[EM] Classical music countdown balloting

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Let's see if this works. I've been having problems with my mail provider 
dropping EM messages due to Dreamhost being on a blacklist. So (after 
telling my provider about this), I did a quick and dirty hack by 
importing mbox messages from the list's web page.

On 2025-12-06 03:50, Joseph Malkevitch wrote:
> For the last several years the classical music station in the New
> York City area WQXR  (which can also be listened to via the Internet)
> asks listers to vote, this year, for up to 5 pieces of music. The
> votes are tabulated and the pieces are played  starting somewhat
> earlier than New Year's Eve, counting down to the start of the new
> year with the most voted for piece being played just before the new
> year starts, New York time. Votes are tied to email addresses and a
> person is supposed to submit only one ballot. Instructions for this
> year's countdown appear at the link below including the suggestion
> that one pick as your 5th choice something outside your box. >
> https://www.wqxr.org/classical-countdown-2025/
> 
> Lists of pieces played in previous can be found via an Internet search.
> 
> Presumably the goal here is to get large numbers of listeners to the
> station in the period running up to the new year but individual people
> may be interested in learning about appealing music that other like
> minded people find worthwhile to know about and listen to. Newcomers to
> this kind of music may find this a venue to learn about people who made
> important contributions to this kind of music. Certainly if one has
> never listened to the music of Franz Joseph Haydn, one has  missed out
> but Haydn wrote so much fascinating music that voters who vote for one
> valued piece may scatter votes for Haydn's music so that none of his
> music gets played. Looking at past results some pieces of an
> "obscure" nature appear that it seems possible that there was a
> coordinated effort by some person/group to vote for a truly not
> "broadly" popular piece.

I've been thinking about this more broadly before. In a sense, every 
deterministic election has a kind of "compromising incentive" where you 
rank candidates who you're sure other people know about. There might be 
some candidate who, if the public saw them listed, would go "now there's 
an idea", but who doesn't have the ability to make themselves visible. 
Getting yourself elected requires that you can put yourself in the 
public's mind.

(This problem is just a lot more severe when there's no formal 
coordination process, like the classical countdown example.)

Some nondeterministic methods don't have this problem. Random Ballot is 
one of them. If the election is by random ballot, you're free to list 
your true favorite as your favorite. If you know someone you think would 
do a good job, just put that someone in first. No matter how popular 
they are, if your ballot is chosen, they're elected, and if not, you had 
no influence anyway.

But Random Ballot is too variable. So perhaps the following would work 
as a compromise:

Stage 1: Voters rank or rate a given number of candidates by writing 
them down in order (as with the classical countdown).
Stage 2: The method picks five candidates by bloc Condorcet or a house 
monotone multiwinner method; and five more candidates by random ballot. 
(If this is an election for public office, then some organization or 
organizations should probably be given time to provide information about 
these candidates -- or a citizen's assembly could do this.) Voters then 
approve of subsets of these candidates.
Stage 3: The field is narrowed down to four based on the approval counts 
(either by bloc approval or a house monotone PR approval method like 
PAV). The voters rank the candidates and a winner is selected by an 
ordinal method.

This is probably too cumbersome for something as simple as a classical 
music election, but it would reduce the indirect compromise problem. The 
first and second phases serve as a particularly unbiased reduction of 
the field of candidates, then the second and third phases focus on 
determining a quality outcome from that unbiased selection.


There's a related paradox-of-choice problem where the public doesn't 
know about truly good candidates. I kinda referred to it with the stage 
2 parenthetical, but it's a much harder problem to fix than just the 
indirect compromising problem of "there exists some high-quality 
alternative that people would agree was good if they saw it".

> I think there are some interesting issues in designing a voting
> scheme (ballot/decision method") here depending on the goal one hopes
> to achieve.

And Random Ballot might not be the ideal method -- it does have a kind 
of center squeeze after all -- but it is a good illustration of the point.

-km