Delegate Selection Plan Update
I wrote up as an article my April blog post on the weird hybrid proportional representation + ranked-choice voting kludge of an electoral system that the US Democratic Party introduced in its 2020 presidential nomination process—or at least it's in article-inspired form. I had to introduce a (to my knowledge) new notion of non-monotonicity to study it and I show in proposition 1 that this definition captures what I think is the natural thing. The embedded notion of delegate-allocation preference is very similar to the idea of majorization in math so it's not really original or surprising in any way. I submitted the article to SSRN on September 2, but for some reason only the abstract has been (intermittently) appearing there. It's not really an arXiv-appropriate topic, so I think this zombie corporate noise machine—SSRN is apparently run by Elsevier 💀—is where the preprint is supposed to go. (I'm not sure it qualifies as a "preprint" as I haven't really found a good free and open access e-journal in the field. It will obviously need to be rewritten once I identify a target journal, and I'll probably run some more simulations. The journal that hosts most of the discussion on this electoral system charges 2,000 bucks to publish an article lmao. Lina Khan, this sounds like a junk fee, and it sounds like these journals have somehow convinced...social scientists of all people to waste so much public and donor money on these junk fees that my right to honest services is being infringed upon.)
On September 14, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee determined that Democrats Abroad's Delegate Selection Plan (DSP) is in "conditional compliance" with the rules and that the ranked-choice voting for the presidential primary should be removed. Since then, some folks have reached out to read the article draft/"preprint" and SSRN still says a modification is under review, so voilà, the draft I sent to SSRN.
The document is available here.
If you have any questions or comments or want to coauthor/collaborate, please reach out! This was something fun to work on during some downtime this summer, but I can't really think about it now as I have a thesis to finish writing.