[EM] Hybrid ranking/approval ballots

[Forest Simmons]

I totally support the conventions suggested by Chris.

For grade ballots I suggest refinement of rankings by using pluses and
minuses like many schools do.



On Sun, Aug 6, 2023, 12:13 PM C.Benham <cbenham at adam.com.au> wrote:

>
> I'm attracted to a couple of Condorcet methods that allow voters to rank
> the candidates and also give an approval threshold.
>
> I think an important question is what should be the default placement of
> this approval threshold.  I've read from one or two
> people that all candidates "ranked in any position" should be considered
> approved, meaning that a ballot that strictly ranks
> all the candidates by putting a number next to all of them should count
> as strategically useless approval for all the candidates
> while a ballot that does the same thing by putting a number next to all
> but one of them counts as approving all but the unmarked
> candidate.
>
> I find that silly and unnecessarily unfair to naive or careless voters,
> so instead in the past I have gone with "voted above at least one
> candidate".
>
> Since the approvals are only used to complete Condorcet it is likely
> that most of the time they'll have no effect and so many voters won't
> bother giving an explicit approval cutoff.
>
> In that circumstance with either the "voted above at least one
> candidate" or the "ranked in any position" rules, the outcome of the
> election
> could be affected by the addition or removal of candidates that all (or
> nearly all) of the voters hate.
>
> I find that also silly and unacceptable.  So now I am strongly of the
> view that default approval should be only of "voted below no other
> candidate".
>
> Condorcet methods with no Push-over incentive should allow above-bottom
> ranking.
>
> The ballot rules should allow voters to strictly rank however many
> candidates they like and also (if the method has some use for approval
> information)
> to approve only one candidate or all but one or any number in between.
>
> Hopefully this should all sound obvious. But several people here have
> been tolerant or (even supportive) of alternatives.
>
> Someone who proposed a Condorcet completed by Approval method suggested
> that a 6-slot grading ballot would be fine and that we would arbitrarily
> call the top 3 slots approval and the bottom 3 not.
>
> If there are more than 4 candidates that isn't enough to allow the voter
> to strictly rank all the candidates and approve only one or all-but-one.
>
> In principle a grading or multi-slot rating ballot with the top half of
> the slots/grades signifying approval is fine as long as there are at
> least as many
> slots/grades as twice the number of candidates, minus one.
>
> Another abomination is compulsory ranking. This is "GIGO" (garbage in,
> garbage out) and I find it analogous to compelled speech.
>
> In Australia, the major parties'  "How-to-Vote" cards usually just
> advise their supporters to after writing a "1" next to their party's
> candidate just to
> number all the rest according to the order they appear on the ballot paper.
>
> Chris Benham
>
>
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