[EM] In defense of the Electoral College (was Re: Making a Bad Thing Worse)

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Dave Ketchum wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:45:38 +0100 Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

>> I'll add that this phrasing would give states the same power no matter 
>> the relative turnout. If that's not desired, it could be rephrased 
>> differently, but giving states the same power is closer to the current 
>> state of things. The continuous electoral college variant does not 
>> take into account the 23rd Amendment, either.
> 
> Ugh.

All of which is fixable. I was just trying to give a rough idea of how 
it may be phrased.

>> Yes. What I'm saying is that it's theoretically possible to 
>> incorporate any voting method into this; however, the results might be 
>> suboptimal if you try to aggregate, say, IRV results this way, since 
>> you'd get both the disadvantages of IRV and Condorcet (nonmonotonicity 
>> for the former and LNH* failure for the latter, for instance).
> 
> IRV is a distraction since such ballots could and should be counted as 
> Condorcet.
> 
> Should be a method that at least tries for a result based on comparative 
> strength of candidates.

Again, that's true. The point of my generalized transformation scheme is 
that any method could, theoretically, be incorporated into this form of 
compact. Therefore, complaints that it's biased in favor of explicit 
Condorcet methods would be weakened (although not completely eliminated, 
because of the intersection of limits I mentioned).

>>> States have differing collections of candidates:
>>>      In theory, could demand there be a single national list.  More 
>>> practical to permit present nomination process, in case states desire 
>>> such.
>>>      Thus states should be required to prepare their NxN arrays in a 
>>> manner that permits exact merging with other NxN arrays, without 
>>> having to know what candidates may be in the other arrays.
>>
>>
>> The easiest way to do this is probably to have the candidates sorted 
>> (by name or some other property, doesn't really matter). When two 
>> matrices with different entries are joined, expand the result matrix 
>> as appropriate. Since the candidate indices are sorted, there'll be no 
>> ambiguity when joining (unless two candidates have the same names, but 
>> that's unlikely).
> 
> Two candidates with the same name is a problem to solve regardless of 
> method.
> 
> Sorting could be part of the joining, but I demand the results be 
> exactly the same as if the ballots had been counted into the final 
> matrix.  Doable, but takes a bit of planning.

A possible tiebreaker for same names would be to prepend (or append) the 
state of origin to each candidate name. In case two have the same name 
in the same state, the state decides who gets to be "number one" and 
"number two". These corner cases would be extremely unlikely, but it 
doesn't hurt to specify them.

The results should be the same with a plain merge as with a single 
count, since a Condorcet matrix entry cm[a][b] just lists how many 
voters ranked A > B. Consider voters that couldn't vote on a given 
candidate as if they had no effective preference regarding that 
candidate. Then, by including the results of some other Condorcet 
matrix, if A and B wasn't on that other matrix, cm[a][b] won't change.