Thanks to many of you for your comments. I've posted my election reform proposal -- based roughly on Steve Eppley's Maximize Affirmed Majorities (MAM) -- which I'm now calling Majority Preference Voting, at:
http://radicalcentrism.org/majority_voting.html
The name MPV is an attempt to describe what is happening from both the -voters- and the -counters- perspective (unlike most of our names, which focus only on the counting perspective). And, while it is Condorcet-compatible, that name (French as it is! :-) doesn't appear except in the footnotes. The goal is for this page to be comprehensible to 'mere mortals' with no prior experience in voting systems. That means having an approachable marketing name as opposed to the intimidating technical name (like aspirin vs. acetylsalicylic acid) -- something the IRV proponents understand quite well.
At the same time, I want the description to be technically correct for experts (such as yourselves) to comment on. To do that, I need to make sure I'm properly referring to the existing systems, especially in the footnotes. To wit:
MPV could also be called Majority Maximization Voting, as it is based on a deterministic form of Steve Eppley's Maximize Affirmed Majorities (MAM) system, which in turn is a variant of Tideman's well-studied Ranked Pairs algorithm for finding the pairwise winner (also known as the Condorcet winner. This particular Condorcet-compatible variant was apparently first proposed by Mike Ossipoff, and recommended to me by Eric Gorr
This is a rather awkward paragraph, reflecting my rudimentary understanding of the situation. Could one of you experts on "Maximize Affirmed Majorities" review my algorithm, to determine whether in fact it is a clone-independent, deterministic variation of MAM? Is there a better way to characterize this than 'MAM-d'? And whom should I credit for it?
Of course, any other comments or corrections are always welcome. I've started thinking about how to rewrite my Python script to implement this, but would prefer to know that the algorithm itself is sound.
Thanks in advance,
- Ernie P.
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