[Election-Methods] delegate cascade

[Juho]

On Jul 24, 2008, at 9:05 , Michael Allan wrote:

> Rankings are determined by votes incoming, not votes held.  This is
> crucial.  (It was only decided a couple of releases ago, so there may
> inconstencies in the docs.)

Ok, this seems to bring the model closer to what Kristofer  
Munsterhjelm proposed.

> Large cycles will tend to be *structurally* un-stable - they will tend
> to fall apart and not re-form.  But I doubt they will be *dynamically*
> unstable.

I'm quite confident that the possibility of continuous cyclic changes  
in continuous elections (due to cycles in the group opinions; A  
preferred over B, B preferred over C and C preferred over A) exists  
since that is a very general property of voting methods. The problem  
may not appear often and it may be that the cyclic behaviour won't  
last long for other reasons, but in theory that risk exists.

> You're pointing to a tension
> between voting for competence in communication, on the one hand, and
> competence in a specialty, on the other.

I don't see any bad tensions. I just thought that it would be good to  
state it clearly if the proposed method is not intended to be just an  
election method but also has another target of creating a permanent  
communication structure among the voters. The change makes the  
evaluation criteria and questions and comments quite different.

> What happens if two candidates
> vote for each other (tight cycle), in order to formalize a kind of
> partnership between them?

If the incoming votes are the ones to be counted then both will get  
more votes. Sounds like a good strategy, except that the one with  
less original incoming votes will now get as many incoming votes as  
the other one.


Here's one more potential problem case. If some candidate receives  
votes from too many directions then some of the voters should switch  
to not voting this candidate directly (to make the tree structure  
less flat). If many of them have about the same number of incoming  
votes they may be reluctant to change their vote since they'd prefer  
other voters making the move first and thereby letting them stay  
closer to the root of the tree (instead of ending up close to the  
leaves).

Juho





		
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