[EM] Dual Dropping method and "Preference Approval" ballot ideas

[Forest Simmons]

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 matt at tidalwave.net wrote in part:

> also, but not as a tie-breaker.  Instead, I think that the approval cut-off should be
> used to complete the ballot by placing the unvoted candidates between the
> approved and unapproved candidates.  Although this is imperfect, it seems to me
> that this is probably an improvement over leaving the ballots incomplete or
> completing them by just appending the unvoted candidates as lowest ranked.

It seems to me that any method that gives intermediate value to the
unranked candidates can backfire by letting a candidate with tiny support
win over two other candidates with a near majority of support:


47 A>>C, (B unranked)
48 C>>A, (B unranked)
 5 B>>C, (A unranked)

If I understand your suggestion, these factions are scored as if they were
(respectively)

47 A>B>C,  48 C>B>A,  and 5 B>A>C .

If so, then

B beats A (53 to 47), and B beats C (52 to 48).

Whether this is a good or a bad result depends largely on the reasons that
B was left unranked in the two larger factions.

One possible interpretation of this example is that a coalition of five
has taken advantage of a hotly contested near draw between two well known
candidates to sneak an unknown "dark horse" candidate into office.

However, I believe that the motivating idea for your suggestion is good.

Perhaps it could be improved by requiring any winning candidate to have
some specified quota of approval.

(In the above example B has only five percent approval.)

Some members of this list have suggested distinguishing the cases

A=B and A?B ,

where the equal sign indicates informed indifference, in contrast to the
indifference based on ignorance suggested by the question mark.

It is this latter type of indifference that can make it dangerous to place
truncated candidates in the middle of the preference order.

A similar idea has been suggested for "Grade Voting":

On each grade ballot, all ungraded candidates are given the default grade
of E, thereby making use of the letter that is usually skipped over.

The idea is that the letter F should be reserved for genuinely despised
candidates.

(The ballot itself offers only the usual five letter grade options, namely
A, B, C, D, and F.)

The dark horse problem is solved by requiring that a winner must receive D
or above on at least fifty percent of the ballots, no matter the scoring
method, which could be pairwise, for example, in analogy to some Condorcet
method.

I believe that the Grade Ballot is the best for public use when resolution
greater than three is required.  With a default letter E, it affords six
distinct levels, enough for complete rankings of up to six candidates, and
enough to give statistically indistinguishable results (from the results
of complete rankings) in elections with more than six candidates.

Of all the possible non-interactive ballots with resolution greater than
three, it is the least confusing, at least to any voter who has gone
through our public school system.

For the record, I also agree with Joe Weinstein that randomly chosen
citizen committees with limited scope in time are both the best hedge
against corruption of democratic representation and the best field of play
for carefully crafted elections methods (to be used for making decisions
within those representative committees).

Forest

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