At 04:07 PM 11/29/2005, Paul Kislanko wrote: > > > Of course, with Asset Voting, the whole exercise becomes unnecessary. > > Asset approaches the voting problem in an entirely different way. As > > one way to vote Asset, pick the person who you would prefer for the > > office, or, alternatively, whom you would prefer to choose who wins > > the election. The latter is the most important, but this might > > usually also be the former. > >Frame that in a way that it can be analyzed and I might buy it. But it's >just Borda in disguise.
I replied briefly to this before, but I think that it may have gotten buried. Asset Voting has no resemblance to Borda. Borda is a full-rank method where all candidates are ranked in preference order by voters; with N voters, the top ranked voter gets N-1 points, the next top ranked gets N-2 points, etc., until the least ranked voter gets 0 points. The points are added and the winner is the candidate with the most points. In certain environments, where candidates really do naturally fall more or less evenly spaced across a continuum, Borda could make sense. But Asset is completely different. The simplest form of Asset voting would use a vote-for-one ballot. Essentially, under Asset, votes received by candidates would be "assets" which the candidates could use or reassign to create a winner or winners (Asset would be especially good for non-party-list proportional representation). Potentially, in Asset, a minimum of votes (possibly *no* votes) are wasted. Yes, the candidate you voted for may not actually win the election, but then your vote would be recast. In a multiwinner election with enough candidates to broadly represent the electorate, it is indeed quite possible that every vote would create a winner. The original Asset proposal was actually fully refined: one could vote for as many candidates as desired, splitting up the vote (three-place decimals were used). But a simple form of Asset that uses a standard simple ballot, similar to Approval, would count the ballots by dividing each vote cast by the number of votes on that ballot, so that each voter has cast a total of one vote. In standard Approval, dividing the votes would be reprehensible, because it would weaken them. But in Asset, it is simply the voter's choice: vote for an individual, or vote for a committee; in either case the vote is, potentially, fully effective. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
