Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
But want simple and maximally powerful? Asset Voting. Terminally simple
as a voting method. Ideal strategy: identify the eligible person (could
be yourself!) whom you most trust to make a good decision in your
absence, because you will be absent, as a voter, until the next
election. Vote for that person, period. There is no reason to vote for
anyone else, at all. Can't decide between two? Vote for both, the system
will divide your vote between them. But I suggest that only to avoid
tossing out the vote, I see no other reason to put that in. We are
deciding *representation*, not a final decision. If we were limited to a
small candidate set, then we'd want to be able to create virtual
committees by voting for more than one. But we need not be limited to
such a small candidate set.
The persons receiving votes in Asset become public voters, I usually
call them electors. There are a lot of uses for this, and it goes far
beyond single winner elections. Asset was first designed as a tweak to
STV, by Lewis Carroll, to deal with the very serious problem of
exhausted ballots. It was a much better fix than the Australian one of
requiring full ranking, which essentially coerces votes out of people
who don't have the knowledge to do deep ranking. And who clearly would
rather not, as we see where full ranking is optional, as with
Queensland, for example.
Something I've always wondered about Asset Voting. Say you have a very
selfish electorate who all vote for themselves (or for their friends).
From what I understand, those voted for in the first round become the
electors who decide among themselves who to pick for the final decision.
Wouldn't this produce a very large "parliament"?
Perhaps the situation that the voters vote for themselves is unlikely,
but some of the problem remains. Asset's advantage is supposed to be
(again, as far as I understand it) that it involves more people than
would be directly elected. So if it involves too few, that's a problem,
but if it involves too many, that's a problem as well because the
deliberative process doesn't scale.
How's that solved?
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