorknob > voters. > > E.G. - the Florida 2000 President election -- circa 2-3 percent of the voters > cast illegal ballots regardless of the instructions on how to vote and > regardless of the system being used ---- paper ballots, punchcard ballots, > scan ballots, etc. (which is the subject of all sorts of private and public > studies and reports floating around in the U.S.A.). > > With median voting it would be necessary to vote in a maximum to minimum > range such as 100 to 0. > > I assume that equal number votes might have to be prohibited --- i.e. C 100, > B 99, > F 0, A 1, etc. (to prevent having ALL 100 or 0 votes). > > One can almost hear the moaning and whining about such dumb voters of the Fl > variety being even more confused (with more moaning and whining about > discrimination, etc.). > > I highly question whether anything more than simple YES/ NO (currently used > on ballot questions) and simple rank number voting (1, 2, etc.) can be passed > for candidate elections pending some major political I.Q. increase in the > general population -- noting that median voting would have elements of both > YES/ NO and rank number voting. > > Median voting should be applied to two of my standard examples-- > > 26 A > 25 B > 49 Z > 100 > > 34 ABC > 33 BCA > 32 CAB > 99 > >
