[EM] remember Toby Nixon?

[Dave Ketchum]

On May 24, 2011, at 6:42 PM, 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.

I would propose Condorcet, with just a few clarifications:
      Leave CSSD beatpath as a detail method decision to resolve later.
      Reject IRV for known problems.
      Those unranked are simply counted as having the bottom rank.
      Write-ins permitted and counted as if actually nominated.  This  
is a bit of extra pain, but I like it better than demanding extra  
nominations that enemies could make unacceptably difficult.
      Equal ranking permitted.  Those who like Approval should  
understand that using a single rank lets them express their desire  
without considering ranking in detail.
      No restrictions as to how rank numbers compare - when  
considering which of a pair has higher rank, ONLY their ranks compare  
as H>L, L>H, or E=E - what ranks are assigned to other candidates have  
no effect on this.
      No restriction as to how many rank numbers a voter may use,  
beyond fact that a chosen ballot design may impose a limit as to how  
many can be expressed.
      DYN is a simple addition for those who see value in that  
method.  Unranked serves as no; top rank serves as yes; third (middle)  
rank gets passed to the candidate this voter wants to leave choice to.

Dave Ketchum

> 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?