On Aug 15, 2008, at 3:00 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Also, such a scheme would be, I think, highly susceptible to
agenda manipulation: who decides which issue is to be effectively
on the ballot, and who decides that the candidates associated with
X and not-X are sincere?
Citizens are free to form such lists. Each list may support and
oppose any topics, and the lists are supposed to collect similar
minded candidates together. Ballots may be just votes for
individual candidates (not for issues). I don't see any specific
problems in this case.
Does that mean that a single candidate can be a member of more than
one list? If so, how are ties handled? Depending on how that's done,
it could cause complex interactions depending on which party a voter
decides to support.
If a single candidate can't be on more than one list, then agenda
manipulation still has some power. If a candidate has to commit to a
list that is based primarily on issue X, but where he also supports
Y, he has to make a choice (distinct from the choices voters make)
of X over Y. That could be technically solved by making 2^n "lists"
for n issues, but then you'd have to let candidates be on multiple
lists, and pure "party-neutral" PR becomes much simpler.
Tree lists would help, but say that a voter likes Y, but not X any
more than the candidate in question does. Then he wouldn't want to
have his vote contribute to any of the other X-favoring candidates.
I could see a kind of proxy front end to STV elections. I'm not sure
I'm convinced it would be a good idea, or even practical to implement,
but suppose that any person or group (including parties) could
register an STV ranking, and a voter could select that ranking instead
of ranking individual candidates. The logistical difficulty would be
in determining how a voter specified their proxy, along with the
possibility of ambiguity deliberate or accidental ("Siera Club", "John
Smith").
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