Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem is quite important in the realm of public choice. Essentially, it says that you can’t get an aggregate preference ordering that has the sorts of nice properties you might want such a thing to have [here’s a better explanation than I could give]. Any number of solutions to this problem have been advocated. Many of them violate various aspects of Arrow’s theorem: A Borda count violates the IIA principle and plurality voting violates transitivity, etc.

Pairwise voting schemes seem to be one of the better ways to deal with this. Condorcet’s Method is usually a pretty good solution. The only problem is that it doesn’t always produce a winner. Yeah. However, I do think that there’s a great opportunity to have the relatively low participation in ASUO elections not arrive at such a bad outcome.

I think the Executive race should be set up as a pairwise competition. So, the ballot for this year’s race would’ve looked like:

Ben/Diana VS Adam/Mena
Ben/Diana VS Adrian
Ben/Diana VS Ben Brown
Ben/Diana VS Tyler
Ben/Diana VS Nick/Joe

Adam/Mena VS Adrian
Adam/Mena VS Ben Brown
Adam/Mena VS Tyler
Adam/Mena VS Nick/Joe

Adrian VS Ben Brown
Adrian VS Tyler
Adrian VS Nick/Joe

Ben Brown VS Tyler
Ben Brown VS Nick/Joe

Tyler VS Nick/Joe

That is a rather tedious list of choices for kids to make, but on duckweb it shouldn’t be that hard to set up appropriately. Further, it would eliminate the need for a primary and a general elections, provided that there was a Condrocet winner present in the set. The general elections, if needed, could be a simple majority count or, alternatively, any number of dispute resolution methods could be used. I’m not sure which one of those possibilities would really be best. The reason I think that the ASUO is the perfect place to try this sort of thing should be obvious: in majority voting a small turnout can have a profound effect on an election; further, majority voting violates both IIA and transitivity. The ease of implementation is also a factor to consider, as voting here is all electronic and should be relatively easy to modify. Just something to think about, I shall now return to the nerd cave. You know, the one devoid of ladies.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2004 at 11:46 by Timothy and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.