[EM] Using Borda to Set an Agenda

[James Green-Armytage]

Dear Jeffrey O'Neill,

	Your proposal is an interesting one, and worthy of further thought. It is
often easier to think that there are only a few election methods which are
simply the best, and the rest are junk, but it is true that some voting
situations are very different from other, and require different methods.
Getting a broader understanding of these situations is indeed a valuable
direction in which to take election methods discussions, especially for
people who have hashed over the ins and outs of traditional single winner
elections and PR very thoroughly.
	

>Hello,
>
>Poor Mr. Borda was recently dissed on this list. :)  I'd like to suggest
>a use
>of the Borda count.
>
>What is the proper voting system to set an agenda for a meeting.  Suppose
>50
>proposals are submitted for consideration at a meeting which is to last
>eight
>hours.  How do you choose which proposal should be considered first,
>second,
>and so on until the meeting is over?

	Apparently there is no specific time allotted for a single proposal?
>
>In just such a situation, I first proposed using STV.  STV was used to
>select
>the top five.  This was then repeated to choose the next five and so on. 
>The
>hand count was tedious and it isn't clear to me if PR is appropriate for
>this
>situation.  

	Ah, is the use of computers not allowed?

>Why spend time on a proposal supported only by a small group if a
>majority is required for approval?

	If you take this argument to its logical extreme, then the answer to your
question is much more clear. That is, if one is only interested in
pleasing the majority, than one should use a version of Condorcet that
gives a complete ordering of outcomes, such as Kemeny, beatpath, or ranked
pairs. It might be a pain to do these without computers, though.
>
>For the next meeting I sugested using a Borda count.  Intuitively, a Borda
>count seems more appropriate, but I find it difficult to express the
>proper
>principles.  Practically, it is a straightforward method for ranking all
>of the
>proposals.

	Your proposal seems to make use of the fact that multi-seat Borda
occupies a sort of weird grey area between proportional representation and
majoritarianism. That's interesting. What I'm curious about is whether
another method could do the same thing as well, without being as gauche as
Borda.
	STV is at an immediate disadvantage because it is used to do PR when the
number of slots is fixed. This aside, it might be interesting to play
around with the STV rules to make it slightly less proportional. For
example, to mess with the retention fractions of elected candidates such
that they are too low, so that a candidate's surplus would be higher than
it should be.
	Condorcet doesn't have this weakness, but it is hard to make Condorcet
proportional or semi-proportional without getting clumsy, at least on the
order of Borda's clumsiness. (CPO-STV is proportional, but again, this is
STV as much as it is Condorcet, and the STV difficulties apply again.)
There have been various proposals to make a sort of proportional or
semi-proportional multi-seat Condorcet method such that when one winner is
elected the voting strength of those who helped elect this winner is
reduced by some degree. It is hard to be fair in terms of whose voting
strength you diminish, and it intuitively seems that the strategic
incentives created would be truly weird.
>
>Any thoughts?
>Jeff
>
>PS. I'd also like to point out that there is some proportionality to
>using a
>Borda Count with multi-member districts.  Let me give an example for a
>3-seat
>district.  Using SNTV, IRV, or STV, a candidate is guaranteed to be
>elected if
>he or she receives at least 25% of the vote.  This is sometimes called the
>"threshold of exclusion."  With Borda, the threshold of exclusion will be
>higher (it is straightforward to compute it exactly) but there will still
>be
>some proportionality.

	You are right. It is a strange thing. I suppose that it is
semi-proportional, but not quite in the same way as cumulative voting and
limited voting, which I think are fully proportional under ideal
conditions, that is perfect knowledge and strategy on the part of the
voters, parties, etc.

	Anyway, I don't have any good answers, but I hope that someone else can
do better.

my best,
James Green-Armytage