[EM] Voting by selecting a published ordering

[Steve Eppley]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 10:38 PM 5/12/2006, Simmons, Forest wrote:
-snip-
>> So most of the time, in the context of Candidate Published Orderings, Concorcet will 
>> yield an unambiguous social ordering of the candidates, with no cycles to resolve.
-snip-
>> I would say that's amazing, and extremely relevant to the topic of this thread.
-snip-

I think an assumption undergirding that conclusion is questionable. Given a voting method
that tends to elect a candidate within the sincere top cycle, candidates trying to win
will tend to position themselves more closely on more issues than they do under existing
voting methods.  With smaller distances between candidates, other quirky effects that are
hard to predict or analyze will become relatively stronger.  If candidates (and their
supporters) do not agree on the importance of the issues--for example, some may care much
more about abortion, some may care much more about taxes, some may care much more about
health care, some may care more about corruption, etc.--then cycles may not be so rare.

-snip--
> I'd prefer the flexibility of Asset Voting to the fixed process of Candidate Published 
> Ordering, for the latter could still create a minority winner, unless the rules 
> prohibited that.
-snip-

I'm unsure what the writer meant here by "Candidate Published Ordering" and by "minority
winner."  When I wrote weeks ago about candidates' publishing pre-election orderings, I
didn't specify how the votes should be tallied, so in my mind we're writing about a family 
of voting methods.  I wrote then that tallying by MAM would be good, and in some later 
messages mentioned a simple system using candidate withdrawal and plurality rule.  On the 
other hand, some methods in this family would be quite poor, such as tallying by Borda, 
which would encourage nomination of a farcically large number of inferior clones.

I don't know where the dividing line is between "rules prohibiting a minority winner" and 
rules that define a member of this large family of voting methods.

Is a "minority winner" a candidate not in the sincere top cycle?

Assuming he was referring to tallying using candidate withdrawal and plurality rule, I
believe I understand his point: Some candidates might "perversely" refuse to withdraw
even though staying in elects an inferior or extremist candidate.  Although we could 
abandon the simplicity of "withdrawal//plurality rule" for something like MAM (under which 
candidates wouldn't need to withdraw to defeat inferior or extreme candidates) or 
"withdrawal//Instant Runoff" (under which only some major candidates would need to 
withdraw), I don't see this as a big issue.  The incentives on the candidates to do the 
right thing look fairly strong.  If exceptions will be few, why worry?  A legislature 
composed of a supermajority of centrists ought to perform well; a few extremist 
legislators would be irrelevant.

I apologize for not knowing what Asset Voting is.  I can glean something from the context,
though.  So, let me say this: A positive aspect of the "fixed process" of having
candidates publish orderings of the candidates prior to the election is that it will help
focus attention on the candidates' and voters' relative preferences regarding the various
compromise positions on the issues.  I think it's more important to elicit this info, when
making collective decisions, than to elicit the candidates' and voters' favorite
positions.  Elections should be about making decisions in the near term; there are plenty
of other forums in which current minorities can argue that the elected compromise
positions are inferior, to try to make their preferred positions popular enough to be
adopted in the future.  If I were choosing a proxy to represent me, I'd want to choose
someone who would relatively order the plausible compromises similarly to how I would,
since ultimately one of the compromises is going to be chosen.

Contrast candidates' published orderings with a more familiar method, parliamentary
proportional representation systems (PPR).  In PPR, each party or candidate adopts
positions favored by a significant segment of the voters, to win some seats. (Typically a
minority of the seats.)  After the election, the elected representatives negotiate to pick
the governing executives; assuming no faction won a majority of the seats, some sort of
compromise will be reached.  My (limited) understanding of the behavior under PPR is that
how the parties/candidates will negotiate after the election is not scrutinized much
during the period prior to the election, when the focus is more on preferred positions.

--Steve