[EM] Re: Democratic Fair Choice

[Forest Simmons]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Jobst Heitzig wrote:

> Dear Folks!
>
> Under the working title "Democratic Fair Choice", I described on our
> Wiki a detailed voting procedure composed from ideas by Forest (most)
> and me (some):
> http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Imagine_Democratic_Fair_Choice
> I tried to make it more interesting by writing it as a fictitious
> television show reporting on an actual election -- hope you have some
> fun reading it.
>
> In short, this is what I suggest:
> 0. Each candidate simultaneously publishes a ranking of all candidates.
> 1. Each voter marks one candidate as "directly supported" and
> arbitrarily many additional ones as "approved".
> 2. This is transformed automatically into an individual ranking by
> placing the approved over the unapproved ones and completing the ranking
> by means of the directly supported candidate's published ranking.


This step is the stroke of genius that I never would have thought of.  It 
gives the voter more control than mere candidate proxy.



> 3. After booths have closed, direct support, approval, and pairwise
> comparisons are counted.
> 4. A numbered list of voters grouped by directly supported candidates in
> order of decreasing direct support is constructed like this:
>   0000001-0821461: supporters of C
>   0821462-1318964: supporters of F
>   ...
> Then each candidate submits in a sealed envelope a number between 1 and
> the number of voters. The envelopes are opened in public, and the
> numbers are added modulo the number of voters, giving the number of the
> "proposing voter".
> 5. The published ranking of the proposing voter's directly supported
> candidate becomes the "proposing order".
> 6. Only now the approval values and the matrix of pairwise defeats are
> published, and the winner is the topmost candidate in the proposing
> order who pairwise defeats all more approved candidates.
>
> Essentially, this is "Random Ballot from Forest's set P", but without
> the need to specify individual rankings, and with no "real"
> randomization but instead with a sophisticated pseudo-random procedure
> which is under complete deterministic control by the candidates...
>
> I'm quite curious about your thoughts!
>

Great!  It's much better than Majority Choice Approval at no extra 
cost.

And remember that with any more complicated ballot, most voters will just 
copy candidate cards, anyway.

Forest