[EM] Highly-expressive preference voting

[Stéphane Rouillon]

Dear Sebastiaan,

Many years ago I designed with Forest a presomptuously called "Universal Preferential Ballot" that contained an approval cut-off between acceptable and unwanted candidates. Your example could not have been well represented. To obtain all the latitude you want to represent such details, I suggest you move to grade ballots:
> ((A>B)>(C>D))=(E>F=G)
could become
A: 100
B: 49
C: 12
D: 9
E: 51
F: 0
G: 0

Of course, other interpretations are possible.
Dr. Stéphane Rouillon

Envoyé de mon iPhone

> Le 2015-08-27 à 08:02, Sebastiaan Snoeckx <ikke at sebastiaansnoeckx.be> a écrit :
> 
> Hello
> 
> This may sound like an insanely strange question, but I was wondering whether there were specific election algorithms and ballot designs that would allow a voter to express preferences between specific candidates, without having to specify their preference between the expressions of preferences themselves.
> 
> Don't worry if this sounds inconsistent, I'll explain by example:
> 1. The voter prefers A over B (A>B)
> 2. The voter prefers C over D (C>D)
> 3. The voter prefers E over F and G (E>F=G)
> 4. The voter prefers their own preference of A>B over their preference C>D, but could care less whether E>F=G is preferred over the others
> 
> Notationally, it would be a bit like this: ((A>B)>(C>D))=(E>F=G)
> 
> Ow! I can imagine any voting system choking over this (and imagine this happening with loops allowed!), but it is an incredibly common thing in real life: people prefer burgers over pizza and prefer coke over sprite (YMMV!), but when you ask them wether this mean that they prefer burgers over coke or pizza over sprite, they'll shrug and say these are not comparable: (burgers>pizza)=(coke>sprite).
> 
> In real-life elections, candidates are rarely comparable to each other (ie. one-issue candidates or mutually-complementary ideologies), and forcing voters to rank (or score, in a cardinal system) incomparable candidates or ideologies seems to me like a lot of information is lost.
> 
> Did this make any sense at all?
> 
> I myself had been thinking this would be akin to a candidate-grouping scheme (whereby candidates should be allowed to be part of multiple groups, or none) where you'd have a matrix comparing every group-candidate-ranking combination to every other group-candidate-ranking combination. Or something in that style; or not.
> 
> 
> Thanks and hoping to hear any and all comments!
> 
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