Is the target here to have a method that would allow and encourage having multiple candidates? (to allow the people of Owego to select the winner themselves instead of others/parties telling them what their choices are)
This can be taken as an independent challenge. Which methods / systems lead to having numerous candidates? (I limit the scope of discussion to single-winner elections, and exlude primaries and other party internal candidate selection and hierarchical proxy based methods.) Plurality certainly is not the method. It typically has only two candidates with chances to win, and others are easily spoilers. Approval discourages nomination of more than one candidate per party or section. IRV also carries some risk of early elimination of potential winners if one party has several candidates. Also exhausted ballots may be a problem if some section has numerous candidates. IRV is however probably better than the previous two. Condorcet seems to work a bit better than IRV. All methods that expect the voters to evaluate (rank or rate) large number of the candidates will be in trouble when the number of candidates gets high. At some point methods with shorter ballots become useful. One approach is to use a candidate tree where the votes (to individual candidates) are summed up in all the branches to see which branch, sub-branch and candidate wins. This would allow very high number of candidates. Discussion above covered only the part of making nomination of multiple candidates possible. In addition to this the method should also discourage nomination of only few candidates (parties may have some interest in doing so because this way the "inner circle" may better determine who will win instead of leaving that to the voters). All additional candidates may make the intended winner look weaker and thereby not win the election. Or the voters will be to lazy to fill the ballot well enough. Numerous candidates may also improve the chances of some section to win (in some methods) by collecting efficiently the votes of smaller groupings that support those "lesser" candidates. This mail is getting long so you need to figure out which ones of the methods have tendencies to either reduce or increase the number of nominations. Rules concerning nominations are naturally also important (e.g. x signatures required to nominate someone). Juho --- On Thu, 5/3/09, Fred Gohlke <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Fred Gohlke <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [EM] language/framing quibble > To: [email protected] > Date: Thursday, 5 March, 2009, 3:23 PM > Good Morning, David > > re: "Suppose I take an interest in becoming mayor of > Owego. > > This will require my neighbors > learning this, and something > of what I might do as mayor." > > The essence of democracy is not what you want, it is what > the people of Owego want. > > The only way we can find out who the people of Owego want > to be their mayor is to ask them. Our present > electoral methods do not ask the people who they want, they > tell the people what choices they have. Campaigning is not > asking, it is telling. > > The failure of our political system is that it is not an > asking mechanism, it is a telling mechanism. In spite > of the advances in transportation, communication and data > processing over the past 200-odd years, we have not yet > devised a means of asking the people to make their own > political decisions. We have the means, but not the > method. > > My purpose is to devise a practical method of asking the > people of Owego who they want as their mayor. > > Fred Gohlke > ---- > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info > ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
