[EM] Condorcet meeting

[Colin Champion]

Kristofer - I certainly agree with your last point. A weakness I'm 
conscious of in my proposal is that a TV personality popular among 
silver voters might put himself forward for the sole purpose of 
directing his second preference votes to a sinister candidate unwelcome 
to his personal supporters. But at least they're told up front what 
they're voting for.
    CJC

On 24/08/2023 17:52, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> 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

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