Billiard-Ball Theory of Voting

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I don't know if Martin's use of Approval ballots to place
billiard-ball votes would placate the 1-person-1-mark objectors.

They'd just object that, though ultimately each voter has one
indivisible vote, the placement of those votes is based on a system
in which different people can make different numbers of equally-counted
marks.

So they'd just transfer that same objection to the system that
determines the placement of the billiard-ball votes.

It seems that the 1-person-1-vote objection will have to be answered
by directly confronting its justifications.


Showing that Plurality & Approval are just special cases of CR,
a method that no one says violates 1-person-1-vote or gives voters
unequal power seems a good approach. As Richard mentioned a few days
ago, even in lone-mark (Plurality), the voter is actually casting
a vote with respect to each  candidate--a low rating score to all
but one of them, and a higher rating score to one of them. As long
as all the voters have only those same 2 rating scores to bestow,
then, if they must give the low score to all but one, it obviously
makes no difference what the 2 compulsory scores are...+1 and -1, or
1 vote and 0 votes, or 37 & 35, etc.

That likely will bring out the silliness of requiring the voter
to give the low score to all but one of the candidates.

Lone-mark being just a special case of CR
weakens the claim that it has some kind of fundamental justification. The 
burden of proof is on the person who wants to
claim that CR is only fair when the voter must give the lowest
score to all but one of the candidates.

Also, of course the main "justification" for 1-person-1-vote is
the fear that the person who makes more marks has more power in
Approval; and the claim that Approval gives voters more unequal
power than IRV does has recently  been unexpectedly dramatically demolished.

Obviously there are many ways a person could divide the candidates into
2 sets and say that one set is better than the other. In a manycandidate
election, it's difficult to justify saying that everyone should only
be allowed to designate a better-set that just contains one candidate
a worse-set that contains all the rest. Maybe 40% of the candidates
are clearly better than the other 60%, with no important differences
among those 2 sets.

Mike Ossipoff




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