[EM] Interesting use of Borda count

[Forest Simmons]

I assume that you are not advocating cumulative voting for single winner
elections, but are saying that Tom's idea might be a good way to get
proportional representation in multi-winner elections.

Forest



On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, Bart Ingles wrote:

> 
> 
> Forest Simmons wrote:
> > 
> > Bart,
> > 
> > this discussion reminds me of the time Tom Ruen was toying with the idea
> > of modifying Approval by requiring all of the approved candidates on one
> > ballot to share one vote equally, i.e. if you approve three candidates
> > they each get one third of your vote, a kind of constrained cumulative
> > voting where all of the non-zero votes on your ballot have equal value.
> 
> This may actually be the most practical form of cumulative voting.  I
> think in most cases, the best strategy is usually to divide one's vote
> equally anyway (otherwise, the candidate who gets fewer votes will
> probably lose & his votes wasted, so that his voters would have been
> better off concentrating their votes on the remaining candidates).
> 
> In the relatively rare situations that could benefit from unequal
> voting, such as two factions each with their own candidate but sharing a
> third, you can overcome this restriction using the same cooperative or
> stochastic strategies.  So each group gives 2/3 of its voting power to
> its dedicated candidate, and the remaining 1/3 to the shared candidate
> (or let individual voters roll the dice to make the choice).
> 
> The fact that this strategy requires a conscious effort would serve to
> keep voters from blindly assiging points without regard to consequences,
> or based on sentiment, etc.
> 
> Bart
>