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

[goljerp]

Argh. I wrote a long, well-written post yesterday, even including a hand-created table. And it's not here. Apparently I forgot to hit "post comment".

You ask good questions. My answers were better yesterday, but I'll try...

To your first question, voting for all-but-one candidate is identical to giving a negative vote for that candidate, when the number of candidates, n, is less than or equal to 3. When n is greater than 3, however, the two systems are different. I worked out a scenario with the following breakdown. Imagine there are four candidates, two major party candidates (A and B), one third party candidate who only is viewed positively by that candidate's supporters (C), and one third party candidate who's liked by all (D). Imagine the breakdown of sentiment is as follows: (sorry, no table this time...)
Likes A - 5
Dislikes B - 25
Likes B - 25
Dislikes A - 30
Likes C - 10
Likes D - 5

Furthermore, people who Dislike A will either give a negative vote for A (my system) or will vote for B and D (Xiphias's). Likewise, voters who dislike B will vote for A and D (or against B). In Xiphias's system, the winner is is D, with a 5 vote margin over B. In my system, the winner is C, with a 5 vote margin over D. In a more "traditional" system (with people who dislike a candidate splitting evenly among the other possibilities), B wins by the largest margin (more than 6 votes). In fact, a more likely scenerio would have the people who are against a major party candidate mostly voting for the other major party candidate; when I had 60% do this (and 40% vote for D), B wins even more overwhelmingly.

I freely admit that I had to work a bit to come up with this scenario. But if it's possible, the parties will work to exploit the system to their advantage. Take the Louisiana Senate race as an example; the republicans knew that they didn't have any candidate who could beat the democratic candidate, but that by fielding lots of candidates they could whittle the lead down below 50% and trigger a runoff. (I'm sure the Democrats would do the same thing were they in that situation).

I was able to find more scenarios where both of our alternate systems had the same results. But the thing I like a bit more about mine is that it makes it harder for a third party candidate to campaign and win on nothing but warm fuzzies (Democrat? Republican? Doesn't matter; Vote for Bob, too, he's a nice guy...) One good thing about both our systems is that it would make candidates think twice about negative advertisements, because just getting people to vote against the other guy doesn't help you out that much... Right now, if you get people disgusted enough, they don't vote... but in either of our systems, they might be disgusted enough to go to the polls and vote against someone... which is fine, but helps third party candidates as much as ones from traditional parties. (Note - I have the spreadsheet I used to play around with this if you feel like playing around with it... it was probably getting carried away with the spreadsheet that made me forget about the comment yesterday)

As far as your question: And how does someone who votes for half the candidates have more of an impact than one who votes for just one?

Well, it must have some difference, because otherwise there'd be no difference between our systems. Part of my response is a gut instinct: one person, one vote. Even though my plan is stretching things a bit (as you pointed out, a negative vote for one candidate is equivalent to voting for all-but-one candidate), you can still say with a mostly straight face that each person gets one vote.

Finally, I freely admit that my idea could potentially pose problems (imagine if all those poor folk in Florida who accidentally voted for Buchannan accidentally voted against Gore?