On May 24, 2011, at 6:42 PM, [email protected] wrote:
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.
I would propose Condorcet, with just a few clarifications:
Leave CSSD beatpath as a detail method decision to resolve later.
Reject IRV for known problems.
Those unranked are simply counted as having the bottom rank.
Write-ins permitted and counted as if actually nominated. This
is a bit of extra pain, but I like it better than demanding extra
nominations that enemies could make unacceptably difficult.
Equal ranking permitted. Those who like Approval should
understand that using a single rank lets them express their desire
without considering ranking in detail.
No restrictions as to how rank numbers compare - when
considering which of a pair has higher rank, ONLY their ranks compare
as H>L, L>H, or E=E - what ranks are assigned to other candidates have
no effect on this.
No restriction as to how many rank numbers a voter may use,
beyond fact that a chosen ballot design may impose a limit as to how
many can be expressed.
DYN is a simple addition for those who see value in that
method. Unranked serves as no; top rank serves as yes; third (middle)
rank gets passed to the candidate this voter wants to leave choice to.
Dave Ketchum
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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