James G-A replying to Russ
My first comment is that this proposal is significantly more complicated than my (or Kevin's) "Ranked Approval Voting" (RAV) proposal, which simply drops the least approved candidate until a CW is found.
Yes, I suppose the tally is harder to explain, although the interface is identical. However, you've not responded to the points I made in the last e-mail about strategic vulnerability in your RAV method. http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2005-March/015226.html
Secondly, I find it interesting that you define the magnitude of a defeat in step 3 as, "the number of voters who place A above their approval cutoff and B below their approval cutoff." This is equivalent to using the difference of Approval scores for the two candidates (with a constant offset).
No, it isn't. You can have a very strong defeat even when a candidate
with a higher approval score beats a candidate with a lower approval
score. You seem to be imagining that I wrote "the number of voters who
place A above their approval cutoff and B below it, ***minus the number of voters who place B
above their approval cutoff and A below it***." But the second part of
that sentence isn't in my proposal. This creates a world of difference,
and that difference has important anti-strategic properties. Again, I urge
you to read the cardinal pairwise paper and the strategy example posting. http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/cwp13.htm
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2004-September/013936.html
James,
I had misread your defeat magnitude as "the number of voters who place A above their approval cutoff plus the number who place B below their approval cutoff." Now I see that is not what you wrote, though the grammatical distinction is very subtle.
As far as I am concerned, your AWP proposal is far too compicated for public acceptance. I suggest you try the test I suggested earlier today: spend five or ten minutes explaining AWP to several people, then see how many can paraphrase it back accurately. That means they must be able to explain to a programmer all the rules that define the method in detail.
Your last step is to revert to Ranked Pairs or some such defeat-dropping scheme, which is already too complicated all by itself.
The defeat-dropping stuff is necessary in ordinal-only methods because they have no cardinal information. I don't understand why you want to retain those methods when simpler and more effective methods are available.
If you simply used the winning approval score rather than the difference, I think your proposal would be equivalent to RAV.
I don't use the difference.
Elsewhere you have advocated using "winning votes" rather than "margins" for the pairwise measure off Condorcet defeat magnitude, but here you seem to be advocating "margins" for the defeat magnitude when it is based on approval scores. Why the difference? What is the advantage of using "margins" in your proposal?
This is exactly where you are misunderstanding my proposal. Cardinal pairwise and approval-weighted pairwise both use winning rating differentials rather than marginal rating differentials. That's what makes these methods interesting. Please read the references I give you.
More importantly, does the advantage, if there is one, justify the additional complexity of your proposal? I must tell you that I'll be surprised if it does. Then again, it won't be the first time I've been surprised.
Yes, the benefits do justify the additional subtlety of the method. Because approval-weighted pairwise is more strategy resistant than RAV.
No, I don't think the benefits, if any, justify the additional complexity because they will prevent your method from ever getting used. Would you rather half a loaf of bread or zero full loaves?
--Russ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
