[EM] A Proportionally Fair Consensus Lottery for which Sincere Range Ballots are Optimal

[Jameson Quinn]

>
>
> It should be clear that using such "biasing" techniques we can cause
> this kind of voting method to be "arbitrarily close" to essentially
> any voting method we want
> (i.e. elects the same winner 99.9% of the time, where 99.9% is any
> constant and can be made arbitrarily near 1)  but still inspire
> sincere range voting on the sincere range ballots.
>
>
This is true, and good. However, it assumes that voting a sincere range
ballot is "free" - that it doesn't cost time or "cognitive energy", either
for candidate research or for evaluation.

Of course, in a large democracy, voting would scarcely ever be selfishly
rational if it weren't free, and people still vote. So that assumption can't
be too wrong. Still, I think you'd need more than a .1% chance to motivate
sufficient voters to be sufficiently careful with their range voting.

Also, note that to the extent you're extracting and publishing useful data
from the honest range totals, you are adding strategic incentives to that
vote. For instance, if I vote strategically on the strategic ballot, I may
choose to vote the same strategy on the "honest" ballot to inflate the
published "sincerity score" of my candidates' voters.

Finally, note that, presuming you're electing some sort of official who has
given term of office, your system can split the term of office between two
candidates. A relatively-short term in office for the "backup" candidate
elected using the honest-range-backed choice-between-lotteries may motivate
voters to vote well on the range ballot, better than a vanishingly small
chance that the backup comes into play. It may also be more manifestly
"fair", because it is less random and arbitrary.

Jameson
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