[EM] Candidate Proxy Origins

[Forest Simmons]

All of this time I thought Candidate Proxy was my idea, yet while
searching the archives I found a reference to it by Mike Ossipoff in
November 2000 (prior to my debut on the EM list) under the title "Two
alternative voting system suggestions."

It was message 6068 posted 20 Nov 2000.

The other idea in the message was Steve Eppley's candidate withdrawal idea
which is similar to my candidate concession idea that I had also thought
to be original.

Perhaps these ideas will gain more acceptance when folks find out that
they didn't originate with me :')

I like wclarke's suggestions along these lines, too. In particular running
candidates that are committed to a ranking of the other candidates.

Candidates with a tight following wouldn't have to make this kind of
commitment: most of their followers would trust their judgment; but
candidates with a looser following could benefit from mirror candidates
that would rank them first but have different alternatives for the
remaining ranks.

One might object that the list of candidates could grow beyond N! since
that is the number of distinct complete rankings of N (serious)
candidates.  But these mirror candidates would have to have some minimal
quota of support, just like any other candidate.

In other words, if your favorite A preferred C over B but you preferred B
over C, you and sufficiently many like minded voters could run mirror
candidate AB.

If you couldn't muster the support for this order, then you would have to
bite the bullet and decide whether to vote favorite A or compromise B.

Forest