Hello. I've been reading lots of messages on this list for a week or so, and I decided it would be good to join it. I can ask questions even if my own ideas are not generally interesting.
I've always been interested in organization of government (esp. comparative), but I've only recently become interested in single-member election methods. Up to that point, I most admired a system like Chile's: open-list PR for two seats per district. (I valued balance.) But I've become disenchanted with party lists and proportional representation generally. I think parties would wield too much power, and there would be little reason to expect that passed legislation would be "improved" somehow with PR. (In other words, even if you reduce wasted votes cast by voters, among legislators the number of wasted votes should end up about the same.) I'm now more taken with Approval and Condorcet after reading about them. I want the elected candidate to have the broadest base of support identifiable. I have an issue or two with both systems, though. Because of voter strategy, I worry that Approval would do little to "centralize" the elected candidates. With Condorcet I worry that many voters would rank candidates into three groups: the favored candidates highest, the poorly understood candidates second (we have such candidates even under plurality; wouldn't their number increase quite a bit under Condorcet?), and finally, the disliked candidates. I worry that, as a consequence, an "unknown" candidate could accidentally win, particularly if many voters lazily place unknown candidates in the same positions. I'm also interested to read about exotic systems. (I've seen some of interest here which defy my comprehension, as I don't understand concepts such as "eigenvectors.") I've devised some bad ones myself. One of my favorites puts the incumbent on a party list all by himself, and every challenger is "de facto" on a second, "challenger" list. The voter votes for only one candidate. The result is that the incumbent only wins with an outright majority; if the incumbent fails to get a majority, the "challenger" candidate with the most votes is the winner. It would be an entertaining system if nothing else. (You could complicate it further by permitting any candidate to run instead on the "incumbent list," with the qualification that such a candidate would need an outright majority within the list's votes to take it from the incumbent. You could use the option to avoid splitting your party's votes.) I am putting finishing touches on a system which is an Approval variant aiming to select the Condorcet Winner more often. I hope to write a document on it. First I have to make sure I can defend the system's results philosophically, but I'm very close to that point. I also want to write a quick program or two to see if idiotic results ever occur in random scenarios (that is, compared with Approval's results). I hope it will be interesting. Stepjak ___________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en fran�ais ! Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
