[Election-Methods] Clone related problems in Range/Approval

[Juho]

On Apr 17, 2008, at 7:20 , Dave Ketchum wrote:

>>>> P.S. Similar problems may hit also the ranked methods if voters are
>>>> too lazy to rank at least all the (strongest) own party clones.
>>>> Bullet voting for one's favourite clone only may thus be a problem.
>>>> If this is common parties will have the incentive to limit the  
>>>> number
>>>> of candidate also in ranked methods like Condorcet and IRV. One (ad
>>>> hoc?) approach to fighting against these problems could be to
>>>> interpret bullet votes as ranking also the other candidates of the
>>>> same party ("R1" => "R1>R2=R3=R4") (or those candidates that this
>>>> candidate has listed as his/her second favourites) unless the voter
>>>> explicitly has indicated that the intention really is to bullet  
>>>> vote.
>>>> This could be also hierarchical ("party1" =>
>>>> "party1>party2=party3=party4>wing1=wing2=wing3>...") or a full
>>>> preference order as given by party1. (Why not also changing
>>>> "party1>party3" to "party1>party3>..." using party1's other
>>>> preferences to complete the ballot.)
>
> Teaching avoiding bullet voting is proper and seems doable.  I  
> choke on
> guessing what the apparent bullet voter might have meant.

The worst case might be one where party that is about to win has 10  
candidates but people don't know which one of these 10 is strongest.  
If many enough people do not rank all 10 there may be also votes  
where the best candidate of that party is not ranked. The "second  
best candidate" is from another party. Now these voters fail to  
indicate preference and the "second best candidate" might win because  
of this.

But I admit that this threat of not ranking sufficiently many  
candidates of one's own party is not one of the most severe problems,  
and it may well be that it will have no major impact on anything in  
most practical elections.

Juho






		
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