[EM] Condorcet meeting

[Colin Champion]

On 24/08/2023 14:02, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
 > My intuitive response is to do some type of open Approval primary.
 > The incommensurability and chicken dilemma problems hit a lot less
 > when there are 5 candidates to spread the error over.

I wouldn't have thought that this would work very well. One of the 
problems is that most voters will not initially know much about most 
candidates, so they won't give them approval.
    It seems to me that voter ignorance is the main problem with ranked 
voting if the field is large. Voters will truncate out the candidates 
they don't know much about, and this will be misinterpreted as a low 
preference. So the first round should give obscure candidates a chance 
of the spotlight.
    CJC

> On 2023-08-24 14:29, Colin Champion wrote:
>> One of the agenda items is "rules for reducing a large field of 
>> candidates to a field of 2 to 5". This seems to me an important 
>> topic, since voters cannot be expected to vote in the way ranked 
>> preference methods assume if the number of candidates is large. 
>> Presumably proposals have been made for addressing it; unfortunately 
>> I haven't seen them.
>
> My intuitive response is to do some type of open Approval primary. The 
> incommensurability and chicken dilemma problems hit a lot less when 
> there are 5 candidates to spread the error over.
>
> Of course, the naive STAR approach is not cloneproof, which is a bit 
> of a bummer.
>
> From one perspective, we'd *want* the "ranked general" to have a pool 
> of differing shades of centrist, because the general's purpose would 
> be to determine which out of the reduced pool is actually the best 
> candidate. But this approach seems to be fundamentally clone 
> vulnerable, i.e. it's not something you could patch up, because clones 
> of the winner would all seem to be reasonable centrists in their own 
> right. There's a tension between doing most of the median-finding in 
> the primary, and clone independence.
>
> So there may still be room for proportional voting type patches, even 
> though they draw the general further from the idea of closely 
> scrutinizing similar candidates, and even though they are somewhat 
> ugly kludges.
>
> Or perhaps there exists a better method :-)
>
> -km