On 11/27/2012 02:24 AM, Richard Fobes wrote:
I gave 5 stars to the Ban Single Mark Ballots proposal.
FYI, I did not post that proposal. Jon Denn posted the proposal using
the executive summary he copied from the website copy of the Google Docs
original.
(I did work with Jon to post there a tax-reform proposal named "Tax The
Takers More Than The Makers.")
Based on the vote-counting method used at the site -- it uses score
ballots -- I was tempted to vote one star for the "competing" "American
Anti-Corruption Act." But I didn't. I gave it 5 stars too.
This sheds light on a question someone else posed: Why aren't better
voting methods actually used in small organizations? The choice of which
method is "best" is not obvious. And when voting is done by people who
understand how to vote strategically, the strategy-vulnerable methods --
in this case score-ballot-based counting -- easily produce
unrepresentative results.
Let's hope the declaration helps with that. It says that "we may
disagree about which method is the best, but the ones we list are all
better than Plurality, and better enough to make a difference".
Perhaps we don't know which method is the absolutely best, or more
likely, that we won't find agreement (because of differing priors or
whatever). But then small organizations could just take a chance.
There's plenty of risk already to, say, a startup, so founders shouldn't
be unfamiliar with the concept.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that evidence is what counts. We
can keep on going rounds about what people *might* do, but when it comes
down to it, what matters is what people *will* do. And having
organizations try out better methods would definitely help in that regards.
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