[EM] Greatest Majority is the future of elections

[mrouse1 at mrouse.com]

I don't doubt that most of the EM list is interested in the future of
elections (I know I am!), but voting methods have wide application in
fields far removed from the voting booth. In computer science, it has been
used for pattern recognition, spam-resistant web searching, neural
networks, book and movie suggestions,  and (I think) data compression. A
lot of the really esoteric stuff here can be useful outside of politics,
because computers tend not to vote strategically, and are rather harder to
confuse than the average voter.

In rather less intellectual endeavors, voting methods (or the equivalent)
have been used in hotornot-type websites, and in sporting events, to
figure out playoff berths, and to aggregate judge's rankings. Though there
might be fewer of us on the mailing list, I don't doubt there would be
interest in the subject, even without the political aspect.

Mike Rouse

>
> I just joined this list and some of it is kind of bewildering.
>
> 1-what is your goal for elections?  I would assume that it is to have the
> best govt. which presumably can be identified as the system of govt.
> supported by the most people.
>
> 2- Since there will probably be more than one exclusive/competing
> policy/candidate supporter by more than a majority we can call this goal
> "GREATEST majority voting."
>  
> 3- Thus the goal would be determine the best or at least better structure
> of govt./voting to require the greatest majority support possible.
>
> 4-This would probably be a combination of local representatives and
> executives elected by ranked ballots, "ranked pairs" if possible, but that
> counting the system is not realistically practical and the IRV counting
> system is realistically equivalent.
>
> I suggest the ranked voting forum for debate: http://4gmv.org/
>
> We would rather not have any new govt. policies unless, at least, the
> greatest majority of the population agrees that it hopefully be the best
> govt. policy.
>
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