Should Mild Preferences Have Equal Weight?

[PokrLikeItsProse]

Number 2 has been proposed before by Lani Guinier, the law professor who Clinton nominated for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. It's been a while since I've read her book Tyranny of the Majority, but I recall that it proposed giving voters multiple votes that they can either case for separate candidates or use to strongly support a few or just one candidate in a general election for multiple seats.

Wikipedia claims that this sort of cumulative voting scheme has been done before, such as in an Alabama county commission where it led to women, blacks, and Republicans winning seats that had previously been held by white male Democrats.

[David Sklansky]

Oh OK. Every once in a while someone thinks of something before I do. So is it a good idea, in theory at least?

[PokrLikeItsProse]

This may be outside your area of interest, but I see problems in the area of political legitimacy.

Democracy isn't about maximizing fairness, it's about maximizing legitimacy while maintaining a satisficing condition of perceived fairness.

Consider case 1, where you suggest letting people vote on a fraction of all possible candidates/issues. What happens if you give a person n votes, and he has equally strong opinions on n+1 issues? Will repeated iterations of this situation cause a sufficient number of people to question the legitimacy of the system and ultimately lead to its abolishment?

Consider case 2, where 49% strongly oppose something, 41% weakly support it, and 10% rabidly support it. I don't know if this is sufficiently similar to your proposed case to be relevant, but I suspect that it is, since it is more probable than the entire majority having weak support for a position. How often will someone be in that 10% who get overruled by the minority's strongly held beliefs before they start questioning the system?

You would see the same question of legitimacy pop up if you proposed the solution of creating a barrier to voting so that people with weakly held opinions are less inclined to vote, a situation which some argue exists today.

[UMTerp]

[ QUOTE ]

One of the problems with democracy is that some idiots vote and some genuises don't.

[/ QUOTE ]

While on the surface, I like both proposals as much or more than our current system, I could definitely see it confusing the aforementioned "idiots" at the voting booth.

For all the stories you read about people getting confused while voting with the current system, I couldn't even imagine the outcry a system like yours would cause.