[EM] thoughts on the pairwise matrix

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 04:07 PM 11/29/2005, Paul Kislanko wrote:
>
> > Of course, with Asset Voting, the whole exercise becomes unnecessary.
> > Asset approaches the voting problem in an entirely different way. As
> > one way to vote Asset, pick the person who you would prefer for the
> > office, or, alternatively, whom you would prefer to choose who wins
> > the election. The latter is the most important, but this might
> > usually also be the former.
>
>Frame that in a way that it can be analyzed and I might buy it. But it's
>just Borda in disguise.

I replied briefly to this before, but I think that it may have gotten buried.

Asset Voting has no resemblance to Borda. Borda is a full-rank method 
where all candidates are ranked in preference order by voters; with N 
voters, the top ranked voter gets N-1 points, the next top ranked 
gets N-2 points, etc., until the least ranked voter gets 0 points. 
The points are added and the winner is the candidate with the most 
points. In certain environments, where candidates really do naturally 
fall more or less evenly spaced across a continuum, Borda could make 
sense. But Asset is completely different.

The simplest form of Asset voting would use a vote-for-one ballot. 
Essentially, under Asset, votes received by candidates would be 
"assets" which the candidates could use or reassign to create a 
winner or winners (Asset would be especially good for non-party-list 
proportional representation). Potentially, in Asset, a minimum of 
votes (possibly *no* votes) are wasted. Yes, the candidate you voted 
for may not actually win the election, but then your vote would be 
recast. In a multiwinner election with enough candidates to broadly 
represent the electorate, it is indeed quite possible that every vote 
would create a winner.

The original Asset proposal was actually fully refined: one could 
vote for as many candidates as desired, splitting up the vote 
(three-place decimals were used). But a simple form of Asset that 
uses a standard simple ballot, similar to Approval, would count the 
ballots by dividing each vote cast by the number of votes on that 
ballot, so that each voter has cast a total of one vote. In standard 
Approval, dividing the votes would be reprehensible, because it would 
weaken them. But in Asset, it is simply the voter's choice: vote for 
an individual, or vote for a committee; in either case the vote is, 
potentially, fully effective.