On Fri, 4 May 2001, Rob LeGrand wrote:
> Forest wrote:
> > When the only information available is simple preference, then majority
> > rule would be the only democratic choice. But that's not the context of
> > the posting to which Demorep replied below.
> >
> > Suppose that you know strength of preferences:
> >
> > 51 A > B >> C
> > 49 B > C >> A
> >
> > The majority choice is A.
> >
> > The Approval choice is B with 100% approval.
>
> . . .
>
> > But arguably the Approval choice is more democratic than the Majority
> > choice, especially if a democracy is supposed to be for the benefit of ALL
> > the people, not just the magical 51%.
> >
> > That's why I changed my tune recently and started advocating the Approval
> > winner unabashedly (for elections based on these kinds of ballots).
>
> Just my opinion, but it seems to me that when the voted Condorcet winner is not
> picked, you introduce more instability and potential strategy problems than you
> should.
> In the above example, if a voting system would choose B, the A voters
> would be punished by their approval cutoff choice.
And yet they would be punished very mildly in comparison to the
punishment of the large BC faction if the A voters decided to "bullet"
vote.
So if you want to minimize punishment, this example shows that sometimes
zero info yields a better result than partial info.
Note that the same would hold if B>C were changed to C>B in the second
faction. In that case it would take almost perfect information to convince
the A voters to bullet, so Approval would work even better in the interest
of the common good because of the extra incentive for approving the
consensus candidate.
The more I hear, the more I'm convinced that the magical 51% should be
decisive only when it is not contradicted by better information.
Forest
> I think combining Condorcet
> and Approval could certainly have merit, but surely it would be best to use
> Approval to choose from the voted Smith set. Nice and simple.
>
In the above example Universal Approval
> =====
> Rob LeGrand
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.aggies.org/honky98/
>
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