[EM] remember Toby Nixon?

[fsimmons at pcc.edu]

About six years ago Toby Nixon asked the members of this EM list for a advice on what election method 
to try propose in the Washington State Legislature. He finally settled on CSSD beatpath.   As near as I 
know nothing came of it.   What would we propose if we had another opportunity like that?
It seems to me that people have rejected IRV, Bucklin, and other methods based on ranked ballots 
because they don’t want to rank the candidates.  Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) anticipated this 
difficulty in 1884, and he suggested what we now call Asset Voting as a solution.
Asset voting is the simplest solution to the spoiler problem.  Approval is the next simplest.  IMHO 
anything much more complicated than Approval or Asset voting doesn’t stand a chance with the general 
public here in America.   For this reason most IRV proposals have actually truncated IRV to rank only 
three candidates.  This destroys IRV’s clone independence.
Asset Voting in its simplest form tends to squeeze out the CW, because when flanked closely on both 
sides  by other candidates, the CW tends to have too few first place preferences (assets or bargaining 
chips) to survive.
On the other hand Approval requires reliable polling information for informed strategy.  This fact makes 
Approval vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation.
That brings us to Delegable Yes/No (DYN) voting, which is a hybrid between Asset Voting and Approval 
that overcomes the weaknesses of those methods without increasing the complexity to the level of IRV:
In DYN you circle the name of your favorite candidate and then optionally mark “Yes” next to the 
candidates that you are sure you want to approve of, and “No” next to those that you are sure that you 
want to disapprove of.  You automatically delegate the rest of the Yes/No decisions to the candidate that 
you circled as “favorite.”
Those delegated decisions are made by the candidates after the partial results have been made public, 
so that no false polls can manipulate the strategy.
What do you think?