> > Or: the addition of 22 people voting against A caused A to win. In my > > opinion, this is very wrong.
On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 09:38:46PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > Why ? I answered this in the message you were responding to, immediately following the paragraph you quoted. > You are trying to use the quorum for something it is not for. I disagree. > A quorum (in traditional elections) is just a mean of ensuring that > enough people are present so that the election is meaningfull. And that's what I'm using quorum for. Except my proposal for quorum satisfys the monotonicity criterion (http://www.electionmethods.org/evaluation.html#MC) while the mechanism you're proposing would have cases where an option wins *because* of votes against it. > Also, there is no way you are going to be able to explicitly exploit > this weakness you pointed out, unless you are the project voting > secretary (or whatever it is called) or you did manage to get access to > the already voted ballot. I'm concerned about the effects of lack-of-interest. I don't want people deciding to not submit a ballot because of the chance that they'll cause something they're opposed to to win. If this happens even once it will be very upsetting. > Let's say you are against option A, and you have two choices : > > o not vote, in hope the quorum will not be met. > > o vote against A (or DA in this case). > > if you do not vote, like you suppose, you can only do this in a > meaningfull way if you are sure that the quorum will not be met, which > should not be possible. And if you don't vote and the quorum is met, > then you have one less vote against A, and if A wins, you deserve it. Your argument is valid if quorum is never used. Imagine that quorum is relevant at some point in time: imagine that we have a set of elections which default because they don't meet quorum. At this point: you wouldn't be certain that the some elections will meet quorum. Neither could you be certain that voting against an amendment in some elections would not cause that amendment to win. -- Raul
