[EM] Range voting, zero-info strategy simulation (Dave)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 06:14 AM 11/1/2006, Dave Ketchum wrote:
>A normal election is usually not close enough to a tie for what ONE voter
>does to make a difference.  If, generally, the collection of voters that
>consider A and B tolerable vote your strategy, A and B can tie; if each
>who has a clear preference votes it, this should properly affect the result.

I just want to note that Asset Voting can create a situation where 
practically no votes are wasted. It is quite possible, as well, for 
every vote to be connected with a winner who takes office. When no 
votes are wasted, voters will, I'd predict, have a sense that every 
vote counts.

Under Asset, votes are redistributed at the discretion of the 
candidates who received them. If a voter overvotes, the votes are 
fractionally distributed (This is Fractional Asset Voting, the 
original Asset of Warren Smith allowed voters to cast a vote in the 
range 0.000 to 1.000, sum of votes being 1.000, but it is unclear to 
me that there is any substantial advantage of this over FAAV, which 
uses a standard ballot, same as plurality, and allows the choice of a 
single candidate, who is effectively a proxy, or of a virtual 
committee of proxies.)

Now, an additional twist. Every vote is already tagged according to 
the precinct it came from. When the candidate transfers votes, he or 
she transfers precincts with them. The vote count transferred and the 
sum of precinct vote counts would not be exact, but that does not 
matter much. The idea is that every vote can look at a winner and 
say, "My vote elected him."

This would allow a winning candidate with surplus votes to 
essentially assign representatives so that the ultimate elected reps 
are as local as possible. Yet some reps would largely represent the 
total voter space, because, say, there was only enough to elect that 
candidate state-wide, the candidate has no surplus votes. Or a seat 
is cobbed together with surplus votes from many candidates. However, 
I strongly suspect that, except for thinly and widely-distributed 
factions, who aren't even close to getting a seat now, voters would 
tend to vote for someone they know or who is local.

The voters make the decision, through the candidates they voted for. 
Representative "districts" are effectively created without the 
possibility of gerrymandering. While the districts would overlap, a 
particular region would probably have a relatively stable set of 
local representatives.

The representatives would not know who elected them, specifically, 
but they would not what precincts were involved. They would consider 
those precincts their bailiwick.