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<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Kristofer - I certainly
agree with your last point. A weakness I'm conscious of in my
proposal is that a TV personality popular among silver voters
might put himself forward for the sole purpose of directing his
second preference votes to a sinister candidate unwelcome to his
personal supporters. But at least they're told up front what
they're voting for. <br>
CJC<br>
</font><br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 24/08/2023 17:52, Kristofer
Munsterhjelm wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:90863571-2b14-6d9c-1690-0fa24913eecc@t-online.de">On
2023-08-24 15:31, Colin Champion wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">On 24/08/2023 14:02, Kristofer
Munsterhjelm wrote:
<br>
> My intuitive response is to do some type of open Approval
primary.
<br>
> The incommensurability and chicken dilemma problems hit a
lot less
<br>
> when there are 5 candidates to spread the error over.
<br>
<br>
I wouldn't have thought that this would work very well. One of
the problems is that most voters will not initially know much
about most candidates, so they won't give them approval.
<br>
It seems to me that voter ignorance is the main problem with
ranked voting if the field is large. Voters will truncate out
the candidates they don't know much about, and this will be
misinterpreted as a low preference. So the first round should
give obscure candidates a chance of the spotlight.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
That's a good point. I was thinking of a different setting, where
there are say, ten established parties with good track records,
each of which fields a candidate, and you have to narrow down the
field to something manageable before doing proper ranked voting.
<br>
<br>
But now that I think about it, in such a setting, voters could
probably just rank and truncate. E.g. a left-wing voter ranks all
the left-wing parties' candidates and then truncates.
<br>
<br>
About your setting, I think that points to a more fundamental
problem of electoral democracy: only those who can make themselves
heard or somehow get popular have a chance of being elected.
That's kind of your argument, but with number of candidates
equalling the number of voters; somewhere in the mass that is the
population, there's someone whose political ideas would appeal to
enough people that he'd be elected if they knew about them. But
since marketing is costly, they don't.
<br>
<br>
The solutions I most commonly know of for that problem are
sortition, asset voting, or some way of dynamically discovering
the good candidates by parallelism (e.g. Gohlke's triad method).
<br>
<br>
Your predeclared orders are kind of like asset. Sortition could
either be done directly, or by having a randomly selected group
choose the five finalists after examining candidates' platforms in
detail. And parallel methods would replace elections with
something different.
<br>
<br>
I'm wary of predeclared orders because they could lead to obscure
deals (like Chris mentioned regarding above-the-line voting in
Australia). Picking five candidates instead of a single winner
would mitigate the impact, but still. I'd think after-the-fact
public asset trading, with the voters being able to see who their
candidate is contributing to, would be better. But that would
require a deeper change which could be infeasible.
<br>
<br>
-km
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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