SODA was initially designed as a single-winner system. I believe that as such, it has four independent advantages, three of which are unmatched by any other good system.<div><br></div><div>1. It is the easiest possible system for voters. No spoiled ballots, bullet voting works, and no need to defensively strategize.</div>
<div>2. It is "later-no-harm" enough to satisfy political incumbents who don't want to be defeated by centrist nonentities. (This is also true of IRV, but IRV has other problems)</div><div>3. It resolves the chicken problem better than any other system I know of.</div>
<div>4. I believe it would give good results overall - like Approval, Condorcet, MJ, or Range.</div><div><br></div><div>So if you are thinking of SODA as just being Asset shoehorned into a single-winner case, then you don't understand the motivation, and either you don't understand the system or I don't.</div>
<div><br></div><div>JQ<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2011/9/5 ⸘Ŭalabio‽ <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Walabio@macosx.com">Walabio@macosx.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
2011-09-05T09:28:14Z, “Jameson Quinn” <Jameson.Quinn@Gmail.Com>:<br>
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0thly, I recommend that you read this article:<br>
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<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080113211450/http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting.html" target="_blank">http://web.archive.org/web/20080113211450/http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting.html</a><br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Basically, ⸘Ŭalabio‽'s objection is that SODA does not allow non-bullet votes to be delegable. The reason that SODA is designed that way is not "paranoia", as ⸘Ŭalabio‽ claims, but rather simplicity.<br>
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</div> Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. What is simple for me is choosing people whom I trust to represent my interests in the Asset-Negotiations and leave them to their work. If some of them screw me during Asset-Negotiations, I shall never vote for the bad 1s again. As far as simplicity goes, SODA seems more complex to me than Asset-Voting.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> To see why multiple delegable votes would be confusing, consider the following scenario. Let us say that I vote for A and B. After the votes are counted, it turns out that all the other voters voted for X or Y, in a 50/50 proportion. My delegated vote could be decisive. But A approves X, and B approves Y. So both of these approvals are added to my delegated vote, which ends up being useless in deciding between X and Y.<br>
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</div> Either A or B would eventually by won over to the other side by policy-concessions.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Also, making multiply-delegated votes possible would entirely ruin SODA's summability. This would make a number of useful anti-fraud measures impossible, including precinct-level counting, sampled count audits, and voter-auditable cryptographic ballot receipts like those of <a href="http://heliosvoting.org" target="_blank">heliosvoting.org</a>.<br>
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</div> Just make the allowable votes a fixed number. This is required in 1 form or another in proportional systems. Indeed, most of the problems with SODA is that it is based on a system designed for creating a proportional legislature, but is modified for both creating proportional legislatures and for single-winner. These are 2 different domains and should use different systems. The simplest methods for these domains are:<br>
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Single-Winner:<br>
Approval-Voting<br>
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Proportional Legislature:<br>
Asset-Voting<br>
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SODA should just forget about single-winner. Because it is based on a proportional-voting system, it is ilsuited for single winner.<br>
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If voters want to make their votes in an Asset-Election nontransferable, that is fine by me, but we should tell them that they run a real risk of disenfranchising themselves.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> ⸘Ŭalabio‽, I understand and sympathize with your desire for multiple delegation, but I do not see how a SODA-like system could meet that desire without too high a cost in complexity and insecurity. If you think that you can resolve these issues, please propose a specific solution and explore its implications. As you know, voting system design often involves trade-offs, and so "doing P has disadvantage Q" is not a good objection against a system unless it's accompanied by "alternative S avoids Q without causing any other disadvantages as serious".<br>
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</div> My solution is to scrap SODA SODA as being fundamentally flawed and use Approval for single-winner and Asset with 9 votes for proportional with an option to makes the votes nontransferable with the understanding that one _“*PROBABLY*”_ will disenfranchise oneself if one makes the votes nontransferable.<br>
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FairVote started wanting STV for a new house of proportional representation or turning the House of Representatives into an house of proportional representation using STV. FairVote settled for using STV for single-winner which is IRV. We all know how lousy IRV turned out. SODA repeats the mistakes of IRV:<br>
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One tries to use Asset for single winner, but it does not work well, so one modifies it into SODA which instead of working well for single-winner and proportional, works well for neither proportional nor single-winner.<br>
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The fact is that Asset works better than SODA for proportional representation and Approval works better than SODA for single-winner. SODA just is not a good tool for the job:<br>
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Let is suppose that we tell steelworkers to build a skyscraper using only the tool Allen-Wrench. The steelworkers are the voters, SODA is the Allen-Wrench, and the pile of rubble which is supposed to be a skyscraper is the legislature. SODA is good for neither proportional representation nor single-winner.<br>
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> Jameson<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
“⸘Ŭalabio‽”</font></blockquote></div><br></div>