Using brackets to elect the US president | Hacker News Reader

Using brackets to elect the US president

github.com

How would you seed the candidates?

If you have a random draw instead… people will claim it was rigged to give their preferred candidate a harder run to the final.

Most importantly, you can allocate voters to individual matchups… but you can’t make their political media consumption focus on that matchup.

The seeding mechanism is a work in progress. One approach is to do petitions and take the top 2^n people with the most signatures. We can allow a rather large number of candidates because a bracket is more scalable. Instead of a handful of contenders selected by the parties, we can have hundreds or thousands of contenders who are all given thoughtful consideration.

I think randomizing the matchups is the most fair, because I can't think of any other objective mechanisms. Although I'm open to ideas.

> you can’t make their political media consumption focus on that matchup

Regarding that point, let's say there are 1024 candidates and I am assigned to just vote between Alice and Bob. I can research those 2 very thoroughly and ignore all other information. Likewise, everyone else will thoroughly research the 2 candidates they have to decide between.

Through these pairwise matches, we then narrow down to 512 candidates, then 256, etc...

Randomising the matchups is a terrible idea, because candidates will claim that the matchups have been fixed, and you won’t be able to refute that in a way that convinces most people.

> Likewise, everyone else will thoroughly research the 2 candidates they have to decide between.

Hahaha no.

I’m sure you’re very conscientious and would do this. You are not typical.

I agree that most people are not conscientious and have little incentive to research candidates thoroughly! That's precisely why each voter should research 2 candidates.

The alternative is that every voter has to analyze all candidates (this is the case in our current system)

In the current American system, most voters only research the top two candidates, if that. (i.e. they don’t vote in the primaries.)

Alaska seems to have got voters to consider the top four, that seems like an approach worth rolling out more widely.

Indeed, in America most voters only research two candidates. That's a big problem because the best person to be president is probably neither Biden nor Trump.

A bracket would allow us to process thousands of candidates while only requiring each individual to research 2 candidates.

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