One reason I went ahead and formulated the Marginal Ranked Approval Voting page was to illustrate a method that is biased toward higher approval.
http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Marginal_Ranked_Approval_Voting
Hey, I don't know about the method, but I love those colorful matrices! Nice job.
The problem with this method, when compared to DMC, is that it gives higher-approved candidates too much of an advantage. The long term game theory effect of MRAV's bias toward higher-approved candidates is that voters will give less approval to non-favorite candidates.
Forest made a comment a few weeks ago about an irritating former contributor to the list, Donald Davidson:
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2002-February/007310.html
One of his statements (no longer on the web, apparently his web site is gone) was he didn't care what method was used, it would eventually evolve into IRV.
This Davison guy is very good at pointing out problems with election methods other than IRV, but when it comes to IRV he seems to be wearing rose-colored glasses.
The one thing IRV is good at is eliminating the effect of spoilers. But the same effect could be achieved by simply persuading all voters to vote strategically.
Here's what Gore supporters should have told Nader supporters in 2000 who thought that IRV could have helped them: write you preference for Nader over Gore on the bathroom wall, then vote for Gore and imagine that your vote transfered from Nader to Gore.
Well, that has a kernel of truth to it -- candidates are going to try to game the system, whatever it is. So whatever method you set up, it needs to have a certain unpredictable aspect to it, even (or especially) if it is deterministic, so voters will give up and simply state their true preferences.
I don't think I can go along with that. If a little bit of randomness helps discourage strategy, then a lot of randomness will help even more. Why not just toss dice? The only effective strategy is to somehow load the dice.
--Russ
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