[EM] The "Single Contest" method

[Jameson Quinn]

I did have one offhand thought. If you want to propose SC for use in New
Zealand, perhaps you should call it Minimum Approval Opposition Runoff
Instant voting.

OK, on a more serious note. It seems to me that instead of using ranked
ballots and explicit approval cutoffs, you could use rated ballots, and
auto-set the global absolute approval cutoff to whatever number maximizes
the number of approval-decisive votes in the contest. This would probably
not test as well - it's hard to get simulated voters to use absolute ratings
in a meaningful way - but it would be more voter-friendly, both because
empirical results show that rated ballots are easier, and because it removes
the hard-to-explain and inevitably-strategic requirement of setting an
approval threshold. And I believe that this method of automatically setting
the threshold would naturally find a threshold that was about right - around
the median of the winning pair, because the median naturally has the most
approval-decisive information per ballot. I'd call this method Automatic
Single Contest (ASC), because Single Contest Automatic Threshold has a bad
acronym.

JQ
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