[EM] Condorcet meeting

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2023-08-24 15:31, Colin Champion wrote:
> 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.

That's a good point. I was thinking of a different setting, where there 
are say, ten established parties with good track records, each of which 
fields a candidate, and you have to narrow down the field to something 
manageable before doing proper ranked voting.

But now that I think about it, in such a setting, voters could probably 
just rank and truncate. E.g. a left-wing voter ranks all the left-wing 
parties' candidates and then truncates.

About your setting, I think that points to a more fundamental problem of 
electoral democracy: only those who can make themselves heard or somehow 
get popular have a chance of being elected. That's kind of your 
argument, but with number of candidates equalling the number of voters; 
somewhere in the mass that is the population, there's someone whose 
political ideas would appeal to enough people that he'd be elected if 
they knew about them. But since marketing is costly, they don't.

The solutions I most commonly know of for that problem are sortition, 
asset voting, or some way of dynamically discovering the good candidates 
by parallelism (e.g. Gohlke's triad method).

Your predeclared orders are kind of like asset. Sortition could either 
be done directly, or by having a randomly selected group choose the five 
finalists after examining candidates' platforms in detail. And parallel 
methods would replace elections with something different.

I'm wary of predeclared orders because they could lead to obscure deals 
(like Chris mentioned regarding above-the-line voting in Australia). 
Picking five candidates instead of a single winner would mitigate the 
impact, but still. I'd think after-the-fact public asset trading, with 
the voters being able to see who their candidate is contributing to, 
would be better. But that would require a deeper change which could be 
infeasible.

-km