[EM] Advocacy

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 11/27/2012 02:24 AM, Richard Fobes wrote:
> I gave 5 stars to the Ban Single Mark Ballots proposal.
>
> FYI, I did not post that proposal. Jon Denn posted the proposal using
> the executive summary he copied from the website copy of the Google Docs
> original.
>
> (I did work with Jon to post there a tax-reform proposal named "Tax The
> Takers More Than The Makers.")
>
> Based on the vote-counting method used at the site -- it uses score
> ballots -- I was tempted to vote one star for the "competing" "American
> Anti-Corruption Act." But I didn't. I gave it 5 stars too.
>
> This sheds light on a question someone else posed: Why aren't better
> voting methods actually used in small organizations? The choice of which
> method is "best" is not obvious. And when voting is done by people who
> understand how to vote strategically, the strategy-vulnerable methods --
> in this case score-ballot-based counting -- easily produce
> unrepresentative results.

Let's hope the declaration helps with that. It says that "we may 
disagree about which method is the best, but the ones we list are all 
better than Plurality, and better enough to make a difference".

Perhaps we don't know which method is the absolutely best, or more 
likely, that we won't find agreement (because of differing priors or 
whatever). But then small organizations could just take a chance. 
There's plenty of risk already to, say, a startup, so founders shouldn't 
be unfamiliar with the concept.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that evidence is what counts. We 
can keep on going rounds about what people *might* do, but when it comes 
down to it, what matters is what people *will* do. And having 
organizations try out better methods would definitely help in that regards.