[EM] Declaration's policy on single-mark ballots (was Re: Do any of you have any thoughts about California's top-two primary?)

[Juho Laatu]

It is easy to fill the ballot in VPR. It is one step more difficult to check the preferences of the candidates and decide whom to vote. If one goes one step further in this simplification path, one might end at tree voting. We could have a candidate that belongs to the free rifle group of the green group of the socialist party. That's close to open lists but allows voters to clearly position themselves to the level of a full binary tree, provides proportionality also within the parties, allows voters to see easily what each candidate intends to stand for, and is quite strategy free. Voters may vote a green socialist or a socialist green, depending on which criterion is more important to them. One can say that trees are policy oriented (candidates rank themes) while VPR is person oriented (candidates rank candidates).

Juho


On 10.6.2012, at 20.22, Steve Eppley wrote:

> It's a bad idea for the Declaration to denounce all single-mark ballot methods, because one of them--Vote for a Published Ranking (VPR)--has desirable properties that distinguish it from the others. (One can also make an argument that VPR is better than many voting methods that require more complicated ballots.)
> 
>     VPR:
>     Two weeks before election day, each candidate publishes a top-to-bottom ordering
>     of all the candidates. (Any candidate who fails to meet the deadline will be treated
>     as if s/he'd ranked him/herself on top and all others tied for bottom.)
> 
>     On election day, each voter simply selects one candidate.
> 
>     Then each vote is treated as if it were the ordering published by its selected
>     candidate.  These orderings are tallied by a good preference order algorithm
>     to determine the winner.
> 
> Some interesting variations:
> 1. Give each candidate the opportunity to withdraw after the vote totals are published; withdrawn candidates will be dropped to the bottom of each ordering before the orderings are tallied.  With this option, tallying algorithms such as plurality rule & instant runoff would become nearly as good as condorcet algorithms because withdrawal would mitigate their vote-splitting problem. (Borda would still be terrible due to its clones problem.)  Also, withdrawal would be useful in presidential elections--with VPR and other voting methods--to help candidates avoid fragmenting the Electoral College.
> 2. Technology permitting, allow each voter to select an ordering published by a candidate or by a non-government organization (NGO).  Some example NGOs: the New York Times, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association...
> 3. Technology permitting, let each voter modify the ordering published by her selected candidate, before submitting it as her vote.
> 
> Obviously, being a "single-mark" method, VPR maximizes simplicity.  Yet it can be expected to handle the vote-splitting problem well.  It ought to typically allow each voter to vote for her sincere favorite, assuming her favorite publishes an ordering the voter considers reasonable. (Or strategically reasonable.  If an election has a strategy problem, the voter's favorite can handle it by publishing a strategic ordering, or by withdrawing if necessary, if withdrawal is an option.)
> 
> Also, VPR would make it easier for good candidates to win without spending a lot of money, since they can win by persuading other candidates to rank them over worse candidates.  For example, Centrist might persuade Left to rank Centrist over Right, and Right to rank Centrist over Left.  Furthermore, an honest centrist might persuade Left & Right to rank her over corrupt centrists, and when she can't due to Left & Right also being corrupt, the corrupt orderings they publish would presumably attract negative attention during the two weeks preceding the election, reducing their votes.
> 
> Regards,
> Steve Eppley
> ---------------
> On 6/8/2012 2:20 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
>> Although this is a bit of a simplification, the "top-two" runoff form of voting in the U.S. consists of using single-mark ballots combined with a variation of instant-runoff voting.
> -snip-
>> The way this fits into the "Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates" is that the Declaration denounces single-mark ballots, regardless of how they are counted.
> -snip-
>> I think the easiest way to explain the concept is in the context of vote splitting, 
> Richard Fobes
>> > On 6/7/2012 8:31 AM, Adrian Tawfik wrote:
> -snip-
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