Here's something I posted
today on the Condorcet list.
Forest
From: Simmons, Forest
Sent: Tue 8/30/2005 1:36 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Recent History Perspective on Condorcet Methods
As most of you know, the
Election Methods group has been at the forefront of promoting both Condorcet and
Approval for the past ten years. I have followed it fairly closely for the
past five years.
The main serious Condorcet proposals over
the past ten years have been Beatpath, Ranked Pairs, and MinMax which I
have listed in increasing order of simplicity and decreasing order of
performance. More recently we could insert River between Ranked Pairs and
MinMax. The paradox remains; simplicity and performance are diametrically
opposed.
To make matters worse, there has always
been an unresolved controversy over whether it is better to measure defeat
strength (a concept used by all four methods) in terms of margins or winning
votes.
The Condorcet proponents on the EM listserv
have gone round and round on these issues, while never coming to a concensus on
them.
However, recently Jobst showed that if one
measures defeat strength by total approval (of the victor in the pairwise
defeat) then all four of these competing methods coalesce into one
method.
This fact would seem to resolve the
controversy unless it turned out that total approval was not a good way to
measure defeat strength.
However, it seems to be better than winning
votes or margins. The defensive properties of winning votes that are
normally obtained by "defensive truncation" can usually (if not always) be
obtained by raising the approval cutoff instead of truncating the
rankings.
Therefore, I suggest that we adopt
MinMax(Total Approval) as the Condorcet proposal.
In my opinion the main questions that
remain are
(1) ballot style
(2) how best to describe the method
and sell it.
(3) including which of its many names
to use.
Of all the names, I think that DMC is the
best!
Forest
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