<div dir="auto">We will never see 500 presidential candidates on a general primary here in the states.<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Even the Green Party candidate ... it's touch and go to get her on the ballot in some states.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">A "direct democracy delegable proxy scheme" is designed for this kind of heavy burden.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The other possibility is Eppley's Vote for a Published Ranking (VPR): </div><div dir="auto">"I vote for ranking number 7029 with the following amendments..."</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">We're not going to see it, but visualizing the problem might stimulate ideas on more efficient handling of more realistic but still difficult challenges.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">From 500 to 5 is two orders of magnitude. How about interposing a stage ... so one stage for each order of magnitude ... 1000 to 100, then the 100 to 10, and finally 10 to one. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Some people would skip the first stage, and some would skip the second stage ... but after all of that trouble, you better have a great excuse for sitting out the final stage!</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">-fws </div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Sep 1, 2023, 4:21 PM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <<a href="mailto:km_elmet@t-online.de">km_elmet@t-online.de</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I think I'm more or less done with this subject, as I don't feel like <br>
I'm getting anywhere much. But I will reply to this:<br>
<br>
On 9/1/23 17:47, Colin Champion wrote:<br>
> It seems to me that the position is this. Condorcet voting works well <br>
> under certain assumptions, which include voters sincerely ranking all <br>
> candidates in order of preference. Strategic voting turns out to be less <br>
> of a problem than one might fear, but drastic truncation is fatal.<br>
> The merits of Condorcet voting lie partly in its not penalising <br>
> minor parties, so you'd expect it to lead to an explosion in the number <br>
> of candidates.<br>
> So you're organising a presidential election, hoping to take <br>
> advantage of the merits of Condorcet voting, and you expect 500 <br>
> candidates to put themselves forward. What do you do?<br>
> One no-brain solution is to run a Condorcet election with 500 <br>
> candidates. Another is to rely on administrative procedures, eg. only <br>
> the 5 candidates with most supporting signatures get onto the ballot. <br>
> This isn't a bad idea; something like it is widely practised. I think <br>
> the Virginia meeting is intentionally allowing it as an option. Can we <br>
> do better?<br>
<br>
I guess that with numbers around 500, nothing will really work well, and <br>
that we would bump against the, for lack of a better term, "aristocratic <br>
nature" of elections. That is, if we don't do anything to counteract it, <br>
such a field will naturally thin itself out by who's got the best <br>
marketing; by what candidates are able to amplify their voice and get <br>
their message out the most, and that undoing this bias will require a <br>
more thorough redesign than changing the way votes are tallied.<br>
<br>
If that's right, then it would seem the only option is to augment the <br>
electoral procedure itself. Do something like asset voting or have a <br>
representative sample dig deep into the candidates policies and pick the <br>
finalist set. For 500 candidates, the voters would otherwise face a <br>
burden just getting to know what they're about, no matter the voting <br>
system, and the 100:1 "compression ratio" down to a finalist set of 5 is <br>
so high that it's very difficult to get the right set if they skip on <br>
that burden. Any consistent bias will greatly shrink that 500-candidate <br>
set with time.<br>
<br>
If we suppose that all of the 500 have a chance to get into the finalist <br>
set, there has to be a considerable period before the general happens, <br>
so that finalist set can inform the electorate of their positions.<br>
<br>
The more we consider the possibility that anybody could be a good <br>
winner, the more elections, as a mechanism, is at a disadvantage from <br>
the start. My intuitive feeling is that at a 100:1 ratio, if you only <br>
choose centrists, then the non-centrists are disincentivized as you say. <br>
If you don't only choose centrists, then there's not enough room for the <br>
full variety of the 500 to be represented in a set of size 5 anyway. So <br>
something has to give.<br>
<br>
Even if I'm wrong, the contention about clone dependence suggests to me <br>
that we don't really know how to make a voting system that does what's <br>
asked of such a primary. In a sense, it's not just that we don't know <br>
how to solve the puzzle, but we're uncertain what kind of puzzle it is <br>
(what the desiderata and dynamics are). But you said in another post that<br>
<br>
> I posted some figures a while ago indicating that as the level of<br>
> truncation increased, some strange reversals set in just after the<br>
> half-way mark: the Borda count briefly gained in accuracy while<br>
> Condorcet methods started a headlong fall.<br>
<br>
This in turn suggests that you could at least determine if a particular <br>
suggestion would be good by simulating the two-stage process:<br>
<br>
- Lots of candidates present themselves<br>
- Voters vote in the primary according to the method to be tested <br>
(possibly with some noise)<br>
- Then the voters' hypothetical correct no-truncated ranking (of 500 <br>
candidates!) is used as a basis for the general method, but after <br>
everybody but the finalist set is eliminated.<br>
- Now determine the VSE, strategic resistance, or other figure of <br>
interest wrt the winner of the general.<br>
<br>
Maybe by tinkering with this, it would be possible to get some idea of <br>
what works and what doesn't. But note that it doesn't incorporate the <br>
idea that getting acquainted with candidate positions is very expensive <br>
when there are 500 of them, unless the primary deliberately takes that <br>
into account.<br>
<br>
-km<br>
----<br>
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</blockquote></div>