On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 02:50:55PM +0200, Markus Schulze wrote: > There is only one election. In this election, 38 voters prefer E to C, > 42 voters prefer D to E and 24 voters prefer D to C. Manoj's May 15 > proposal would choose candidate E. My proposal would choose candidate D. > > But --and this is what I have to criticize-- _if there was a second election_ > then (simply because of the fact that in the first election the default > option has been changed from candidate C to candidate E) in this second > election the winner according to Manoj's May 15 proposal would be changed > from candidate E to candidate D _without having any voter to change his > mind_.
Um... I already addressed this (your response was "There is only one election"). I'm not sure how to talk about that hypothetical case if you're going to be saying there is no such case. How should I approach this issue so that you can understand me? > In my opinion, this is a disadvantage of Manoj's May 15 proposal because > this means that Manoj's May 15 proposal leads to unnecessarily frequent > changes of the status quo. Given that elections failing on quorum are so rare, I don't see this as a significant issue. I'd be much more concerned about adopting (in those rare circumstances) rules that not many people think were worth adopting. The problem I have with your method is: when people can't agree on the which options are better than which other options, it's entirely possible to pick an option which most everyone agrees to be worse than doing nothing. I see this as a significant potential problem in situations where most people don't care to vote. On the other hand, if you could show that the May 15 mechanism violates monotonicity, then I'd be opposed to it. -- Raul
