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

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/6/10 Juho Laatu <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk>

> 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).
>

Trees show promise for eliminating voting paradoxes by limiting voter
freedom. However, you'd have to actually develop a system for building the
trees. Just assuming that they exist doesn't cut it; that hides hairy
strategy and coordination problems for the candidates, factions, and
parties.

Also, the way trees work is by privileging certain dimensions of a
candidate over others. One set of dimensions which is almost sure to get
short shrift is quality – that is, intelligence, honesty, hard work, you
name it.

In other words, I'd be interested in reading about a system built from the
ground up around trees, but I don't think it's a good idea to vaguely
speculate that VPR would be even more perfect if we just sprinkled magic
tree dust on it.

Jameson
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