[EM] Voting by selecting a published ordering

[Paul Kislanko]

> Looking much like Condorcet.  From there we know that cycles 
> can occur, 
> needing more thought here.

Only in the case of ties with respect to the pluralities that chose the
rankings involved. I think with more thoughht we'll find that the
tiebreaking method here corresponds to a cycle-breaking method in
Condorcet-based systems.

> 
> > 
> > If the most popular order is not complete, then refine it 
> using the order that is second in popularity, then third in 
> popularity, etc.
> > 
> > Note that Eppley's suggestion (in its simplest forms) 
> requires only a standard plurality style ballot, and each 
> voter marks only one alternative (a candidate's name or a 
> code word for somebody else's published ordering).
> 
> 
> Starts out looking good but, how many lists might there be 
> with half a 
> dozen candidates?
>       What would this quantity do to the voting machine?
>       How much might this confuse the voter looking for an 
> acceptable list?

I think (as I've said before) it is helpful to keep the tallying mechanism
separate from the collecting mechanism. This is not terribly difficult to
implement on the collection side, given the pre-loaded published list and
the voter's opportunity to select one and modify it (in the ideal world that
modification would instantly become a part of the published list, but
finding out that many voters made the same modification to the same
published one is trivial on the back-end tallying side.


> Sounds like as much trouble as Condorcet and in counting complexity, 
> though doable with present voting machines - provided they 
> can tolerable 
> the number of choices.

I have always thought of a ranked ballot method as being a "choose from
among these available orderings" sort of thing. Althoug the combinatorics
get out of hand very quickly if you assume each ordering is equally likely,
in practice there's a second-order divide on issues that keeps A>C>B from
even being considered by A&B partisans OR by C partisans so that permutation
never appears on either the pre-published lists or "write in" modified
lists.