[EM] Cheering for simplicity/Orphan

[Forest Simmons]

On Sat, 30 Aug 2003 Kislanko at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 8/30/03 6:47:16 PM Central Daylight Time, fsimmons at pcc.edu
> writes:
>
> > Here in the U.S. 99.9 percent of the voters would rather have their
> > favorite candidate worry about ranking, rating, or approving the other
> > candidates for them.
>
> Justify that statement!

I cannot justify the laziness of the U.S. citizen, but I can tell you some
of the sources of some of my evidence of that laziness:

(1) I have taught math (including elections methods math) to community
college students for two decades.  The vast majority of them would rather
just mark one candidate per ballot, even after learning about all of the
common alternative methods, and even if that means settling for the
plurality winner.

(2) I interacted extensively with the FairVoteOre Oregon IRV initiative
folks both before and after that initiative failed to get the signatures
to make the ballot here in Oregon.  Those whose opinions I respect the
most feel that Candidate Proxy would have made it on the ballot where IRV
did not, because voters do not want to fill out ranked ballots.

(3) People whose opinion I respect from countries that make use of STV
have indicated to me that most voters copy "candidate cards" or vote for
the party ranking, because they are too lazy to work out their own
rankings.

(4) During my time in the military service and as a lay minister in
various congregations of my church in various states of the US as well as
my years of teaching I have been an amateur psychologist.  The results in
(1), (2), and (3) above are entirely consistent with the psycholgical
profile of the cross section of the US that I have observed over the
years.

Having said that, remember that even if my estimate is way off, so that
only twenty percent (say) of the population trusted their favorite to
represent them, Candidate Proxy would simplify their lives without any
skin off the nose of the other voters, who could still send in their
rankings as absentee ballots to the Completion Convention.

Another alternative is to allow favorites to complete all truncated
ballots: if you truncate after your top three preferences, the truncated
are ranked according to your favorite's preferences.

The truncation mark could be considered as an approval cutoff.

Forest