Voting by auction-- morally repugnant but strategy free! The simple, humble Clarke tax method does seem a bituh unfair to me. There are various ways to remedy this problem like having it be based on the log of your income or making it based on how much income you have left as a means of judging how much you have contributed. There is a near endless number of ways to tweak this in order to amount to something useful.
Here is my question: Let's say voters have this imaginary currency. It is a multiwinner race and they can distribute as much as they want to each candidate. Let's say you take the (relatively) extreme measure of determining the winners according to (what essentially amounts to...) naive Range voting. Now go back and eliminate any ballot that overvoted.. Or instead of elimination for overvoting, you could use some other method of reallocation, the point is simple: The methods will be based on naive Range. You determine the first set of winners this way. (You could conceivably use naive approval or naive something else, but what is the point...) ; ) auction-type methods rely on weakening overvotes rather than the more traditional elect one candidate and then punish the supporters. As a starting point, let me explain what I mean by Naive Auction Range before before proposing more complicated methods. Here is how it works. 1) Voters fill out a range ballot. An ordinary Range ballot 2) The Naive Range winners are calculated. 3) you go back and eliminate any ballots that have voted more than whatever the individual maximum score was (in this case 99) 4) go to 2 We can make an improvement to this: Naive Reweighted Auction Range instead of eliminating overvoting ballots, change their weight such that they are no longer overvoting. You could make arule that once it gets to one tenth or some arbitrary number it is no longer counted to prevent infinite loops. You could also make an "eliinated" ballot simply become a Cumulative Vote ballot instead. To my knowledge, acution type iteration hasn't really been discussed. Disclaimer: it is about 1 AM and I ate way too much candy. I also didn't look very hard for previous mentions of a similar topic. Greg Nisbet The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words. – The Atlanta Journal ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info