>A FPP supporter will claim that the FPP winner is the best guess for >best candidate. A Borda supporter will claim that the Borda winner >is the best guess for best candidate. A IRV supporter will claim >that the IRV winner is the best guess for best candidate. Well, I've always said that standards are relative. But I don't carry it to the point of not advocating any criteria or voting systems or saying that some voting systems are better than others, with the understanding that that statement is true for people who agree with me about the importance of the main standards. > >When you now say that a sincere Condorcet winner is a rightful >winner and that therefore a strategy to elect a sincere Condorcet >winner is defensive (even if the used election method doesn't meet >the Condorcet criterion) and should never be punished, then you >judge the heuristic of one election method by demonstrating that >if you use the heuristic of another election method then this >election method behaves wrongfully. That isn't really correct. I'm not using the Condorcet Criterion, because, as usually defined, that criterion says that the candidate who actually beats everyone pairwise, by the actual ballots, should win. I'm saying that the candidate who is _preferred_ to each one of the other candidates, when compared separately to each one of them, by more people than vice-versa, should win. That's why I emphasized _sincere_ CW. Still, you might say that it's just a prejudice of mine that the candidate that the people prefer to each one of the others should win. Ok. Then what I'm saying, when I use the sincere CW in a definition of offensive or defensive strategy, is that that definition makes sense, I claim, for those who agree with me that there's something right when the SCW wins, and something wrong when he/she doesn't win. Or at least that it's desirable that the SCW win. > >It is clear that you must not criticize election method X for not >being election method Y. When the supporters of a given election The idea that it's better if the SCW wins isn't an election method. So I don't criticize FPP & IRV for not being some other method, only for doing what many of us don't like. The idea that it's desirable for the SCW to win, that his win is the natural result, is so widespread among people who discuss voting systems, that it seems acceptable to include the SCW in a definition of offensive or defensive strategy, with the understanding that people who don't agree about the SCW are free to not accept those definitions. Incidentally, Riker showed that, if everyone votes in their own interest, with respect the the election that they're voting in, and if everyone knows eachother's preferences (or eachother's votes) then the SCW will win, no matter what the method is. Therefore I don't agree that mentioning the SCW in those definitions favors any method. There's something fundamentally natural about the SCW winning--He/she will win if people vote in their own interest and have complete information about eachother. Mike _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
