At 11:55 PM 4/18/2010, Dave Ketchum wrote:
There are many elections with only one reasonable choice - such as a
good qualified worker trying for re-election. Here even FPP would be
fine, and we hope for nothing that makes voting unreasonably labor
intensive.
The many with two reasonable choices are also doable with FPP, though
needing TTR for help when losers prevent FPP from seeing a majority.
Or other advanced method. What is often overlooked in the discussion
of voting methods, due to the emphasis on deterministic methods that
always find a winner with one ballot, is that runoff voting provides
the voters with an opportunity to gain information and use it in the
runoff. If runoffs are special elections, the voters will tend to be
more informed. Runoffs make FPTP work much better, because,
obviously, if a majority, just voting for one, vote for a single
candidate, that's a deserving winner! (Sure, there are possible
exceptions, but that doesn't break the general rule. It just means
that there might be room for improvement.)
When representatives are being elected, rather than office-holders,
i.e., executives, vote-for-one becomes even more important as a
voting practice to be accomodated. With open ballot, a simple method
would be to elect representatives with vote-for-one, where the voters
who have elected a representative then get reduced voting power on
the next ballot, which is only electing a reduced set. But that can't
be done with secret ballot, per se.
However, Dodgson realized, and published in 1883 or so, a very simple
fact: most ordinary voters, working people, busy people with
families, etc., would often not know much more than a single favorite
candidate. With STV, which he was working on, these voters are
effectively disenfranchised, to a degree, unless they can identify
candidates by party or use voting guides or the like, which then
gives special power to political parties and leads away from electing
independent representatives who might be closer to the people. So he
invented Asset Voting, with an idea that is so simple that when I
first heard about Single Transferable Vote, I thought it would be
this: an exhausted ballot (or excess votes) would become "the
property" of the candidate receiving them. (I presume that if the
ballot wasn't a bullet vote, that it would go to the candidate in
first position, since that candidate would clearly best represent the voter.)
To my knowledge, only one Asset election has ever been held, the
election of the steering committee for the Election Science
Foundation. It was, to me, quite interesting, and confirmed, more
than I expected, that Asset is a powerful techique for obtaining full
representation. There were 17 voters electing a three-member
committee, and the election settled in about a week. The rules
weren't well nailed down, but the power of Asset was such that this
didn't matter. In the end, there was unanimity on the result, i.e.,
all agreed it was fair (except for one person whose objections were a
little unclear, at least to me, and it has to be said that he did
vote for someone who did produce the result.)
We should produce a standard set of rules for Asset election for
on-line use, as through a mailing list with some provision for
voting. The election was secret ballot; this is possible with Asset
and is perhaps more difficult with delegable proxy. DP, of course,
can be used to create an Asset Assembly with any desired number of
representatives, the principles are similar. Asset is generally
designed to create a peer assembly, where every member has the same
voting power. I don't recommend DP for actual election, but for
negotiation of election, if you can see the difference.... Asset,
though, could be used immediately and raises no particular security
issues beyond what are already issues with secret ballot.
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