- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 03/10/01 Forest Simmons, Don't be so quick in handing out those Nobel prizes, not yet. Mike Ossipoff has proposed something clever allright - a clever scheme to allow a minority party candidate to win over a majority party candidate. This is Mike's ongoing agenda. You should take that into consideration whenever you read any of his tripe. Consider an example: 60 A, 30 B, 10 C Now it would appear that the 60 A faction is a shoo-in to win this election, but it will depend on one of four methods winning the methods election, Plurality, Irving, Condorcet, or Bucklin. If the 60 A faction is careless and votes at random, each of these four methods will only receive about fifteen votes. The 30 B faction needs Borda in order to have a chance of winning, Approval would be better. So, Borda gets thirty votes and is the winning method because this is a `Plurality' election of the methods. Now, if enough of the 60 A faction carelessly made a choice for candidate B, then candidate B is the winner, this is possible. How long is it going to take for you to see thru Mike. He's feeding you Dingle Berry Pie and you are lapping it up. In order for the 60 A faction to protect itself under Mike's scheme, it will need to always be on its toes by making sure that every one of their supporters vote for the same method, Plurality, and bullet votes their candidate A. And, this will be necessary for every election. But, voters should be free to just vote their favorites without being concerned about the schemes of Mike and others like him, are you like him? You call it ingenuity, I call it deception, not worthy of even a consolation prize, let alone the Nobel prize. Think before you speak, is a good rule to follow, if you are going to be reading Mike's material. Donald Davison ------------ Original Letter ------------- Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2001 14:34:17 -0800 (PST) From: Forest Simmons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [EM] Voter's Choice In his masterful article at http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/noagree.html Mike Ossipoff proposes a clever meta-method called "voter's choice" to use when there is no agreement among knowledgeable voters on which method to use. I think Nobel Prizes have been given for less ingenuity. Each voter votes his preferences among the candidates with the understanding that his preferences will be used (along with everyone else's) in all of the common methods (based on preference lists) to determine winners for all of the methods. (There will be a Borda winner, an IRV winner, a plurality winner, as well as winners for various versions of Condorcet, etc.) The voter also indicates on his ballot which one of those (as yet undetermined) winners he would like his final (plurality) vote to go for. For example if he wants his final vote to go for the Borda Count winner, and candidate A ends up winning the Borda Count, then his final vote will go to candidate A. The candidate with the greatest number of votes in this final plurality contest (not necessarily the plurality winner in the list of method winners) is the grand winner. This idea is very appealing to me, so I think it is worth extending to include methods like CR and Approval (and now dyadic approval) that are not based on (simple) preference lists. These other methods would be accommodated if the voters were asked to rate each candidate on a scale of zero to 100. And the preferences could be deduced from the order except when two candidates received exactly the same rating. In that case, order could be imposed at random for the purposes of those methods that require a complete preference list; after all that's what the voter would have to do if he were required to show preferences where there was none. It's amusing to ponder whether any further advantage could be eked out by allowing voters to rate each of the methods (as well as the candidates). Well, don't let it give you a headache. Forest