Let me just clarify a few things I may have left vague, or add a few things that I may have omitted, when I replied to Tobin about margins & standards. First, Hugh, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble. I told you why Young fails our standards & criteria. Though those violations have truncation & order-reversal as their mechanisms (and truncation seems to happen in every rank-balloting election), truncation & order-reversal are important only as mechanisms of failure rather than as primary standards. So it's missing the point to direct the discussion to the mechanism while ignoring the primary standards. You can disagree about how Young or Condorcet does with regard to those standards, or you can explicitly say why your standard is more important to you (and exactly what it is), and, why it should be more important to us. But if you're going to argue for Young vs Condorcet, don't dodge the standards issue. As Demorep has pointed out, Arrow, and Gibbard & Satterthwaite have pointed out, in their own way, that there's no perfect method, if we're talking about methods that only use 1 balloting and whose only input is a ranking from each voter. Methods of that type aren't the only kind. Steve & I have proposed several enhancements that make much better methods possible. Still, methods allowed by that limitation, which I'll call "simple methods", are the basis for the enhanced methods that Steve & I proposed here. Since no simple method can be perfect, let's not attack Condorcet(EM) because it isn't perfect. Order reversal can be a problem under certain conditions that probably aren't relevant to public political elections? Sure, no method is perfect. Conceivably someone could benefit from insincerely ranking his top choices equal? Sure, no method's perfect. But, though this is beside the point, as I said at the beginning of this letter, since standards are the real issue, I'd like to reply to a few especially unreasonable criticisms of Condorcet based on order-reversal and incentive to rank equally. No, I'm not going to repeat the order-reversal discussion that I recently posted. Hugh said that, one shouldn't be concerned about Young having a truncation problem when Condorcet(EM) doesn't, becaues both methods have the same order-reversal problem. Well, he implied that their order-reversal problem is the same. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It will sometimes be necessary, with Young, to protect against order-reversal by engaging in _defensive_ order-reversal. By ranking a less-liked alternative over a more-liked one. This is in stark contrast to Condorcet(EM), where it isn't even necessary to rank a less-liked alternative equal to a more-liked one. Yes, yes, I realize that Markus showed an example where voters could benefit by insincerely ranking their top choices equally. But that example was never represented as other than a chaotic natural circular tie. I claim that what happens under those conditions isn't nearly as important when there's a Condorcet winner, a lesser-evil to protect, an LO2E problem for the method to avoid. As Markus agreed, Schlze & Tideman also can give incentive to rank one's top choices equal insincerely. What about Young? Young can force you to insincerely rank your top choices equal in order to protect truncation (innocent or strategic) from defeating a Condorcet winner and electing the truncators' candidate. So it's Young's method, not Condorcet(EM), that has that problem when it can do real harm, when there's an alternative that we'd all agree should win (nearly all of us). So the fact is that Young is the method that has serious problems in the 3 areas that Hugh named: truncation, order-reversal, and incentive to insincerely rank one's top choices equal. But as I said, this is all beside the point. We like Codorcet(EM) (with or without the Smith set) because it meets standards that are important to us and which concern voters. If you want to argue for a different method, show that it's better by our standards, or tell us why we should consider other standards to be more important. As I've said, though, as long as LO2E is so important to voters, it will remain important to electoral reform advocates, I suspect. Young thoroughly fails our standards. Mike
