[EM] Asset Voting (was: Simplifying Ballots)

[Abd ulRahman Lomax]

At 05:28 PM 8/16/2005, Alex Small wrote:
>First, as Paul Kislanko pointed out, with asset voting it wouldn't just be 
>about a handful of candidates.  Any idiot with a following could (and 
>undoubtedly would) declare himself a candidate for 
>President.  Evangelists, talk show hosts, actors, self-help gurus, 
>activists, psychics ("Ms. Cleo for President!"), you name it.  So, to 
>avoid a ballot with 10,000 names on it, it might be nice to have a 
>significant signature requirement to participate.

Good impulse, bad idea. Yes, it should take some serious signatures to get 
on the ballot. But write-in should still be allowed. And there might be a 
registration system where you can get a number that could be used on a 
ballot, perhaps there would even be a book available at the polling places 
with lists of people and numbers.

(I've seen how write-in actually can work, or, more accurately, fail to 
work. My wife was written in, we know, on three ballots, and it was done 
properly and yet her name did not show up in the results (which had four 
other write-ins with one vote each). (There was no declared candidate in 
time to get on the ballot.) And, indeed, both my wife and I know her name 
and address! (It was a requirement to include the address....) Had we 
cared, we could, I think, have established that she won this 
hotly-contested election.... seriously, it was for school committee and one 
of the town Selectmen said, "you want it, don't worry, we'll simply appoint 
you to fill the vacant position." But by this time my wife had realized 
that she *didn't* want it.... Still, it showed what can happen if there is 
not a good procedure.)

>(Just look at the number of candidates for the California gubernatorial 
>recall.  In addition to a State Senator, a State Assembly leader, and a 
>few prominent businessmen, we had a whole bunch of freaks.[...]

One man's freak is another man's professional wrestler....

>[...]
>But that's a detail.

Indeed. But an important one. I'd say that a good procedure for getting 
printed on the ballot, relatively open (it could properly encourage many 
more than presently make it), plus a simple but relatively easy to count 
write-in procedure would do it. So you could, indeed, simply name your 
friend, if your friend was willing to serve. (I do think that it might be 
appropriate to require registration of *all* candidates who could legally 
receive votes. But it should be simple and cheap to register, not more than 
a few dollars to cover costs.)

[...]
>Another thought is that it might actually be pitched as a way to return to 
>the original spirit of the electoral college:  Have a bunch of 
>widely-supported people (as well as Gary Coleman) show up and hash it out 
>to make a decision.

The electoral college as originally conceived was indeed something like 
this, but with each elector having equal voting power. Indeed, the way 
Asset Voting could be used to great effect in presidential elections in the 
US, without any constitutional change, would be to select the state's 
electors by PR. Asset voting PR, which would generally produce even 
representation (even though some electors would doubtlessly represent, 
through vote reassignment, more than one "constituency.")

And, really, the electors should be on the ballot in the US, not the 
Presidential candidates.... This, again, is probably what was originally 
conceived.

The electoral college takes a bad rap, all too often, for its perversion by 
the party system, which inexorably converted state selection of electors 
into all-or-nothing, simply because "all" would be for the majority 
party.... It is all-or-nothing which does the true damage, not the 
relatively minor inequities of the numbers of state electors assigned to 
each state. (Those are important, but get rid of all-or-nothing, which is 
not in the Constitution and really, in my view, perverts the original 
intent, and more than half the problems would be solved. Then we could work 
on the other details.)

Now, if it were allowed for very small-vote-getters to participate, there 
might well be provisions for small numbers of votes to be reassigned in a 
simple way. Perhaps some kind of mail-in affidavit. In the U.S., probably 
all such recast votes would be public record.

This might be a big step, too big for many people. But Fractional Approval 
Asset Voting with its simple ballots and procedure and a field that is not 
too large could be practical and sellable. The shifts that could lead to 
relatively wide participation in the reassignment of votes, I think, would 
happen slowly. Or they might not happen at all. Simple asset voting with a 
relatively small number of candidates (not a great deal more than we now 
see) would probably satisfy most people quite well enough.