[EM] Idea Proposal: Listening Democracy

[Terry Bouricius]

Jameson,

Abd has made much of a proposal of Charles Dodgson tweaking STV by allowing candidates to assign exhausted ballots...but that is NOT the system that Dodgson's name is normally attached to. His name is attached to a Condorcet method (but not knowing of Condorcet's prior invention) using a matrix in which each cell was a fraction with a numerator was the number of voters who ranked the row option ahead of the column option, and the denominator was the number of voters whose column option ahead of the row option. He proposed that cycles not be settled, but rather that this would result in "no election."

Terry



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jameson Quinn 
  To: Andrew Myers 
  Cc: election-methods at lists.electorama.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 2:44 PM
  Subject: Re: [EM] Idea Proposal: Listening Democracy





  2010/4/21 Andrew Myers <andru at cs.cornell.edu>

    On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: 
However, I strongly urge people who attempt to analyze the situation 
and to propose reforms to:

1. Keep it simple. An extraordinarily powerful system for fully 
proportional representation consisting of a seemingly-simple tweak on 
Single Transferable Vote was proposed in 1883 or so by Charles 
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). If a simple system that is *obviously* far 
more democratic doesn't attract notice for more than a hundred years, 
what chance does something more complicated and dodgier (i.e., 
involving lots of unknowns) have?
  This description is misleading. It omits that there are no known good algorithms for implementing this method: the computational complexity of Dodgson's voting method is prohibitive. In fact, it was not even known until a few years ago, when the problem was shown to be complete for parallel access to an NP oracle (class Theta_2^p).

        http://www.springerlink.com/content/wg040716q8261222/

    This result means it is extremely far from being usable in practice. Unless P=NP, there are no polynomial-time algorithms for deciding elections with Dodgson's method.

    -- Andrew


  Huh? Dodgson's method is asset voting. If I'm not mistaken, he did not put any time limit on the convention - vote holders could refuse to delegate their votes. Other Asset systems mandate vote transfers under certain circumstances (elimination-style, to prevent games of chicken of "you endorse me", "no, you endorse me"). However, in either case, it's still a decidable process.

  If you want tweaks to Asset to promote dialog: you can mandate some form of accessibility to communication, either vertically (between a voter/proxy and their proxy/metaproxy) and/or horizontally (between the voters/direct subproxies for a given proxy). I think that vertical accessibility to communication should be mandatory, and all vertical communication should be accessible (though perhaps anonymized) horizontally. This would mean that every level could function as a deliberative body.

  Jameson Quinn





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