[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]

On 11.6.2012, at 0.46, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> 
> 
> 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.

Yes. Voter freedom is limited to candidate given (theme) rankings. There are no voter specified rankings that could "jump between different branches".

> 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.

Probably parties will decide which candidates they will take on their lists (in all methods). Even if that is the case, candidates could be allowed to freely position themselves in the tree within the party specific branch. Any group of (already qualified) candidates could in this approach establish a new "theme"/subgroup under the already existing ones.

Alternatively parties would have full control of allocation of candidates in the tree wihin the party branch. In this case parties could plan the optimal tree structure for them. Candidates could be forced to groups that the party considers to be strategically best. Also in VPR parties could try to force their candidates to give certain kind of rankings (e.g. rank own party candidates first, or rank party favourites first).

Maybe one should ban or discourage branches that have no political meaning (e.g. branches "A" and "B" that contain candidates with similar political opinions). Only clear political messages would be allowed, e.g. "green", "pro nuclear power". Whatever the rules are, the system should not be allowed to degrade to a mechanism where the party tries to dictate which candidates will be elected and which ones not. The approaches might be different in different societies. One robust approach would be to allow some officials/court decide which branches are proper political branches and which ones are not, and must therefore be flattened/combined.

One could also have rules that encourage parties to use a good tree stratcture (e.g. rules that allow more candidates in "good" trees).

> 
> Also, the way trees work is by privileging certain dimensions of a candidate over others.

How is one branch, opinion or "dimension" different from another? Do you mean that parties would build the trees and make them favour some candidates?

> 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.

Ground up? Does that refer to candidate driven decisions instead of party leadership driven decisions?

Juho


> 
> Jameson
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