[EM] Proportional Condorcet Voting

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:29 PM 5/1/2006, Simmons, Forest wrote:
>However, suppose that instead of comparing all C(N,K) of the K 
>candidate subsets, we just compare all submitted proposals, 
>including those sets that would be elected by STV under various 
>rules (Droop Quota, etc.).  There might be ten thousand such 
>proposals. But that would only require  C(10000, 2) = 49995000 
>comparisons, a few seconds of CPU time on a second rate computer.

Yes, the objections to Condorcet proposals based on computational 
intractability are pretty silly, based only on a theoretical idea 
that all possible rankings will exist in the ballot population. But 
the ballot population is a limited set, with almost certainly a high 
degree of reduncancy. Systems that require all voters to rank all 
candidates make it worse, to be sure, but even that will have a lot 
of redundancy in it.

However, I'm not sure why one needs Condorcet Voting for PR.

Asset Voting should create a very accurate, non-party-list PR 
assembly rather directly. Asset Voting, though, requires a 
deliberative or bargaining step, which is a rather new idea, as the 
election method itself does not suffice, without candidate action 
after the election, to determine all the winners (it only determines 
those who gain the quota in the initial balloting).

However, if Published Rankings are provided by candidates prior to 
the poll and are used to automatically reassign votes, it might be 
possible to have direct winner determination.

All excess or unused votes would be subject to reassignment. There 
are details to be specified, to be sure. It's obvious what to do with 
a winner's excess votes: they go to the next position on the winner's 
Published Ranking. But it is the votes of those who don't gain the 
quota in the first round that are not so obvious. I'd guess, 
off-hand, that they would be reassigned with the lowest vote-getters 
first. In this case, it might not be so problematic as that is with IRV.

If there are N candidates and any one of them has the direct and sole 
support of 1/N of the voters, that candidate would be elected 
immediately. Many, perhaps most winners would win like this, unless 
there were a very large number of candidates with distributed popularity.

I prefer conscious, deliberate, and negotiated transfer of votes, 
i.e., deliberative process, which I consier would be quite safe in 
the formation of a large PR assembly, but an automatic system could 
work pretty well.