At 9:28 AM -0400 6/30/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >What about a method with determines the IRV winner and the Condorcet >winner and then selects one of them using a random ballot. I assume >that someone has already suggested it. > >It seems to me that if you included a reasonable number of election >methods, then strategic voting would become considerably more >difficult. This is esp. true if the voters must use the same >ballots for all methods. Also, >ballots would be required to be consistant (or it collapses back to >each voter voting strategically for each individual election). > >A ballot could be a range score ballot with an approval cutoff >score. This allowes a ranked ballot and an approval ballot to be >generated. Also, >it ensures consistancy. The IRV would have to handle equal rankings >though (or require that 2 candidates cannot be given the same range >score).
It's an interesting possibility. However... An advantage of IRV and of Condorcet when there's a Condorcet winner is that they're (relatively) simple to explain to voters. Maybe not ab initio, but my experience is that voters quickly "get it", and generally approve of the process. Condorcet methods are a bit more complicated to explain in the face of multiple-member Smith sets, but let's assume that it's manageable. Complexity of voting systems is a major political problem when we try to introduce them to naive voters, though. I'd resist (or at least defer) features like ratings or range scores that make the system more difficult for naive voters to grasp. The major problem with STV systems, including IRV, is that they don't find compromise candidates of the "everybody's second choice" variety, since those candidates get excluded prematurely. I'm not entirely convinced (obviously) of how serious a problem that is in the real world. We talk a lot about left/right/center candidates, in part, I think, because our advocacy of ranked ballots (whatever the counting mechanism) encourages the illusion that candidates fall along a one-dimensional scale. And of course they do not. As voters, we evaluate candidates on a variety of scales, objective and subjective, conscious and unconscious. And each voter must then map their multivariate analyses of the candidates to a one-dimensional preference scale. But it's not justified to leap from that mapping to the implicitly conclusion that there's anything like a one-dimensional ranking of candidates that comes close to capturing the real complexity of positions and issues and subjective judgements. -- /Jonathan Lundell. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
