[priceyicey]

Acceptance Voting:
Rather than a contest of A vs B, with C etc as possible spoilers, all elections are essentially constests of A vs not A, B vsnot B, C vs not C, etc. Of a given field of candidates, the voter selects all that are acceptable, and the most accepted candidate wins. Our current system doesn't always come up with the 'wrong answer', perhaps better worded as 'not the best answer', but it certainly Can, as shown with examples below.

Case #1 - Standard, 2-candidate race. 20% like A and dislike B. 30% like B and dislike A. The remaining 50% think either would do a good job, but when forced to actively select one or the other, divide 40-10 towards A. A wins the election 60-40. And 70% of the people are pleased with the outcome, thinking A will do a good job. However 80% would have been happy had B been elected.

Case #2: 4-way race (easily expanded to n-way). 15% like A and only A. 15% like B and only B. 8% like C and only C. 5% like D and only D. 10% like A or B and split evenly in actual voting. 25% like A,C, or D, but when forced to pick just one pick A, as A has the best chance of winning. 22% like like B or C, but when forced to pick just one pick B, as B has the best chance of winning. Under our current system, A wins with 45% (or 52% if one ignores C & D and/or their supporters don't bother with elections where their votes effectively don't count anyway), and 45% of the people are pleased. The majority of the people are Not pleased and think A will do a poor job. If one were allowed to use acceptance voting, C would win, with 55% pleased.

Acceptance voting has several added benefits for voters. Because acceptance voting eliminates the lesser of two evils paradigm, more candidates will come forward. (I recall one election where I was Pro-X and my choices were Anti-X and Very Anti-X.) Further, it allows voters to vote for what they want rather than a single best fit: "Anybody but that @$$ B", "Anybody who's pro-X and pro-Y", "any female", etc. Lastly, it also cuts down on inappropriate negative campaigning. If you run ads where A calls B names, B will lose votes, A might lose votes, and C, D, etc will stay the same or even gain, making true mud-slinging a losing proposition.


Reapportionment:

Couldn't find the link, so I'll rewrite it. A commission will be set up to score redistricting maps submitted by outside parties. The scoring criteria should be established Well in advance, both to prevent using them to facilitate gerrymandering and to allow any submitters to score their own maps and, if necessary, point out fraudulent winners. To prevent flooding the commision with duplicate or spurious maps, a submission fee would be charged. ($1000?) A portion (half?) of this fee would go towards commission expenses. To encourage valid submissions, offset the expense of valid submissions, and reward the efforts of those who create the best map, a portion of the total fees collected (25%?) would be divided among the submitters of maps that meet certain minimum requirements (50th percentile, with a single rebate divided appropriately in cases of essentially duplicate submissions?), and a portion (25%?) would go to the submitter of the winning map.

My initial thoughts on scoring are that they would be based on the sum of the weighted lengths of all district boundaries. The following multipliers will be applied as appropriate, with compound multipliers allowed: 1.1 if within a municipal boundary, 0.95 if following an existing district boundary, 0.90 if following a 'natural boundary' defined as a municipal border, county border, or center of a river, navigable waterway, or divided highway of at least 4 lanes. (Low scores win, obviously.)