I was perusing the rangevoting.org site (hi, Warren! :) ) after the
latest IRV argument, and I came across something I remembered vaguely
but thought was quite interesting, namely the
"Clarke-Groves-Tideman-Tullock 'perfect' scheme for voting with money"
(link here: http://scorevoting.net/CTT.html )
It seemed like an interesting idea, but the drawbacks mentioned included
the possibility of non-payment and the problem of secrecy. So I looked
at the problem from another angle -- what activity does every election
have where people let others know who they support, and how much? Bingo,
campaign contributions, where donations (at least those above a certain
amount) have a name attached to them.
Now, I don't know if this breaks all of the other good features of
GCTT, but what about considering each dollar of *campaign
contributions* the equivalent of a vote, with the amount of money given
corresponding to the "true worth" of the candidate? Set aside a
portion of each donation in an account, and after the election either
return the money to the original donor, or (in the case where the GCTT
criterion is met) giving the "made a difference" amount to whoever we
decide the recipient to be. For example, if Candidate A wins by 1% over
Candidate B, and someone gave 2% of the total campaign contributions to
the winning candidate, he or she would lose half (or as close to that
as the set-aside was) to the lucky person or government agency.
Of course, money donated is only roughly correlated to the number of
votes someone receives -- Ron Paul had a core of very dedicated
campaign contributors, even though several other Republican candidates
had an electoral advantage -- so this is just a standard voting system
with a strange way of disbursing part of campaign contributions. It
would still be interesting to see the money winner versus the vote
winner in the election using such a system, however.
I would stop there, but then I thought of an interesting "gambling"
version. Unfortunately, I don't have enough math skills to figure out if
it's fair, or suffers from serious economic and electoral paradoxes, but
hey... :)
Let's assume that half of the money given to each candidate can be spent
by that candidate for advertising and related campaign expenses, and
half is saved in a "payoff" account. After the election, the payoff
account of the winner is split among all the losing donors in proportion
to how much they gave to the candidate they supported. If Candidate A
was giving $1 million and Candidate B $500K (assuming a two-person
race), a win by Candidate A would completely pay back the donors of
Candidate B, /plus/ they would make a 50% profit (they get back all of
their payoff account and all of the payoff account of Candidate A, or a
total of $750K for a $500K investment). If Candidate B won, despite
spending only half as much, donors to Candidate A would get back 75% of
their money (half of their $1 million donation, plus half of the $500K
donation to Candidate B).
Like I mentioned, my math skills aren't really up to the task of
figuring out either case, but I thought it was an interesting idea. It
would be fun to see if it was workable, or if it had a fatal flaw.
Michael Rouse
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