I don't know if Martin's use of Approval ballots to place billiard-ball votes would placate the 1-person-1-mark objectors. They'd just object that, though ultimately each voter has one indivisible vote, the placement of those votes is based on a system in which different people can make different numbers of equally-counted marks. So they'd just transfer that same objection to the system that determines the placement of the billiard-ball votes. It seems that the 1-person-1-vote objection will have to be answered by directly confronting its justifications. Showing that Plurality & Approval are just special cases of CR, a method that no one says violates 1-person-1-vote or gives voters unequal power seems a good approach. As Richard mentioned a few days ago, even in lone-mark (Plurality), the voter is actually casting a vote with respect to each candidate--a low rating score to all but one of them, and a higher rating score to one of them. As long as all the voters have only those same 2 rating scores to bestow, then, if they must give the low score to all but one, it obviously makes no difference what the 2 compulsory scores are...+1 and -1, or 1 vote and 0 votes, or 37 & 35, etc. That likely will bring out the silliness of requiring the voter to give the low score to all but one of the candidates. Lone-mark being just a special case of CR weakens the claim that it has some kind of fundamental justification. The burden of proof is on the person who wants to claim that CR is only fair when the voter must give the lowest score to all but one of the candidates. Also, of course the main "justification" for 1-person-1-vote is the fear that the person who makes more marks has more power in Approval; and the claim that Approval gives voters more unequal power than IRV does has recently been unexpectedly dramatically demolished. Obviously there are many ways a person could divide the candidates into 2 sets and say that one set is better than the other. In a manycandidate election, it's difficult to justify saying that everyone should only be allowed to designate a better-set that just contains one candidate a worse-set that contains all the rest. Maybe 40% of the candidates are clearly better than the other 60%, with no important differences among those 2 sets. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
