[geeks] California Proposition 14

[Phil Stracchino]

On 06/05/10 22:33, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> i've been toying with an idea that afaics has only theoretical value.
> today we blow our vote only on the candidate we like best, but suppose
> we were allowed to rank our choices?  eg. #1-#5 for a 5-candidate
> field...  my idea is that if the leading candidates are highly
> polarizing, half the voters might rank candidate a #1 and b #2, while
> the other half might rank candidate c #1 and b #2.  b should win the
> race as the candidate more agreeable to more voters, but in our
> present system he'd receive no votes at all.

Yup, there are a large variety of scoring/transferable-vote systems out
there designed to select the candidate most acceptable to the greatest
number of voters.  Historically they've seen limited use because most of
them involve large numbers of recounts to determine the final winner.

But, DUH!  COMPUTERS!

> entrenched powers like things just the way they are, and there are
> plenty of other problems in actually implementing such a system - but
> does it make any kind of sense?  politicians being the animals they
> are, they'd be sure to exploit any way possible to game the system,
> whatever it is.

Several of the alternate systems have corner cases in which they can
generate weird results, but they *are* unusual corner cases.  Also, it's
been mathematically proven that it is impossible to create a completely
fair voting system.  But all of them are a hell of a lot better than the
system we have in place now, for which both major parties have
fine-tuned their game-the-system skills (and optimized the system for
gaming) over more than a century of practice.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.