[EM] Condorcet meeting

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 8/25/23 22:51, Colin Champion wrote:
> I’m not persuaded of approval voting. My guess is that voters will 
> bullet-vote for the candidate they like best among those they know 
> about; candidates will encourage bullet voting on their own behalf; 
> pundits will have nothing better to say, and voters will have no motive 
> to award more than the minimum number of approvals.
>     A danger of quadratic and entropic measures is that they don't 
> impose the constraint that the number of survivors has to be small 
> enough to make ranked voting effective on the second round.

Here's a funny idea that I probably wouldn't propose seriously. Each 
voter is assigned a random candidate pair in advance and asked to 
determine which is better. This "sampled Condorcet matrix" is then used 
to determine the finalists.

It probably wouldn't work because the voters wouldn't want to be told 
what contest to focus on, and the error (what pairs are noisy) wouldn't 
be uncorrelated as some contests would be considered more important than 
others.

But I just got to think about it because, if any method is to be easier 
than ranking, it has to ask less of the voter than ranking (or the 
product of data required times people asked should be lower). Approval 
obviously does ask less, as does your "pre-established candidate order" 
idea. As does this, and sortition-based hybrids (fewer voters).

So even though that idea may be "thinking too far outside the box", the 
guideline/heuristic of thinking about how to reduce the information that 
needs to be gathered may be a good one for finding methods that do work.

-km