Jameson Quinn wrote:
With that said, I can see a couple of problems with this system right off. First off, bottom-up elimination is probably the worst feature of IRV, because there is a fairly broad range of situations where it leads inevitably to eliminating a centrist and electing an extremist, in a way that can clearly be criticized as "spoiled" (the centrist would have won pairwise) and "nonmonotonic" (votes shifting to the winner can cause them to lose). Secondly, a voter has no power to ensure that their vote is not transferred in a way they do not approve of. This second disadvantage compounds with the first, because a minority bloc will be eliminated early, and their votes transferred more than once before the final result.
I wonder if it would be possible to mitigate the order-of-elimination problem by devising a constraint program of some sort. Something like:
A candidate has links to it from other candidates according to the voters who voted the other candidate above him. A candidate has links away from it to other candidates according to the voters who voted him above the other candidates.
Each candidate can hold a Droop quota's worth of voting power. Any excess is distributed to the candidates that candidate links to, proportional for each candidate to the strength of each link.
Start by giving the candidates power equal to how many people voted them in first place. Then: evolve the system until some candidate gets a Droop quota through the mutual distribution.
Perhaps this isn't always possible. I'm being a bit quick around the edges here. The general idea is to consider equilibria of some vote-distribution system so that the order in which the actual transfers are done matters less.
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