[EM] Remember Toby

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

fsimmons at pcc.edu wrote:
> It seems to me that thevoters are more worried about the ballot type
> and ease of voting it than they are of the exact counting rules.
> There are several Condorcet methods that are clone proof and
> monotonic without being too complicated.

Perhaps, but not to the extent that Schulze has passed yet, if 
complexity is the reason we don't have Schulze yet (or why Toby failed). 
Thus I was trying to find very simple rules that would do reasonably 
well, and I think you could do worse than Copeland with simple tiebreaker.

As far as complexity is concerned, I'd rank them in about this order:

1. Approval, plurality
2. Range
(some distance here because of the unfamiliarity of the Condorcet 
treatment in general)
3. Copeland
4. Minmax
5. Ranked Pairs
(quite some distance)
6. Schulze (although the CSSD phrasing may make it seem simpler)
(quite a lot more)
7. DAC/DSC and other very complex rules.

Your chain-based and uncovered methods would be somewhere between 
Copeland and Schulze. I'm not sure exactly where, because I don't know 
whether they feel unfamiliar because I'm not used to them, or because 
the electorate wouldn't be.

I'm not sure where Borda-elimination would be, either. Borda would 
probably be between Range and Copeland, but Borda isn't any good as a 
method because of its extreme susceptibility to teaming and tactical voting.

> I agree with Kevin that "elect the CW if there is one, else elect the
> candidate ranked (or ranked above last) on the greatest number 
> of  ballots" is plenty simple, and is much
> more satisfactory than MinMax or Copeland in other respects.

True enough. I'd probably prefer it to be Smith, though, and I hope the 
voters wouldn't feel penalized for giving the rank all the way down to 
the last candidate. If someone were to reason "Even though I don't like 
these guys, I'd rather have this one than that one", it would be bad if 
the ballot interpreted this to say that they approved of every candidate.

> But, as I said, what we really need to concentrate on is simplicity
> in votinig, i.e. how do we make ballots that easy to use for "Hodge,
> fresh from the plough," as Lewis Carroll put it.
> 
> It has been averred many times on this list that in Australia, where
> partial rankings are considered spoiled ballots, the vast majority of
> voters fill out their ballots by copying "candidate cards" which are
>  published  sample ballots recommended by the various candidates.

Forcing full rank is bad, you'll get no disagreement from me there. I do 
think the EM style ballot is simple enough, though: rank as many as you 
want, and if you feel like it, make use of equal-rank, too. Although the 
equal-rank part hasn't to my knowledge been used elsewhere, the rest 
seems to work where it has been used. Earlier, I gave examples of STV 
use in the US, and STV is also used elsewhere in the world without 
voters really complaining about the complexity of the ballot.

> Asset voting makes this automatic for 100% of the voters.  That's
> probably going too far, so how do we get a compromise between Asset
> voting and Condorcet?

Approval Asset, perhaps? But I'd prefer the power to stay with the 
voters as much as possible. If we have representative democracy because 
the people can't make every decision themselves, then one should move 
away from the ideal (direct) democracy as little as is required.