scored variants
in congress, there exists a concept called a “poison pill”. after a potentially winning bill is proposed, an amendment to it is proposed, which passes by a majority. the amended bill then fails a majority vote against the status quo.
this is a clever example of game theory is the “poison pill” (or wrecking amendment), in which someone kills the bill by proposing an amendment that’s preferred by a majority to the original bill, but fails by a majority versus the status quo. this is an example of a condorcet cycle. for example:
35% status quo > amendment > original
33% original > status quo > amendment
32% amendment > original > status quoa 65% super-majority prefers the original bill to the status quo (2nd and 3rd rows). so it should pass, right?
well, no. because a 67% majority prefers the amended version to the original bill.
and then a 68% majority prefers the status quo to the amended version.
the fix
a simple fix here is to use a highly spoiler-resistant voting method to evaluate all three bills simultaneously. by far the best combination of accuracy and simplicity is score voting.
but should we really limit to just three options? what if any representative could propose their own variant of the original bill? but then how long would they have to do so?
in general, i propose something like an “anti-arbitrariness rule”. this says that we should generally eschew arbitrary rules like “the vote must happen within one hour” and instead prefer democratic consensus of the group doing the voting.
imagine if the “status quo variant” represents the current state of the law, and gets a maximum score by default. the representatives can manually submit a new vote (an updated set of scores for any of the variants of the bill) whenever they like. the first variant of a newly proposed bill to have a higher total score than the status quo becomes law, and that entire bill and all its variants are frozen. at that point anyone who wants to resurrect that contest is free to do so, by resubmitting their variant as a new bill. but it’s doubtful they’ll arouse much interest given most legislators will see it as a settled matter and prefer to move on to new business.
