Re SODA: The setup appears to actively encourage candidates to commit to a preference order. Naively, I would prefer a modification along the following lines; could you comment?
(1) Candidates may make promises about their preference order among other candidates; but this is not enforced (just like ordinary pre-election promises). (2) The elimination phase runs over several weeks. In this time, candidates may choose to drop out and redistribute their delegated votes. But mainly, the expected drop-outs will negotiate with expected survivors, in order to get at least some of their policies implemented (with the same kind of enforcement as regular pre-election promises). Hence, this phase is “coalition building”.
An interesting final phase (3), in order to encourage compromise / beneficial trade would be something like: Once we are down to candidates with > 25% approval, we randomize the result. The probability of a candidate to win could be something like the square, or third power, of his approval. The threshold of 25% is in order to prevent complete crackpots from winning the election, and might need to be even more brutal. The randomization serves to allow the two remaining highest approval platforms to negotiate a compromise, weighted by their chance of winning the final lottery. In practice, one would hope that the randomization is never applied: That is, the highest candidate makes enough concessions in order to make the second candidate agree to drop out.
This way, we preserve minority rights, and get a pretty good outcome if the candidates are actually reasonable and trustworthy parties (instead of persons) that are capable of committing to modify the values they will espouse once in power.
Obvious disadvantages are (1) negotiation skill and integrity become essential (integrity in the christiano sense: You need to be predictable in which promises you will break under which contingencies), because the winner is decided though coalition building, rather than voting; and (2) some voters might object to shady backroom deals being the explicit procedure, and (3) randomization may make losers very pissed if the dice are ever rolled (which hopefully is never, because of positive-sum trades).
You can obviously combine this with a 3-2-1 system (where only candidates reaching at least 50% “OK” votes are eligible, and otherwise “Good” votes are counted; if no candidate receives 50% OK, then the election is repeated, under the assumption that Belgium is better than Trump, i.e. better a constitutional crisis and government by interim civil servants than government by crazy elected officials).
edit: I forgot to mention the other big advantage of the probabilistic phase (3): Enforcing continuity, i.e. preventing small factions from gaining oversized influence by playing kingmaker.
The point of SODA isn’t so much as a serious proposal; I prefer 3-2-1 for that, mostly because it’s easier to explain. SODA’s advantage is that, under “reasonable” domain restrictions, it is completely strategy-free. (Using my admittedly-idiosyncratic definition of “reasonable”, it’s actually the only system I know of that is. It’s a non-trivial proof, so I don’t expect that there are other proposals that I’m unaware of that do this.) Forcing candidates to pre-commit to a preference order is a key part of proving that property.
I do see the point of your proposal of having post-election negotiations — it gives real proportional power to even losing blocs of voters, and unifies that power in a way that helps favor cooperative equilibria. Some of that same kind of thinking is incorporated into PLACE voting, though in that method the negotiations still happen pre-election. Even if post-election negotiations are a good idea, I’m skeptical that a majority of voters would want a system that “forced” them to trust somebody that much, so I think keeping it as a pre-election process helps make a proposal more viable.
Re SODA: The setup appears to actively encourage candidates to commit to a preference order. Naively, I would prefer a modification along the following lines; could you comment?
(1) Candidates may make promises about their preference order among other candidates; but this is not enforced (just like ordinary pre-election promises). (2) The elimination phase runs over several weeks. In this time, candidates may choose to drop out and redistribute their delegated votes. But mainly, the expected drop-outs will negotiate with expected survivors, in order to get at least some of their policies implemented (with the same kind of enforcement as regular pre-election promises). Hence, this phase is “coalition building”.
An interesting final phase (3), in order to encourage compromise / beneficial trade would be something like: Once we are down to candidates with > 25% approval, we randomize the result. The probability of a candidate to win could be something like the square, or third power, of his approval. The threshold of 25% is in order to prevent complete crackpots from winning the election, and might need to be even more brutal. The randomization serves to allow the two remaining highest approval platforms to negotiate a compromise, weighted by their chance of winning the final lottery. In practice, one would hope that the randomization is never applied: That is, the highest candidate makes enough concessions in order to make the second candidate agree to drop out.
This way, we preserve minority rights, and get a pretty good outcome if the candidates are actually reasonable and trustworthy parties (instead of persons) that are capable of committing to modify the values they will espouse once in power.
Obvious disadvantages are (1) negotiation skill and integrity become essential (integrity in the christiano sense: You need to be predictable in which promises you will break under which contingencies), because the winner is decided though coalition building, rather than voting; and (2) some voters might object to shady backroom deals being the explicit procedure, and (3) randomization may make losers very pissed if the dice are ever rolled (which hopefully is never, because of positive-sum trades).
You can obviously combine this with a 3-2-1 system (where only candidates reaching at least 50% “OK” votes are eligible, and otherwise “Good” votes are counted; if no candidate receives 50% OK, then the election is repeated, under the assumption that Belgium is better than Trump, i.e. better a constitutional crisis and government by interim civil servants than government by crazy elected officials).
edit: I forgot to mention the other big advantage of the probabilistic phase (3): Enforcing continuity, i.e. preventing small factions from gaining oversized influence by playing kingmaker.
The point of SODA isn’t so much as a serious proposal; I prefer 3-2-1 for that, mostly because it’s easier to explain. SODA’s advantage is that, under “reasonable” domain restrictions, it is completely strategy-free. (Using my admittedly-idiosyncratic definition of “reasonable”, it’s actually the only system I know of that is. It’s a non-trivial proof, so I don’t expect that there are other proposals that I’m unaware of that do this.) Forcing candidates to pre-commit to a preference order is a key part of proving that property.
I do see the point of your proposal of having post-election negotiations — it gives real proportional power to even losing blocs of voters, and unifies that power in a way that helps favor cooperative equilibria. Some of that same kind of thinking is incorporated into PLACE voting, though in that method the negotiations still happen pre-election. Even if post-election negotiations are a good idea, I’m skeptical that a majority of voters would want a system that “forced” them to trust somebody that much, so I think keeping it as a pre-election process helps make a proposal more viable.