[EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative 1

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> But want simple and maximally powerful? Asset Voting. Terminally simple 
> as a voting method. Ideal strategy: identify the eligible person (could 
> be yourself!) whom you most trust to make a good decision in your 
> absence, because you will be absent, as a voter, until the next 
> election. Vote for that person, period. There is no reason to vote for 
> anyone else, at all. Can't decide between two? Vote for both, the system 
> will divide your vote between them. But I suggest that only to avoid 
> tossing out the vote, I see no other reason to put that in. We are 
> deciding *representation*, not a final decision. If we were limited to a 
> small candidate set, then we'd want to be able to create virtual 
> committees by voting for more than one. But we need not be limited to 
> such a small candidate set.
> 
> The persons receiving votes in Asset become public voters, I usually 
> call them electors. There are a lot of uses for this, and it goes far 
> beyond single winner elections. Asset was first designed as a tweak to 
> STV, by Lewis Carroll, to deal with the very serious problem of 
> exhausted ballots. It was a much better fix than the Australian one of 
> requiring full ranking, which essentially coerces votes out of people 
> who don't have the knowledge to do deep ranking. And who clearly would 
> rather not, as we see where full ranking is optional, as with 
> Queensland, for example.

Something I've always wondered about Asset Voting. Say you have a very 
selfish electorate who all vote for themselves (or for their friends). 
 From what I understand, those voted for in the first round become the 
electors who decide among themselves who to pick for the final decision. 
Wouldn't this produce a very large "parliament"?

Perhaps the situation that the voters vote for themselves is unlikely, 
but some of the problem remains. Asset's advantage is supposed to be 
(again, as far as I understand it) that it involves more people than 
would be directly elected. So if it involves too few, that's a problem, 
but if it involves too many, that's a problem as well because the 
deliberative process doesn't scale.

How's that solved?