[EM] remember Toby Nixon?

[matt welland]

On Tue, 2011-05-24 at 22:42 +0000, fsimmons at pcc.edu wrote:
> 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.

What is "CW"? Us "part time readers" would be forever grateful if some
kind soul would put a magic decoder ring on the wiki.

> On the other hand Approval requires reliable polling information for informed strategy.  This fact makes 
> Approval vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation.

Is this a generally accepted truth? I don't think I agree with it, can
you point me to more information or explain? The only strategy in
approval is to hold your nose and check off the front runner you despise
because you don't want the other front runner you despise more to win.
But I think this is only a factor for the period after transitioning to
approval from a plurality system. In the longer term both the candidates
and the voters will change. I think the change would be for the better,
candidates would generally be more accountable, voters need only decide
who they could live with as leaders and it is worth it to listen to what
the minority players are saying - giving them your vote is both possible
and meaningful. I guess most of these would be true (perhaps more so)
for asset voting also.

> 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?
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