[EM] A modification to Condorcet so that one can vote against monsters.

[Andrew Myers]

On 4/14/12 8:31 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> On 4/14/12 3:45 AM, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
>> ¡Hello!
>>
>> ¿How fare you?
>>
>> It is tedious to rank hundreds of candidates, but sometimes monster 
>> is on the ballot and all unranked candidates are last. If the field 
>> is so polarized that the voters idiotically refuse to rank other 
>> serious candidates other than their candidate and the evil candidate 
>> has followers, the bad candidate might win. I suggest that Condorcet 
>> should have a dummy-candidate:
>>
>> 0 The ranked candidates.
>> 1 The unranked candidates.
>> 2 The dummy-canditate.
>> 3 The monsters.
>>
>> All unranked candidates have higher ranks than the monsters. One can 
>> then rank the monsters by how terrible they are.
>>
>> Basically, it is a way to vote against monsters in Condorcet without 
>> having to rank all of the hundreds of also-rans.
>
> all this is complicated crap that gunks up elections. it has an 
> ice-cube's chance in hell.
>
I've been observing experimentally how people use a Condorcet election 
system in practice over the past ten years (since 2003) and in fact the 
use of a dummy candidate to signal approval has become increasingly 
common. It seems to be intuitive, at least to web users, and effective. 
I do agree that trying to distinguish 0 vs. 1 is probably overly 
complicated.

-- Andrew
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