[EM] teams

[Antonio Oneala]

"Simmons, Forest" <simmonfo at up.edu> wrote: Antonio wrote

"I happen to believe that adjusting a ballot to give each voter an ideally strategic ballot will be the future of advanced voting system design, at least where fairness is involved.  It does take a lot of processing power, and I believe it will usually take away the summability of the method."
 
I agree.  We want the voters to be able to vote sincerely without being taken advantage of, and we want to help them maximize their voting power.
 
Your teams ideas sound like variations on Asset Voting.
 
Forest
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    Asset voting is a way to quickly aggregate the preference of the teams, but it does have flaws.  Because you are assigning your vote to someone who is not yourself, they will often vote differently.  You're second preference may very well have been for an independent, but the people you've designated as your asset proxy will almost always give it to someone of the same party rather than of the same philosophy, or your philosophy.  While many Moderates may prefer McCain first, this does not mean they prefer Bush second. 

   Teams are any group of candidates.  It could include 10 candidates, or 1 candidate.  It is possible to assign votes to any team in any way that you so choose.

The only two applications of this system I've heard of are DSC and DAC.  Descending Solid Coalitions assigns you to a team if you prefer every individual in it to every individual outside of it, and then it takes the biggest team within that, then the biggest team with in that etc... until it gets to one person.  The Descending Aquisecing Coalitions idea assigns you to a team if you don't prefer every any individual outside of it to any individual within it.  Then it uses roughly the same process DSC does to determine the winner.  The major flaw of DSC is that it violates later-no-help, and the major flaw of DAC is that it violates major-no-harm. 

So I ask, why not simply take DAC and only assign people to teams if it doesn't hurt a more-prefered candidate?  Although that definition is vague, and I haven't come up with a more precise way to do it, I am sure it would be an easy task to do.  If you could assign optimally strategic ways to hold votes to hold votes for or against other candidates based on how it hurt or helped other candidates on your ballot that you prefer or don't prefer as much, I'm sure you could come up with a rather good method.

Of course, optimally strategic votes could be applied to Condorcet methods.  I think the teams idea is better, because Condorcet throws away some information.  It doesn't take into account strength of wins, merely the fact that somebody won.  

It could, actually, be assigned to just about any method, however.  I think that once you run each vote through an optimally strategic process, the results would be roughly the same whatever system you use.  The problem, however, is trying to simplify it so that the electorate understands how their votes will be processed.  

The electorate is vulnerable to a lot of lies and misinformation, as can be seen by the fact that people believe in the rather moronic IRV system, which almost always gives the same results as plurality.  My fear is that the IRV advocates will get what they want, and the entire nation will convert to IRV.  This won't improve the election situation at all, as can be seen by the Australian legislature, yet the electorate will believe their votes are being counted by a "perfect" voting method, and so they won't vote for any new fangled methods that aren't the "perfect one".

And this coming from a furtherment of democracy activist... I actually sometimes have little faith in the system, as all the people seem to want to do is use it to benefit themselves at the expense of others.  Yet, many more democracies are much freer than than the other systems that have been proposed, so I guess there's little alternative.

			
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