@cse4129 no problem, that’s what forums are for! Your idea is good, it just happens it was already invented. It also does have some problems/failed properties, though (like any method).

For example, it isn’t Condorcet compliant or Condorcet loser compliant, and it fails participation. It doesn’t satisfy independence of clones either, and it fails various other binary criteria. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad method, but it means it can occasionally produce pathological results. It satisfies the majority winner and majority loser criterion, and later-no-help.

There’s a “mind map” I made some years ago of some of the best-known/characterized voting systems in terms of the binary criteria they satisfy and fail in that discussion above. Probably nowadays I would make a better one (I might at some point). I should have done something like PCA or a graph embedding, but I tried to make that map before I knew about those analysis methods.

@cfrank This is about Ranked Choice Voting, ie Instant Runoff Voting. Not ranked ballots in general.

PSA: Ranked voting is a great umbrella term. "Ranked Choice Voting" is only an umbrella term for IRV and STV. It does not and never has referred to other ranked methods outside that family. It was explicitly coined for IRV by Fan Francisco, who thought the term "instant" was misleading for voter education since the results are not instant with IRV.

At some point Equal Vote started incorrectly sharing something to the contrary, but we were wrong.

It's really important to differentiate from Ranked Choice Voting, so it's really important that we stop using the term for other ranked methods.

@jack-waugh I’m imagining the decisions could be automated by making assumptions about the group utility and computing the mixed strategy Nash equilibria of the game.

The deepest problem there is the utility function, since it would be an aggregate utility of some kind that we would have to presume emerged somehow from the individual utility functions of the voters that constitute the group.

All of that is definitely questionable, I don’t believe in utility functions, but I’m unsure how else to proceed in putting this kind of situation into an analytical framework.