[EM] remember Toby Nixon?

[Jameson Quinn]

I think DYN is my new favorite practical proposal. It's simple and it would
work beautifully.

The one downside of that system would be the possibility of granting too
much power to a minority kingmaker. For instance, a 4% candidate could have
the power to swing the election to either one of two 48% candidates. They
might well be able to negotiate concessions for their party (or worse, for
themselves personally) which amounted to, say, a 20% share of the power, far
in excess of their actual support. The only way to minimize this risk is to
minimize the enforceability of any promises made between the voting rounds -
for instance, by ensuring that all cabinet positions can be dismissed at
will.

Hmm... another way to address this would be to have candidates pre-decide
their full preference order. After the first round, they would only be free
to set their threshold. This would halve the chances that they'd end up as
kingmakers, which is fair, because the winning 51% coalition gets
essentially twice that much power.

Anyway, this issue is actually a pretty good problem to have. Giving a
slightly-larger minority of power to a minority in some circumstances is not
the end of the world.

I like it.

Jameson

2011/5/24 <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?
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
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