Talk:Imagine Democratic Fair Choice

Hi Jobst -- this is a very interesting idea. Extremely simple ballot.

I have a few questions, however:
 * Could you allow more published rankings to be used, as long as they were registered sufficiently in advance of the election? This would allow, for example, labor unions, political parties, newspapers, etc., to make recommendations, and voters could choose the one they prefer.
 * This could become an option after the method has been introduced successively, I think. [Heitzig-J]
 * The approval aspect isn't clear to me -- is it equal ranking or not? I.e., when a voter approves of a bunch of alternatives, are they given equal rank or is the voter grouping them just below the favorite using ordering specified by the published ranking?  What if the published ranking has equal rank of 5 for 2 candidates, but the voter approves one of them and not the other?  That needs to be spelled out a bit more clearly.
 * I hoped the example would make it clear: The rankings inside the approved subset and inside the non-approved subset are taken from the favourite candidate's published ranking, so approved candidates are not ranked equally! [Heitzig-J]

--Araucaria 11:22, 29 Mar 2005 (PST)

Perhaps you should also add a link to this from other pages? --Araucaria 11:23, 29 Mar 2005 (PST)

Well, as a voter of the world, I read this page to understand the voting system. In the five minutes I have, I can't understand it. In fact, I can't understand it with quite a bit more time than that. So I don't vote... A modest suggestion: let the voters of the world choose the voting system! I doubt they would choose this one! When I first read this page, I saw something similar to proxy democracy; the voter is essentially assigning his or her vote to the vote list of the named candidate. As has been noted, it is also possible that non-candidate vote lists could be an option. This is quite similar to proxy voting, but with a fixed voting process for the proxies (which means that they are not actually proxies, for proxies would ordinarily participate in a subsequent deliberative process). But, the more I looked at the dramatized broadcast, the more confused I got. I end up not knowing what exactly was being proposed. Another suggestion: start a page called Democratic Fair Choice and describe the method there. For a true proxy voting process, see Delegable Proxy Election. In the latter, voters simply vote for proxies, who might indeed be candidates themselves, or who might be anyone else who has declared availability to so serve. Then the proxies carry out the election. (Delegable Proxy simply means that the proxies may assign their voting rights, obtained through the balloting process, to others.) The proxies become electors in an electoral college; but, unlike the present U.S. Electoral College, proxies are chosen, not elected. A proxy might only have one vote (which would mean that nobody else trusted the proxy, so the proxy only has his or her own vote to exercise in the subsequent process.) So what I imagined I saw for DFC was this kind of proxy election, but with preannounced votes (kind of like the present electors, who are pledged) and an election method by which those votes would be considered, such as IRV or some other variation. Then I read details that don't match that description. --Abd

how to interpret bullet votes
Great idea Jobst! I would rather vote under this system than any other that I know of (except in small groups where direct interaction makes other nice methods practical).

Now how can we make use of the difference between a ballot that gives direct support to Bob without showing any "also approved", and a ballot that gives direct support to Bob and also puts an approval mark for Bob, but for no other candidate?

I suggest that in the first case, the voters ballot be identical to Bob's published ballot, including approval cutoff if it has one, while in the second case, Bob's published order is used, but the approval cutoff is placed just below Bob, reflecting the voter's wish to approve only him.

What do you think?
 * I don't think there should be a difference! [Heitzig-J]

One other comment. Many of the IRV proposals allow ranking of only three candidates. This ballot is simpler but more expressive.

Suppose the IRV voter would have ranked A>B>C, and the DFC ballot voter wants to do the same, but candidate A's published ballot is A>C>B.

If the FDC voter truly disagrees strongly with his favorite candidate on this order, then he can approve only A and B.

His ballot will become A>B>>C, the same order as the IRV voter's ballot, and also reflecting the strong preference.

Information theory says to encode the most frequently used words with the shortest code words. That's one way of looking at DFC ballots.

Forest

article style
Horrible. It is really painful to read, both because of the formating and the whole time-wasting "story". You don't specify what happens when the voter makes approval marks on candidates that aren't in his main candidate's ranking. How long do you think it takes an election method newbie to realize that the numbers given by the candidates are random?