[EM] RE: simplifying ballots

[Simmons, Forest]

Mr. Lomax wrote:

"Asset Voting, per se, was invented by Warren Smith, though it strongly
resembles delegable proxy (which seems to have been invented independently
by a number of people, I know I did not get it from anyone else). "
 
I reply:
 
It's true that the name "Asset Voting" was invented by Warren Smith, and he discovered the concept independently, but the concept with all of his suggested variations (and more)  have been discussed on this list at least since December 1996, when Demorep  and Eppley started writing about "Candidate Vote Transfer, " and "Low Tech Proxy Democracy."
 
When I first read one of Demorep's posts in October 2001 on "Low Tech Proxy Democracy p.r." I thought that I was the first to see that it could also be applied to single winner elections.  Later I found out that was not the case.
 
Since then I have posted messages to this EM list and the FairVoteOregon list advocating asset voting under the names Candidate Proxy and Candidate Transfer.  These titles are descriptive of the common feature of these methods: the Candidates act as proxies for their voters when they decide who the winner(s) will be.  To early objections that voters might not like any of the candidates preference schedules, I replied that through write-ins all such voters can represent themselves.  I also noted that in approval elections there could be a check box on each ballot asking the voters if they wanted their ballots to be counted cumulatively.  If so, then the approval ballots of the marked candidates would receive additional fractional weight.  
 
Anyway, asset voting in great variety has been bandied about since at least 1996 on the EM list.  Your FAAV is a welcom addition. 
 
Forest
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 4828 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20050820/b3a2ba0b/attachment-0003.bin>