Whom should be elected president? Or more accurately, how would you define that person? Here are some examples:
I) The person who more people would vote for than some other given candidate
II) The person who the most people believe is capable of performing the job
III) The person who people value as the best candidate
IV) The person who would do the best job
(I) Is the definition of “whom should be president” by the single-vote plurality rules system (assuming that it degenerates in to the two party scenario)
(II) Is the definition assigned by the approval voting system
(III) The notion of value means that people are able to attach numbers to candidates in such a way that they can be compared analytically. The P-Norm systems are the simplest version of a voting system that embraces this definition.
(IV) This one is tricky. For a voting system to result in this definition being true, information must be extracted not only from the vote, but from the voter. Context needs to be applied to the information extracted from the voter to give it meaning. If the voters are objective and non-cutthroat, then the simplest way to give context is by an analysis of each voter’s understanding of the problems, ability to understand the effectiveness of possible solutions and knowledge of what solutions are being proposed by what candidates. Or, approximately, knowledge of politics, economics, current events, international relations, technology, gov’t bureaucracy, the Constitution, and the legal system; analytical reasoning, moral philosophical reasoning, financial mathematics reasoning, socio-dynamics reasoning, and comprehension of dynamics of political bodies; and, for each candidate, knowledge of stances on issues, knowledge of proposed plans, knowledge of previous stances and proposed plans, and knowledge of major contributors and supports of the candidates. I have not just proposed a test be given to voters to decide the weight of their votes. All I am saying is that if the goal of an election is to elect the most qualified person, the above attributes of the voters need to be taken in to account. The logical conclusion is that a test should be used to assess these attributes. How to apply the results of the test is tricky, very tricky. It is definitely not a case of person A’s vote’s count 10 times those of person B because person A has the knowledge of a life-time lobbyist. The functions should be non-linear, convex, candidate dependent, and issue dependent. If there is a Nobel-prize winning economist in the booth, and he/she doesn’t know anything about foreign relations but is giving all his/her points to a single candidate based on issues of taxation and financial reform, give that guy 5 gold stars. If people are voting on what they know, their votes should count more. If people are voting on what they don’t know, their votes should count much less, even if they are very smart. Some people may say that this is getting too complicated. I say, if you are electing the leader of the free world, it should be complicated. Doesn’t it seem just a little too easy to walk in to a booth once every four years and check “Republican” or “Democrat”? Seriously.
Yes, huge disparities in voting weights need to be avoided. But just because people’s votes are given different weights doesn’t mean that some people’s votes won’t count. There doesn’t need to be 10:1 or 100:1 weight ratios. An effective system may have a maximal ratio of 1.1:1 (but the important question is: is this MORE effective than what we have now? What about the 1.001:1 case?). But I can assure you, if there was a healthy selection of candidates, there are a whole lot of people 5 times more qualified than I to elect a president.
LCM – v.1.0
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