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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Jameson,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Abd has made much of a proposal of Charles Dodgson
tweaking STV by allowing candidates to assign exhausted ballots...but that
is NOT the system that Dodgson's name is normally attached to. His name is
attached to a Condorcet method (but not knowing of Condorcet's prior
invention) using a matrix in which each cell was a fraction with a
numerator was the number of voters who ranked the row option ahead of the column
option, and the denominator was the number of voters whose column option ahead
of the row option. He proposed that cycles not be settled, but rather that this
would result in "no election."</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Terry</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="FONT: 10pt arial; BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=jameson.quinn@gmail.com href="mailto:jameson.quinn@gmail.com">Jameson
Quinn</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=andru@cs.cornell.edu
href="mailto:andru@cs.cornell.edu">Andrew Myers</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Cc:</B> <A
title=election-methods@lists.electorama.com
href="mailto:election-methods@lists.electorama.com">election-methods@lists.electorama.com</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, April 21, 2010 2:44
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [EM] Idea Proposal:
Listening Democracy</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><BR><BR>
<DIV class=gmail_quote>2010/4/21 Andrew Myers <SPAN dir=ltr><<A
href="mailto:andru@cs.cornell.edu"
target=_blank>andru@cs.cornell.edu</A>></SPAN><BR>
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<DIV>On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><PRE>However, I strongly urge people who attempt to analyze the situation
and to propose reforms to:
1. Keep it simple. An extraordinarily powerful system for fully
proportional representation consisting of a seemingly-simple tweak on
Single Transferable Vote was proposed in 1883 or so by Charles
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). If a simple system that is <B><SPAN>*</SPAN>obviously<SPAN>*</SPAN></B> far
more democratic doesn't attract notice for more than a hundred years,
what chance does something more complicated and dodgier (i.e.,
involving lots of unknowns) have?
</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>This description is misleading. It omits that
there are no known good algorithms for implementing this method: the
computational complexity of Dodgson's voting method is prohibitive. In fact,
it was not even known until a few years ago, when the problem was shown to
be complete for parallel access to an NP oracle (class
Theta_2^p).<BR><BR> <A
href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/wg040716q8261222/"
target=_blank>http://www.springerlink.com/content/wg040716q8261222/</A><BR><BR>This
result means it is extremely far from being usable in practice. Unless P=NP,
there are no polynomial-time algorithms for deciding elections with
Dodgson's method.<BR><BR>-- Andrew<BR><BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV>Huh? Dodgson's method is asset voting. If I'm not mistaken, he did not
put any time limit on the convention - vote holders could refuse to delegate
their votes. Other Asset systems mandate vote transfers under certain
circumstances (elimination-style, to prevent games of chicken of "you endorse
me", "no, you endorse me"). However, in either case, it's still a decidable
process.<BR><BR>If you want tweaks to Asset to promote dialog: you can mandate
some form of accessibility to communication, either vertically (between a
voter/proxy and their proxy/metaproxy) and/or horizontally (between the
voters/direct subproxies for a given proxy). I think that vertical
accessibility to communication should be mandatory, and all vertical
communication should be accessible (though perhaps anonymized) horizontally.
This would mean that every level could function as a deliberative
body.<BR><BR>Jameson Quinn<BR></DIV></DIV><BR>
<P>
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