Executive Voting
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I figure that people may be getting tired of the same old problems so here is a new one which I call "Executive Voting".
There is a commonly used process for multiwinner selection in board rooms of major companies. Everyone gets x post-its and initiatives the company will invest in are written on a whiteboard. Each executive can apply their post-its in whatever quantity to however many initiatives they they like. Thus, each voter can score each initiatives from x to 0, with a limit of total scores across all ideas of x.
This is basically cumulative voting. It has issues that are well known. There is a reasons why they do not just go to a standard Hare Quota fulfilling system. The winner calculations need to be fast and clear. The calculational effort is put on the voter at the time of voting which we normally want to avoid. There are a few more differences to political voting which could maybe be exploited.
- There are only a dozen people at most doing this
- Multiple rounds are easy to do
- Voting is public.
So the question is "What is a better system for doing this which does not require calculations". If we could find a way to implement a cardinal multiwinner system in excel then perhaps we could get adoption but until then lets stick with post-its (pun intended).
My solution would be a simple variation on Distributed Voting. The post-its are put out as usual but instead of just taking the top W winners, we eliminate the worst and redistribute the post-its.
Example:
Assume 10 Executives and 20 initiatives where we want the top 5. I think it makes sense to give each executive 10 post-its so that if one executive puts all 10 on one initiative they cannot be beat by an initiative all others put one on. The executives distribute their 10 post-its on the whiteboard. The lowest is eliminated and the post its are given back to the people who put them down to be redistributed. This is done until only 5 remain. It is done in full view giving strategic advantage to those who are redistributing.This has no surplus handling so it will not pass the Hare Quota criterion but it is better than Cumulative voting.
Any thoughts? Any better system suggestions? Anybody know excel well enough to program SSS or Allocated score into it?
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It's practical to put Score Voting in a spreadsheet (Excel or its imitators).
If I recall correctly, Clay Shentrup got some city council to use Score for evaluating different "initiatives." This seems as though it would have about the same considerations as the corporate decisionmaking you are talking about.
Score takes all opinions into consideration. I think it would probably work pretty well. However, your redistribution idea sounds to me as though it will probably also do well enough for these purposes.
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@Jack-Waugh I think you are talking about Bloc Score which would be easy to tabulate in excel. However, we want a system which gets a stable winner set. I do not know how to do any of the standard ones in excel in a simple way. I wonder what system Clay implemented. It might have been RRV.