[EM] language/framing quibble

[Raph Frank]

On 9/10/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
>  If duplicate votes don't count, then there'll be a natural incentive to
> pick friends instead of central party figures. All campaigning would do
> would be to give whichever candidate's being promoted a lot of votes, which
> is no better than the candidate in question getting a single vote.

That is interesting.  You could still vote for someone who is 'semi' famous.

>  The process would have to run multiple rounds if different voters vote for
> the same person, since that would exhaust the legislature. One way of doing
> this would be to send mail to some number of people. Then iterate 10 times
> (in the way you specify) until you have a set that'll be on the council. If
> multiple voters voted for the same person, then the size of that set will be
> smaller than the council, so send out more mail (to yet other people) while
> keeping the current set secret.

Another option would be to pick 200 people for a 100 person
legislature, but include an ordering.  Everyone who is nominated makes
it into the 2nd round.  However, your position in the queue is
determined by the position of the first person to order you.  For
example,

person 1 nominates person A
person 2 nominates person B
person 3 nominates person C
person 4 nominates person B
person 5 nominates person D

The order for the 2nd round is then

A
B
C
D

and the total length of the list is shorter.

The legislature would then be randomly selected from the final list.

Ofc, they might still have to if there aren't enough to fill the
legislature by round 10.

Maybe in that case, they would also allow people who were voted twice
in round 9 and then round 8 and so on.

> > This should result in a reasonably competent legislature (assuming
> > each person picks someone more competent than themselves) and the rule
> > that you must pick a friend/family members for each link means that
> > campaigning is pointless.
>
>  I wonder if it could lead to extremism, where voters transfer their votes
> to friends that have "strong opinions". It might, but then again, it might
> not. Like delegate cascade, the dynamics aren't obvious.
>

It could also lead to people semi-campaigning in order to let their
friends know their viewpoint.  But for most people it won't be worth
the effort.  However, people might get annoyed if one of their friends
was selected and didn't nominate them :).

I would probably try to pick a friend that agreed on economic policy,
not sure if that counts as extremist seeking.

In any case, I would rather a friend got it than someone famous who I
didn't know.