[EM] Classical music countdown balloting

[Joseph Malkevitch]

Dear Kris,

WQXR tends to program to program warhorses rather than less well known pieces by well known composers. Relatively recently it has given more exposure to women composers and composers in various minorities.

I think some voters like to vote for pieces that will get played rather than vote for pieces they want to "signal" are "great" music.  Beethoven's Symphony Number 9 regularly comes in Number 1, but I would rather hear one of Beethoven's late string quartets so I vote for some of these but none of these will be played in the Countdown.

Last year if memory serves no pieces by Haydn were played though many of his compositions were nominated. One approach to counting ballots would be to think of composers names like political party names, and tallies for composers be maintained, and be used in some way to play his/her music under some circumstances.

Best wishes,

Joe


________________________________
From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no>
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2025 7:29 PM
To: Joseph Malkevitch <jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu>; Election Methods Mailing List <election-methods at electorama.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] Classical music countdown balloting

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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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.wqxr.org/classical-countdown-2025/__;!!MoI8UrBbVg!9NuRe9QwRToHplmLRkVhWmPhnEI8b1dbc4pUP0K8PgWKTNGAa5pGMjLp8NNXbKHuAwc72I2oZqhHsjtYq2fjzCPN_t1eUZNK$
>
> 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
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