On Oct 18, 2004, at 7:09 AM, Bill Clark wrote:
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 11:03:28 -0700, Brian Olson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think I'm allergic to the use of randomness in election methods, so I
don't plan on implementing such an option.
The unique appealing feature of random methods is that they're the only ones that can be completely immune to the the "Tyranny of the Majority" problem. If a particular political party consistently gets 10% of the vote, wouldn't it be nice if their candidates were elected 10% of the time? Random methods are the only ones (that I know of, at least) capable of accomplishing that for single-seat elections -- they're basically the single-seat "time-sharing" version of PR.
If they get 10% of whatever PR body, that's fine and there's no need to augment that with anything else.
For a single seat, I think the vast majority would be poorly served by four years of office holding by a tiny majority. I'm even more scared of tyrannies by minorities. (If you consider US non-voters and the current absolutist power-politics, we already have that. Rule by a quarter or less.) I think in all cases we're trying to move the democratic process to be more democratic and better represent as many people as possible. That's why we want an election method that can find the compromise choice that serves 60% of the people when we might otherwise get some faction's 40% or 41% choice.
If all of the choices are good enough, then randomly picking between them might be fine since it wouldn't really matter and random might be ok. Based on the current highly polarized political climate, a whole lot of people think that a whole lot of candidates are far less than good enough.
Random methods are nothing to be concerned about, they've been used in mathematical physics and other hard-sciences for quite some time (e.g. the Monte-Carlo method).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method
Oh sure, great for science, bad for my sense of fairness. The coin-toss is at the beginning of a football match, not the end.
Obviously what we really want is to stick our candidates in blenders, and then mix proportionally and reconstitute a proper representative.
Brian Olson http://bolson.org/
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