On Apr 19, 2010, at 11:48 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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.
My words above related to simple elections. Later I talked of
others. Abd responds to all kinds here.
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.)
Plurality has been the major method in the US.
It gets in trouble with multiple candidates and none getting a
majority - so do TTR runoffs. TTR gets in trouble if the best
candidate did not get enough votes to go to TTR (two others got more,
even though not truly better).
It gets in trouble with clones and almost-clones. This problem gets
reduced a bit, though not cured, by parties doing primary elections.
Anyway, the aim was to do the major campaigning before the "main"
election.
Abd would do more runoffs, leaning toward doing the major campaigning
then. I choke because I still see need for campaigning before the
main election to get the "right" leaders to the runoff.
I would go to Condorcet:
Forget primaries - Condorcet can tolerate clones and voters
should be able to learn related voting.
I would do less runoffs - voters can more completely express
their desires.
Bucklin? I see its way of handling ranking as not worth voters having
to learn and use those rules. Note that Condorcet only asks for
ordering of ranks per voter desires.
Below Abd talks of Asset - interesting.
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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