[Election-Methods] Elect the Compromise

[rob brown]

On 8/25/07, Jobst Heitzig <heitzig-j at web.de> wrote:
>
>
> > So there are two main devices for solving the challenge: vote trading
> > and randomness.
>
> There is a third one! One of the oldest voting methods that have been
> studied can also solve it at least in part. I wonder who will first see what
> I mean :-)
>

I tend to be in agreement with Forest that vote trading and randomness are
the only solutions.   I have no clue what you are thinking of, but I suspect
when I hear it I'm going to think its in the range of what I'd consider
"cheating". :)

Randomness is a weird one....it is great that it can get people to vote
honestly, but then it can just pick the "wrong" one.

Vote trading generally means the ballots can't be secret, so elections would
be inherently corruptible by anyone with money.  Not good.  And I wouldn't
think it would be ok given your problem description, which is for a single
election.  But....I suppose if we were able to talk about mulitple
elections, where a voter can earn "credit" for compromising which can be
spent in later elections, you could build that into the system in a way that
doesn't require losing the secretness, and would solve this problem nicely.

Obviously range voting would solve this problem perfectly, if only humans
were eusocial animals -- most of us being sterile worker-people, whose only
Darwinian interest was the good of the collective.  Sadly, we're not, so
range voting is (in my opinion)  best left to bees and the like. (
http://rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html)
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