Matthias Urlichs wrote:
Hi,
Nathanael Nerode:
Yow, Debian uses a ludicrously complicated voting system.
How was it chosen in the first place anyway?
Voting algorithms should obey some stringent anti-politicking and
plain-common-sense restrictions.
See http://electionmethods.org/evaluation.htm for one list of such
criteria. Condorcet is the only voting method which satisfies (almost) all
of them.
The site's claim that Approval voting doesn't satisfy the Condorcet
Criterion is facile and inaccurate. With approval voting, for every
preference order there are multiple 'cut-offs' which can be chosen by
voters based on strength of preference and other criteria, without in
fact creating insincere votes. This isn't even analyzed.
The Condorcet proponents at the site claim that approval voting "doesn't
allow a voter to express his full preferences". For that matter,
neither does Condorcet, since there's no way to express "A better than
anyone else, B & C equal preference, but please not D". This causes
people to overspecify their votes (same problem in Instant Runoffs, of
course). In approval voting, given a sufficiently large group of people
with these preferences, some will vote A only, others will vote A,B,C,
with the difference depending on the level of hatred of D. *shrug*
The Strategy-Free Criterion is an excellent case for Condorcet, but it
*only* applies to *majority* voting. Preliminary analysis indicates
that Condorcet doesn't have natural sensible behavior for supermajority
voting, or mixed supermajority-majority options. (Approval voting
handles both quite neatly.)
I won't push my own views any further; this isn't really meant to start
a long argument over preferred election methods, which are as bad as OS
wars. But thanks for pointing out the website which you made your
decision from; it's all was I really asking for.
--Nathanael
