> Brian Olson wrote (in part): Thus an > election to fill 20 seats or 40 seats, all from one ballot, might > start to get onerous if there are 2-5 times as many > candidates as seats.
Not sure what you mean. From the voters' perspective the complexity is just # of candidates if the method requires ranking all candidates, or just # of seats, if the method gives her that many choices. For example, I am a voter on a panel that is to select the CSTV division 1 college baseball player of the year. There are 8,401 players from which to choose. I don't find that "onerous" at all, because the "ballot" only asks for my top 10. All I have to decide is how much weight I give to hitters, starting pitchers, and relief pitchers with regard to how many of each category get spots on my top 10. (I really like this as a model, just replace "hitters" with "economic policy", "starting pitchers" with "foreign policy" and "relief pitchers" with "right-to-life" and you could tell from who I put in my top 10 and their order what I think about the issues.) But it's not "onerous" for me as a voter to pick 10 out of 8401, and it is not "onerous" for a vote-counting method that only gets 10 items from each voter to count. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
