A suggestion regarding unranked candidates

[Mike Ossipoff]

Steve Eppley writes:
> 
> A friend of mine came up with a good idea.  He doesn't agree that
> unranked candidates should be tallied as if the voter ranked them
> last.  He said he'd like to be able to explicitly rank some horrible
> candidates after the unranked:  
> 
>   A > B > C > the unranked masses > G > H > I
> 
> I don't think it would be hard to implement this on ballots.  It
> doesn't appear to complicate the explanations much, but I'm not 
> certain about this.

Yes there could be situations where I'd like to be able to vote like
that, voting a "bottom ranking", below the unranked candidates. But
I don't know about public political elections. Suppose you voted
Goebbels in your worse-than-unranked set, not realizing that Hitler
was in the election? Couldn't there always be some unknown who's worse
than your worse-than-unranked candidates, and whom you don't know about.
But of course, if you don't know of the candidate's existence, he probably
isn't likely to win anyway, so maybe worse-than-unranked bottom rankings
are ok for public political elections.


Anyway, I've considered proposing the "bottom ranking" too. I didn't,
because it use requires some knowledge of the bad candidates in the election,
and could make it easier to err when not ranking people. Also, I was
concerned, and still am, that it would complicate the balloting instructions
& rules. I think bottom rankings could be a good option to have, but I
don't believe that it should be part of a _first_ public proposal. It's
the kind of enhancement that could be added later.


Mike


> 
> Note to Bruce: it would necessitate a minor change in my definition
> of the p(i,j) term.
> 
> --Steve
> .-
> 


--