On Sat, 27 Mar 2004, Dave Ketchum wrote:
-------- Original Message -------- From: Bart Ingles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: EM List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [EM] Argument for Approval Primaries Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 09:49:40 -0800
It occurs to me that one place where ranked ballot methods are entirely unsuitable is in party primary elections. Here neither the CW nor the SU maximizer are necessarily winnable choices, which seems to moot those criteria. A similar statement applies to any determinate system.
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Disagreed! If a method is "good enough" to select a single winner in the general election, then it must be good enough, and most logical choice, for use in related primaries. While the details are a bit different in primaries, the basic issue is to select the best candidate as seen by the voters.
Suppose that the Democrats use Condorcet to select the candidate that has the best chance of winning against Bush. ["Any Democrat is Better than Bush."]
A Condorcet method might well be the best method to pick such a candidate, if the voters are willing to (and remember to) rank the candidates according to winnability (over Bush) rather than in order of actual perceived merit.
It seems to me that any time a general election without a primary would result in a Smith set intersecting more than one party, then winnability would be the major issue if there were primaries.
Regardless of method, the voters need to be mostly agreed as to goals to expect success.
Assume a candidate with the ability to win the general election AND plans to destroy party goals, and the voters had best look elsewhere, EVEN if that risks losing the election to a less destructive candidate from elsewhere.
Forest
-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026 Do to no one what you would not want done to you. If you want peace, work for justice.
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