Hi Folks,
I just got an interesting idea. It's so simple that I'll be very surprised if it has not been proposed before, but I did not see it on Blake Cretney's methods page.
Why not combine Condorcet and Approval into a hybrid election method? The voter ranks the candidates, but truncates at his approval cutoff point. If a Condorcet winner exists he wins, otherwise the winner is determined from the Smith set using Approval rules, where ranked candidates and considered approved and unranked candidates are considered unapproved.
I would tend to oppose allowing equal rankings (except for implied equal rankings for the unranked candidates, of course). However, a variation would be to allow equal rankings. Another variation would be to allow full ranking without truncation but with an approval cutoff point specified separately from the rankings. For example, I could rank all eight candidates but somehow specify that I only want to approve the first three.
How would this method stack up? What would the voting strategy look like? And has it been proposed before? If so, when and where? Thanks.
--Russ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
