I forgot to mention something important before I sent my last post, "CWO may be worth fighting for". I wrote:
> Here is one possible progression for single winner elections (to decide >on representatives): >1. plurality and runoffs >2. IRV >3. CWO-IRV >4. ranked pairs(wv), with CWO >5. cardinal pairwise (with CWO?) I mentioned that this only applies to methods that elect representatives, but I forgot to talk about the other half of the equation: direct democracy. While I am okay with representative elections following the somewhat conservative pattern above, which may take quite awhile to get around to a Condorcet-efficient method, I hope to take a shortcut in the realm of direct democracy. As I have said, I advocate a system of direct democracy by delegable proxy. And I want to make sure that it uses a pairwise tally for multiple-option issues! In the long run, I want the direct democracy system to be legally binding, but during the startup phase, I prefer it to be non-binding. This conveniently allows one to worry less about the burying strategy and to be more relaxed about choosing a completion method, because in the event of a cycle, the legislature can investigate to guess whether it is strategic or sincere, and if it is found to be strategic, to guess the sincere CW. If it is found to be sincere, the legislature can choose what seems like the strongest member of the Smith set (the one with the weakest defeat(s)). Meanwhile, people will become comfortable with the logic of pairwise comparison, which will have a hugely positive impact on campaigns to adopt pairwise for representative elections. Also, we can use this time to do valuable research on voter behavior and voter strategy given a pairwise tally, which will be useful when designing subsequent legally binding systems. Thus, I suggest that we could have pairwise in our direct democracy system before our representative democracy system. The primary reason for this faster-paced approach is that there should be less conservative backpull when designing a new institution from scratch. Another important reason is that choosing the median issue position may be immediately intuitive to more people than choosing the medium candidate. Well, what do you think? Does this seem like a promising way to proceed? I'm trying to work on a new (more open-ended) version of my proxy system proposal, but until then the old version can still be found at http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/voting_methods/proxy.htm my best, James Green-Armytage ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info