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<p>In principle, the Hare system, as advocated by mathematicians,
Clarence Hoag and George Hallett in "Proportional Representation.
The key to democracy" does not need primaries. The point about
"Proportional Representation with a single transferable vote in
large constituencies" to quote HG Wells, in turn quoted by Hoag
and Hallett, is that STV is a general election, primaries and
plebiscites combined into one, as pointed out by Joe Rogaly in
"Parliament for the People." Joe Rogaly coined the term "the
super-vote" for STV, which is a sometimes unpopular term, even
while people liked the system.</p>
<p>Hoag and Hallett explicitly said STV did not need separate
primary elections, when discussing the prospective New York city
STV elections.</p>
<p>Even when there are more candidates than the voters can be
familiar with, separate primaries may not be needed. This is
because all voters can home in on the issues most important to
them, and the specific candidates, who state their concerns with
them. <br>
</p>
<p>The volume of candidates is determined by the level or area of
government. Hence local elections; the candidates entry arena of
politics, may have thousands of candidates, but they will tend to
focus on the areas they come from, and know about, and are known
in.</p>
<p>Regards,</p>
<p>Richard Lung.<br>
</p>
<br>
<br>
On 02/09/2023 07:48, Toby Pereira wrote:<br>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap; display: block; width: 98vw;">> 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.
>
> Toby
>
> 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:
>
>
> I think I'm more or less done with this subject, as I don't feel
> like I'm getting anywhere much. But I will reply to this:
>
> On 9/1/23 17:47, Colin Champion wrote:
>> It seems to me that the position is this. Condorcet voting works
>> well under certain assumptions, which include voters sincerely
>> ranking all candidates in order of preference. Strategic voting
>> turns out to be less of a problem than one might fear, but drastic
>> truncation is fatal. The merits of Condorcet voting lie partly in
>> its not penalising minor parties, so you'd expect it to lead to an
>> explosion in the number of candidates. So you're organising a
>> presidential election, hoping to take advantage of the merits of
>> Condorcet voting, and you expect 500 candidates to put themselves
>> forward. What do you do? One no-brain solution is to run a
>> Condorcet election with 500 candidates. Another is to rely on
>> administrative procedures, eg. only the 5 candidates with most
>> supporting signatures get onto the ballot. This isn't a bad idea;
>> something like it is widely practised. I think the Virginia meeting
>> is intentionally allowing it as an option. Can we do better?
>
> I guess that with numbers around 500, nothing will really work well,
> and that we would bump against the, for lack of a better term,
> "aristocratic nature" of elections. That is, if we don't do anything
> to counteract it, such a field will naturally thin itself out by
> who's got the best marketing; by what candidates are able to amplify
> their voice and get their message out the most, and that undoing this
> bias will require a more thorough redesign than changing the way
> votes are tallied.
>
> If that's right, then it would seem the only option is to augment
> the electoral procedure itself. Do something like asset voting or
> have a representative sample dig deep into the candidates policies
> and pick the finalist set. For 500 candidates, the voters would
> otherwise face a burden just getting to know what they're about, no
> matter the voting system, and the 100:1 "compression ratio" down to a
> finalist set of 5 is so high that it's very difficult to get the
> right set if they skip on that burden. Any consistent bias will
> greatly shrink that 500-candidate set with time.
>
> If we suppose that all of the 500 have a chance to get into the
> finalist set, there has to be a considerable period before the
> general happens, so that finalist set can inform the electorate of
> their positions.
>
> The more we consider the possibility that anybody could be a good
> winner, the more elections, as a mechanism, is at a disadvantage
> from the start. My intuitive feeling is that at a 100:1 ratio, if you
> only choose centrists, then the non-centrists are disincentivized as
> you say. If you don't only choose centrists, then there's not enough
> room for the full variety of the 500 to be represented in a set of
> size 5 anyway. So something has to give.
>
> Even if I'm wrong, the contention about clone dependence suggests to
> me that we don't really know how to make a voting system that does
> what's asked of such a primary. In a sense, it's not just that we
> don't know how to solve the puzzle, but we're uncertain what kind of
> puzzle it is (what the desiderata and dynamics are). But you said in
> another post that
>
>> I posted some figures a while ago indicating that as the level of
>> truncation increased, some strange reversals set in just after the
>> half-way mark: the Borda count briefly gained in accuracy while
>> Condorcet methods started a headlong fall.
>
> This in turn suggests that you could at least determine if a
> particular suggestion would be good by simulating the two-stage
> process:
>
> - Lots of candidates present themselves - Voters vote in the primary
> according to the method to be tested (possibly with some noise) -
> Then the voters' hypothetical correct no-truncated ranking (of 500
> candidates!) is used as a basis for the general method, but after
> everybody but the finalist set is eliminated. - Now determine the
> VSE, strategic resistance, or other figure of interest wrt the winner
> of the general.
>
> Maybe by tinkering with this, it would be possible to get some idea
> of what works and what doesn't. But note that it doesn't incorporate
> the idea that getting acquainted with candidate positions is very
> expensive when there are 500 of them, unless the primary deliberately
> takes that into account.
>
> -km
>
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> for list info</span>epresentation with a single transferable vote
in large constituencies" to quote HG Wells, in turn quoted by Hoag
and Hallett<br>
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