I'm not sure how a "negative vote" would work. Certainly, a person's
popularity or job approval can be ranked on a scale like +4 to -4. In a
sense, you can vote for or against something up to 4 times. Then you
can find some "average" job approval, or simply total the people who
gave an overall positive rating.
However, the standard notion of democracy is "1 person, 1 vote". You
are choosing whom YOU want most. The vote isn't saying how much you
like your candidate (or dislike other candidates). The goal is to get a
majority (or sometimes just a plurality) of people to agree on a
candidate. 51 lukewarm supporters of Candidate A outweigh 49 rabid
supporters of Candidate B.
The BC system is basically holding the run-off election at the same time
as the original election. It's not showing degrees of support for
various candidates. I fear that if you get away from "one person, one
vote" then you open Pandora's box.
Tim Folkerts
-----Original Message-----
From: Forum for Physics Educators [mailto:PHYS-L@list1.ucc.nau.edu] On
Behalf Of Strickert, Rick
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 8:06 AM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Re: A novel voting system
The proposed BC voting system still only provides for voting a
*preference* ranking (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4). It does not allow for a vote
ranking against candidates one does not prefer (e.g., -1, -2, -3, -4)