[EM] Condorcet meeting

[Forest Simmons]

I agree with Kristofer that Approval is plenty good for the narrowing down
phase.

Your favorite pundits and candidates will definitely make known their
recommendations.  Trust your own judgment and gut, as you collate and cull
out their llists of recommendations.

If there are going to be only six finalists, that doesn't mean you can only
approve six or that you have to approve more than one.

My rule is to approve my favorite as well as everybody else that I like
almost as much.

Here's an idea for deciding on n, the number of finalists after the
approval ballots have been tallied:

For this purpose, temporarily count the ballots fractionally, and let f(X)
be the fraction of the total that X gets in this tally ... so that the f(X)
values sum to unity.

The value of n should be the reciprocal of the sum of the squares of the
f(X) vslues... the standard formula for the minimum number of seats that
would be acceptable for proportional representation of a diverse population.

fws


On Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 11:11 AM Colin Champion <
colin.champion at routemaster.app> wrote:

> 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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