For an even more complicated voting method… I think this one is cool. I think I’d probably advocated for one of the ones mentioned in this post, since I think simplicity does matter a lot (unfortunately). Still, can’t resist mentioning this extra cool one.
Minimum Partial Consensus Voting
Fair group decisions via non-deterministic proportional consensus
Jobst Heitzig, Forest W. Simmons and Sara M. Constantino Springer Nature 2021
pretty great at finding a good, fair decision that will satisfy the majority of voters the majority of the time
can automatically find better solutions than would be immediately obvious
cons:
complicated, so a harder system for voters to trust than a simpler system like approval voting (also harder to explain, to operate as the electoral body, etc.)
involves some randomness in outcome. I think this is a good thing, but some people find it upsetting to have a voting method which is nondeterministic given a set of input votes. Indeed, you need a trustworthy overseeable auditable source of randomness pre-agreed upon. Something like the 7th digit precision of celsius temperature reading at a specific weather station, that everyone will be able to check for themselves and which is protected from tampering.
For an even more complicated voting method… I think this one is cool. I think I’d probably advocated for one of the ones mentioned in this post, since I think simplicity does matter a lot (unfortunately). Still, can’t resist mentioning this extra cool one.
Minimum Partial Consensus Voting
Fair group decisions via non-deterministic proportional consensus
Jobst Heitzig, Forest W. Simmons and Sara M. Constantino Springer Nature 2021
paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3751225
code: https://github.com/pik-gane/vodle
pros:
pretty great at finding a good, fair decision that will satisfy the majority of voters the majority of the time
can automatically find better solutions than would be immediately obvious
cons:
complicated, so a harder system for voters to trust than a simpler system like approval voting (also harder to explain, to operate as the electoral body, etc.)
involves some randomness in outcome. I think this is a good thing, but some people find it upsetting to have a voting method which is nondeterministic given a set of input votes. Indeed, you need a trustworthy overseeable auditable source of randomness pre-agreed upon. Something like the 7th digit precision of celsius temperature reading at a specific weather station, that everyone will be able to check for themselves and which is protected from tampering.