(Ninety percent seriously) I suggest that we start with any good method that makes good use of rankings with approval cutoffs.
Then after a few elections, after most people realize that they are just copying candidate cards for the rankings and approval cutoffs, we can simplify the ballots and start gathering the information as per steps 1, 2, and 3, below.
This will be a great relief to most of the voters, who will consider it to be the "greatest ever" improvement in voting methods.
If necessary we can allow the option of more complicated ballots for the rare voters that want them, just like we have several different versions of the tax form to fit different tastes.
When this happens ...
I suspect that ninety percent of the voters will just mark their direct support candidate, and nobody else.
Nine of the remaining ten percent will be happy as clams to specify their also approved candidates, as well.
The last obstinate percent will be so busy posting to the election methods list that they won't have time for voting anyway :')
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Jobst Heitzig wrote:
Dear Folks!
Under the working title "Democratic Fair Choice", I described on our Wiki a detailed voting procedure composed from ideas by Forest (most) and me (some): http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Imagine_Democratic_Fair_Choice I tried to make it more interesting by writing it as a fictitious television show reporting on an actual election -- hope you have some fun reading it.
In short, this is what I suggest: 0. Each candidate simultaneously publishes a ranking of all candidates. 1. Each voter marks one candidate as "directly supported" and arbitrarily many additional ones as "approved". 2. This is transformed automatically into an individual ranking by placing the approved over the unapproved ones and completing the ranking by means of the directly supported candidate's published ranking. 3. After booths have closed, direct support, approval, and pairwise comparisons are counted.
Marking only a "directly supported" candidate replicates for you that candidate's entire recommended ballot, including approval cutoff.
What do you think?
Forest
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