[EM] Condorcet meeting

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 8/28/23 19:24, Forest Simmons wrote:
> For practical purposes, this appeals to me the most so far.
> 
> But the question remains about how to determine the number N.
> 
> Why not just use the number ranked (or approved, as the case may be) on 
> the average primary ballot?

Here's a similar approach with an idea to preserve a kind of clone 
independence:

Use STV, but don't eliminate candidates when they're elected, just 
reweight the ballots according to surplus instead.

When a candidate is elected again, he only appears once in the final 
outcome, but the number of candidates in the outcome is reduced by one 
instead. In effect, the duplicate election leads to the election of a 
"hole" that takes up a spot without assigning any candidate to that spot.

Say N = 5, so that the Droop quota is 1/6. Then a candidate with 
above-majority support (say 1/2 + epsilon) gets three such quotas, and 
is elected three times: once to get into the finalist set, and twice 
more to reduce the number of other candidates from four to two.

The idea is that if the candidate were to be cloned, then these clones 
would occupy three spots of the outcome, so the result is the same; just 
in one case, there's only one winner from that bloc and two "holes", 
while in the other case, there would be three winners from the bloc.

I would probably reserve one of the five spots for the primary CW, 
though. Ideally it would use a proportional ordering or a pairwise STV 
variant, but then we're moving into "deluxe, complex method" territory.

-km