[EM] Condorcet meeting

[Juho Laatu]

> how to reduce the information that needs to be gathered

I have entertained the idea of ranking only few first candidates as a means to reduce the amount of information that needs to be gathered. At least in Finland people are used to voting by writing the number of their favourite candidate inside a big circle in the (cardboard) ballot paper (that does not contain much more than that single circle). It would be easy to add few more circles in the ballot paper, and people would quickly understand that it is ok to write the numbers of few favourites in it, rather than only one.

It is important to keep the participation level high in the elections, and therefore it is important to make voting as easy as possible. Allowing only few top candidates to be ranked of course reduces information, and thereby makes the results less accurate, but that may sometimes be a cheap price to pay, depending on the preferences of the voters, and on what kind of voting practices they are used to and feel comfortable with.

In some elections, like in two-party countries where there are two clear frontrunners, already ability to rank two candidates could be enough. That could mean ranking your true favourite and one of the frontrunners. But in general, I was thinking of something like allowing three to five top candidates to be ranked. The ideal number of ranked candidates may depend on the total number of candidates, on how many of them have some chances to win etc.

You could allow enthusiastic voters to rank even more candidates, but maybe it is ok to set a hard limit also for them, just to keep the ballots simple, and in order not to give the impression that you need to do a lot of work to cast a "full vote".

I note that voters may see this kind of voting also as "approval voting" since they are able to point out few candidates that they "approve", and leave others ranked at the bottom. There is no need to change the method though. For example regular Condorcet is fine. Being ranked at the bottom by default works well enough as a "disapproval" of a candidate.

BR, Juho



> On 26. Aug 2023, at 3.35, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> 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
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