About six years ago Toby Nixon asked the members of this EM list for a advice
on what election method
to try propose in the Washington State Legislature. He finally settled on CSSD
beatpath. As near as I
know nothing came of it. What would we propose if we had another opportunity
like that?
It seems to me that people have rejected IRV, Bucklin, and other methods based
on ranked ballots
because they don’t want to rank the candidates. Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis
Carroll) anticipated this
difficulty in 1884, and he suggested what we now call Asset Voting as a
solution.
Asset voting is the simplest solution to the spoiler problem. Approval is the
next simplest. IMHO
anything much more complicated than Approval or Asset voting doesn’t stand a
chance with the general
public here in America. For this reason most IRV proposals have actually
truncated IRV to rank only
three candidates. This destroys IRV’s clone independence.
Asset Voting in its simplest form tends to squeeze out the CW, because when
flanked closely on both
sides by other candidates, the CW tends to have too few first place
preferences (assets or bargaining
chips) to survive.
On the other hand Approval requires reliable polling information for informed
strategy. This fact makes
Approval vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation.
That brings us to Delegable Yes/No (DYN) voting, which is a hybrid between
Asset Voting and Approval
that overcomes the weaknesses of those methods without increasing the
complexity to the level of IRV:
In DYN you circle the name of your favorite candidate and then optionally mark
“Yes” next to the
candidates that you are sure you want to approve of, and “No” next to those
that you are sure that you
want to disapprove of. You automatically delegate the rest of the Yes/No
decisions to the candidate that
you circled as “favorite.”
Those delegated decisions are made by the candidates after the partial results
have been made public,
so that no false polls can manipulate the strategy.
What do you think?
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