Alternate voting methods

[xiphias]

As we all know, there is no voting method which is "fair" for all definitions of "fair", in elections which have more than two candidates. But as I was debating with myself who to vote for for Massachusetts governor, I started wondering about other methods.

As it is, I think I'd like a method in which you could vote for as many candidates as you want. You'd look at your ballot, and mark as many or few as you wanted to. You could vote for just one, as you do today. You could vote for everybody except one person, if you just really didn't like someone.

Or you could, as I wanted to, vote for the person that you WANTED to win, and also vote for the person who had a chance to win that you would RATHER have than the other option.

So, what I was wondering is, what is the downside (or downsides) to this method?

Comments

[kiya]

You might want to look up politics in Australia, which I believe uses the balloting method "Rank candidates, if there isn't a clear winner counting the first-ranked ones on all ballots, drop the weakest candidate and add the second-choice votes on those ballots, repeat until done."

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I thought about a number of voting methodologies: the reason I'm leaning towards the one I just mentioned is that it's the easiest, and requires the fewest changes in how people currently vote. I wanted to come up with an idea in which, if somebody just plain didn't notice that the voting method had changed, their vote would still be valid.

[cheshyre]

If you're interested, a few days ago Slashdot posted a story from Science News about mathematicians studying how well different voting procedures capture the will of the voter.