[EM] Simplifying ballots

[Simmons, Forest]

Asset voting (in its lone mark version) is one of the few methods simple enough to have a decent chance among lazy U.S. voters, and it would be the greatest possible improvement consistent with the simple lone mark ballot.
 
In Asset voting you vote for the candidate that you think would represent you best.  Then this candidate represents you in a negotiation stage that I call the Election Completion Convention.  In this convention, your vote is an "asset" that your representative controls. At the end of the negotiations the candidate with the most assets is the winner of the election.
 
There are at least as many versions of asset voting as there are possible sets of rules governing the Election Completion Convention.
 
For the voters the simplicity of the ballot and the drama of the Completion Convention would be the big selling points.
 
Imagine the drama we would have had in the Perot, Bush, Clinton election that was referred to recently by Rob Lanphier.  Any one of the three would have had enough assets to make either of the others the winner. That's a lot of political leverage!  No responsible representative should or would back down until he had exacted enough real or symbolic concessions to take the edge off any supposed "mandate" of the eventual victor.
 
The hokey "Presidential Debates" would be put in their place, and someone like Nader would have a genuine chance to highlight the relative incompetence of Dumb and Dumber.
 
The next best use of the lone mark ballot is as a way of specifying which candidate's "how to vote" card you want replicated as your ballot.  This can be used in conjunction with any base method.  Even the IRV version could be justified as a zero cost improvement (no matter how minor) over plurality.
 
In my opinion the only other methods that are simple enough for the U.S. voters are Approval and the various methods that make use of the three slot ballot including Majority Choice Approval (MCA).
 
Jobst's way of applying the three slot ballot to Democratic Fair Choice can be adapted to any other method that would normally use ordinal ballots (with or without approval cutoffs): 
 
As in MCA one slot designates favored status, the next designates "also approved," while no mark at all represents "disapproved."  However, the approval order on each ballot is extended according to the expressed preferences of the favored candidates.
 
For example, if I mark A and B as favored, and C, D,  E, as also approved, while leaving F, G, and H unmarked, then initially my ballot looks like
 
          A=B>C=D=E>>F=G=H .
 
However, if my favorite candidates A and B both agree that E>C, E>D, F>H, and G>H, my ballot becomes
 
         A=B>E>C=D>>F=G>H .
 
But any of their common preferences that (like F>E) contradicted my approval order would be ignored.
 
If I just vote A as favored, and leave all other blanks blank, then A's entire ballot is replicated for me.  It's an easy way of copying a candidate's "how to vote" card.
 
We've got to keep it simple or it will never pass muster with US lazy voters ... yes, I mean like me :-)
 
Forest
 
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