Hello Dave et al, On Aug 13, 2005, at 06:16, Dave Ketchum wrote:
I __do__ get to express my n x (n-1) / 2 pairwise preferences (part or all, as I as a voter choose). I just am forced to be consistent. If I vote A>B and B>Z, then I have voted A>Z. If there is a C for which I have given no explicit specification, then my above partial vote implies A>C, B>C, and Z>C.
Few observations about the ability to express the n x (n-1) / 2 preferences:
1) It would be quite easy to remove the rule of considering unranked candidates to be ranked last. This could of course lead to unwanted results like the most unknown and uninteresting candidate winning the election. For this reason it is good that by default unranked(/unknown) candidates are considered to be less preferred than the ranked ones. In principle it would be ok to allow those voters that know what they are doing to express their opinions also more widely, e.g. a>b>c[cut] (which means that unlisted candidates are not ranked last) or 2) a>b>others>c. The latter option introduces the risk of people ranking widely the strongest competitors of their favourite candidate last, even though that normally doesn't do them much good (would e.g. lead to election of some unknown candidate in the case of three major candidates).
3) It would be also possible to allow circular rankings like a>b>c>a (mentioning "a" twice means that the intention is to describe a loop). Consistent voters do not normally have such looped opinions I guess, but they could be used for strategic or counter strategic reasons. (I don't however want to encourage this kind of voting since I think that voting methods that use strategies and counter strategies extensively are most probably not good enough to be used in normal public elections anyway.)
4) One option would be to allow candidates to be grouped. This could be useful if the number of candidates is large. One could vote for example Bush>Gore>Reagan>Republicans>Democrats>Greens ("Republicans" will be interpreted here as "other Republican candidates than Bush and Reagan" etc.).
Allowing individual Republican candidates to be ranked below the generic "Republicans" item could be banned even if such use of group entries would be allowed otherwise. This is to avoid the negative effects discussed in case 2. It may be better to force voters to list all republican candidates if they want to place one of them last. In this way they are at least forced to see what kind of (maybe even less wanted and totally unknown) candidates they are ranking above the candidate they want to rank last, and probability of "unintended stupid votes" would probably decrease.
5) Yet another way of voting would be to use fragmented votes. One could vote Bush>Reagan;Gore>Clinton, which means that Bush is preferred to Reagan and Gore is preferred to Clinton but the voter has not indicated anything about if (s)he prefers Bush to Gore or the other way around, Bush to Clinton etc. I think voters that would be interested in voting this way would still be quite consistent. It is quite ok to have an opinion "Bush is nicer than Reagan but I don't care if Republicans or Democrats will win (others may decide)".
The current (EM) default rules concerning ranking based ballots are simple, in most cases they offer voters all the tools they need, and they often stop voters making foolish things (like ranking their worst enemies last or electing some unknown candidates). It could be possible to allow e.g. some or all of the five special cases above to be used but I doubt if they would bring more benefits than they do bring problems in the form of making the system more complex and inviting voters to do something stupid. Case 4 could maybe be helpful if the number of candidates is large. I have also sometimes had feelings like the example in case 5 myself. Note that combination of cases 5 and 1 makes it possible to set separately any of the n x (n-1) / 2 pairwise preferences.
Best Regards, Juho ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
