[EM] Large study of high-stakes approval-voting behavior in practice / the pope-elections 1294-1621

[Warren Smith]

Dear assorted people (mainly election- & pope-experts / enthusiasts):

  The Catholic popes between 1294 and 1621 were chosen by a process
incorporating (what election methods experts now call) "approval
voting."
This is generally thought to be a better voting method than the one
now (unfortunately) in most-wide use, "plurality voting."
  And I believe an even-better method is "range voting," also called
"score voting."

  Voting methods are important since they are the decision-making
algorithm for the world. As a rough estimate, if the world were to
switch to range voting, that'd save about 5500 lives per day in
expectation.  So it is important to study how well allegedly-better
voting systems *really* work.

  Hence for some years I have tried to put together a history of all
the pope-approval-elections.  This is probably the largest-yet
historical study of how approval voting works in practice in
high-stakes elections.  (Albeit it was not really "approval voting"
alone since there were a few other crucial rule-ingredients also, e.g.
2/3 supermajority requiement and ubi periculum.)

  My goal was to ascertain how well approval voting worked in real
life under severe
stress.  By "severe" I mean that these conclaves were some of the
nastiest elections imaginable and every possible stratagem was tried
to game the system.

The summary-of-conclusions of my investigations is the following web page:
   http://rangevoting.org/PopeSummary.html
and critique/discussion of those conclusions is
    http://rangevoting.org/PopeCritique.html
and a great deal of information underlying all that is found on
further subpages including:
   http://rangevoting.org/PopeElectionStories.html
   http://rangevoting.org/ApprovalPopes.html
   http://rangevoting.org/PopeApprovalSystem.html
   http://rangevoting.org/ListOfPopes.html

   Unfortunately I have little legitimacy as a pope-scholar or
historian and feel considerable disquiet in acting as though I am good
at that.  The study in its present form is by no means the last word.
Only reason I undertook this study was
since nobody else did.  I would prefer it if those who genuinely are
qualified at that, would contribute.  (In fact, I would have felt
better if they'd done practically everything!) However, you can do so
by sending me your comments, rewrites, etc...
there is no reason the present wording or authorship must remain set
in stone.

-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html