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<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The sort of solution I had
in mind was: reduce the 500 candidates to 36 by administrative
means; reduce the 36 to 6 by a primary; hold a Condorcet election
with 6 andidates. The same answer applies if you replace 500 by 5
million; the problem is to devise an electoral system which
doesn't start from a favourable assumption on the number of
candidates. <br>
If you sufficiently dislike administrative means, then you will
need an ingenious scheme like Toby's; I view them as a necessary
evil.<br>
CJC<br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 02/09/2023 08:48, Toby Pereira
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">If we're talking about a
field as large as 500, different voters could be randomly
given different ballot papers for the primary with not all the
candidates on. It could be, say, 10, on a ballot paper but
there wouldn't be just 50 types because you'd want the
candidates to be against different candidates on different
ballots to make it fairer (so there'd be more than 50). These
ballots would be randomly distributed to the voters (each
candidate would appear on the same number of ballots). If you
made it approval voting, you could probably just combine all
the ballots together and use a proportional approval method to
determine the candidates that make the final election.</div>
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<div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Toby</div>
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<div> On Saturday, 2 September 2023 at 00:21:17 BST, Kristofer
Munsterhjelm <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:km_elmet@t-online.de"><km_elmet@t-online.de></a> wrote: </div>
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<div dir="ltr">I think I'm more or less done with this
subject, as I don't feel like <br clear="none">
I'm getting anywhere much. But I will reply to this:<br
clear="none">
<br clear="none">
On 9/1/23 17:47, Colin Champion wrote:<br clear="none">
> It seems to me that the position is this. Condorcet
voting works well <br clear="none">
> under certain assumptions, which include voters
sincerely ranking all <br clear="none">
> candidates in order of preference. Strategic voting
turns out to be less <br clear="none">
> of a problem than one might fear, but drastic
truncation is fatal.<br clear="none">
> The merits of Condorcet voting lie partly in its
not penalising <br clear="none">
> minor parties, so you'd expect it to lead to an
explosion in the number <br clear="none">
> of candidates.<br clear="none">
> So you're organising a presidential election,
hoping to take <br clear="none">
> advantage of the merits of Condorcet voting, and you
expect 500 <br clear="none">
> candidates to put themselves forward. What do you do?<br
clear="none">
> One no-brain solution is to run a Condorcet
election with 500 <br clear="none">
> candidates. Another is to rely on administrative
procedures, eg. only <br clear="none">
> the 5 candidates with most supporting signatures get
onto the ballot. <br clear="none">
> This isn't a bad idea; something like it is widely
practised. I think <br clear="none">
> the Virginia meeting is intentionally allowing it as
an option. Can we <br clear="none">
> do better?<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
I guess that with numbers around 500, nothing will really
work well, and <br clear="none">
that we would bump against the, for lack of a better term,
"aristocratic <br clear="none">
nature" of elections. That is, if we don't do anything to
counteract it, <br clear="none">
such a field will naturally thin itself out by who's got
the best <br clear="none">
marketing; by what candidates are able to amplify their
voice and get <br clear="none">
their message out the most, and that undoing this bias
will require a <br clear="none">
more thorough redesign than changing the way votes are
tallied.<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
If that's right, then it would seem the only option is to
augment the <br clear="none">
electoral procedure itself. Do something like asset voting
or have a <br clear="none">
representative sample dig deep into the candidates
policies and pick the <br clear="none">
finalist set. For 500 candidates, the voters would
otherwise face a <br clear="none">
burden just getting to know what they're about, no matter
the voting <br clear="none">
system, and the 100:1 "compression ratio" down to a
finalist set of 5 is <br clear="none">
so high that it's very difficult to get the right set if
they skip on <br clear="none">
that burden. Any consistent bias will greatly shrink that
500-candidate <br clear="none">
set with time.<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
If we suppose that all of the 500 have a chance to get
into the finalist <br clear="none">
set, there has to be a considerable period before the
general happens, <br clear="none">
so that finalist set can inform the electorate of their
positions.<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
The more we consider the possibility that anybody could be
a good <br clear="none">
winner, the more elections, as a mechanism, is at a
disadvantage from <br clear="none">
the start. My intuitive feeling is that at a 100:1 ratio,
if you only <br clear="none">
choose centrists, then the non-centrists are
disincentivized as you say. <br clear="none">
If you don't only choose centrists, then there's not
enough room for the <br clear="none">
full variety of the 500 to be represented in a set of size
5 anyway. So <br clear="none">
something has to give.<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
Even if I'm wrong, the contention about clone dependence
suggests to me <br clear="none">
that we don't really know how to make a voting system that
does what's <br clear="none">
asked of such a primary. In a sense, it's not just that we
don't know <br clear="none">
how to solve the puzzle, but we're uncertain what kind of
puzzle it is <br clear="none">
(what the desiderata and dynamics are). But you said in
another post that<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
> I posted some figures a while ago indicating that as
the level of<br clear="none">
> truncation increased, some strange reversals set in
just after the<br clear="none">
> half-way mark: the Borda count briefly gained in
accuracy while<br clear="none">
> Condorcet methods started a headlong fall.<br
clear="none">
<br clear="none">
This in turn suggests that you could at least determine if
a particular <br clear="none">
suggestion would be good by simulating the two-stage
process:<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
- Lots of candidates present themselves<br clear="none">
- Voters vote in the primary according to the method to be
tested <br clear="none">
(possibly with some noise)<br clear="none">
- Then the voters' hypothetical correct no-truncated
ranking (of 500 <br clear="none">
candidates!) is used as a basis for the general method,
but after <br clear="none">
everybody but the finalist set is eliminated.<br
clear="none">
- Now determine the VSE, strategic resistance, or other
figure of <br clear="none">
interest wrt the winner of the general.<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
Maybe by tinkering with this, it would be possible to get
some idea of <br clear="none">
what works and what doesn't. But note that it doesn't
incorporate the <br clear="none">
idea that getting acquainted with candidate positions is
very expensive <br clear="none">
when there are 500 of them, unless the primary
deliberately takes that <br clear="none">
into account.<br clear="none">
<br clear="none">
-km
<div class="ydpadb4051fyqt1997846503"
id="ydpadb4051fyqtfd26265"><br clear="none">
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