[EM] Novel Electoral System

[Andrew B Jennings (elections)]

Hi Dan,

Great paper. Thank you for posting!

It seems like the short version is that the winner is the candidate with the smallest sum of SQUARES of non-victories (defeats plus ties) against their opponents.

Taking the square root and dividing can make it meaningful by scaling it to [0,1] or [0,s] (where s is the number of voters), but doesn't change the finish order.

It does seem like an interesting attempt to "square the circle" (great pun) and compromise between Borda and Condorcet. I hadn't realized that Borda and Minimax are minimizing the one-norm and infinity-norm in the same geometric space. The two-norm certainly seems like it should be explored.

I would love to see the proof of non-favorite-betrayal.

Best,

~ Andy
On Thursday, May 15th, 2025 at 4:25 PM, Daniel Kirslis via Election-Methods <election-methods at lists.electorama.com> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I am a newcomer to this mailing list, so please forgive me if this message violates any norms or protocols that the members of this list adhere to.
>
> I have recently developed a novel method for tabulating ranked-choice elections that attempts to reconcile the concerns of Borda and Condorcet. I believe that it maintains the simplicity and mathematical elegance of the Borda count while incorporating Condorcet's concern with pairwise dominance. Intuitively, it can be understood as ordering candidates by how close they come to being unanimously selected when plotted in Cartesian coordinate space. Here is a link to the paper:
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/152eNheS2qkLHJbDvG4EwW3jdO4I_NwcX/view?usp=sharing
>
> Given its simplicity, I have been very surprised to discover that this method has never been proposed before. I am hoping that some of you all will take a look at the paper and share your comments, questions, and critiques. Ultimately, it is my hope that ranked-choice voting advocates can arrive at a consensus about the best method for RCV and thus strengthen efforts to adopt it and deliver much needed democratic improvements. But even if you don't find the system itself compelling, you may find the method of plotting electoral outcomes elucidated in the paper to be useful for the analysis of other electoral systems.
>
> Thank you!
>
> -Dan
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