[EL] election law, baseball, voting rights, ballot format, Curt Schilling, political science, the fiscal cliff

[Rob Richie]

FairVote this year did a fun little side project involving bringing our
structural/rule-oriented analysis to sports, with two featured proposals
involving a potential college football playoff (and voting rules for
selecting teams) and a better way to vote for teams for the NCAA playoffs.
We had some blogposts on other topics too -- see http://FairSportsRules.com

In the case of the Hall of Fame rules, they seem reasonable to me. I'm not
a fan of approval voting in political elections, given the implications of
not being able to indicate support for a compromise choice without it
counting against your favorite. But for this voting, it makes sense. You
can have more than winner. A player also has up to 15 cracks at winning, so
voters have a chance to see how they're doing and how close they are to
winning -- meaning some real deliberation can happen year to hear.

Ultimately, you get in if more than 75% of the voters think you below, with
10 votes seeming plenty to me for keeping viable candidate in play. In
fact, in the last Hall of Fame voting, the voters on average only used 5
votes.

Speaking of interesting voting rules, the Oscars nominate nearly all
categories with the choice voting (single transferable vote) form of
proportional representation - see our http://www.OscarVotes123.com. It goes
back to the 1930s, as the Academy of Motion Pictures realized that having a
fair nomination process meant that more people would have a stake in the
outcome. They then have used plurality voting in picking winners, as it
promotes upsets -- e.g., winners who may not have majority support. But it
decided to go to instant runoff voting once it began nominating more than
five motion pictures.

- Rob Richie



On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Edward Still <still at votelaw.com> wrote:

> And it is a first past the post election with the post set at 75%.
> http://baseballhall.org/hall-famers/rules-election/bbwaa
>
> Edward Still
> Edward Still Law Firm LLC
> 130 Wildwood Parkway STE 108-304
> Birmingham AL 35209
> still at votelaw.com
> www.votelaw.com/blog
> www.edwardstill.com
> www.linkedin.com/in/edwardstill <http://www.linkedin.com/edwardstill>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 3:52 AM, Mark Rush <markrush7983 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Great stuff.  Cheers to all.
>>
>>
>>
>> http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8777793/real-problem-hall-fame-10-player-limit-votes
>>
>>
>> --
>> Mark Rush
>>
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>>
>
>
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Rob Richie
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