Anthony said: On whether Richard's diagram shows something of interest to voters: I no longer even recall the details of Richard's argument. What I do recall is that it concerned how many votes have to be moved, and how far they have to be moved, in order to create a configuration that qualifies as a win. I reply: IRV arguments too concern the moving of votes, to create what qualifies as a win. IRV also minimizes the distances that the votes are moved, in terms of rank positions in the voter's ranking. Everyone who argues for a voting system talks about the considerations that he considers important. Maybe, to Richard, it's important to define some sort of space, and consider votes as being moved in it, and judging the distance that the votes are moved in that space. Fine. As I said, I don't deny that that's important to Richard , and maybe to you. You aren't wrong. Standards are individual and subjective. Anthony continues: Thus, Richard not only dealt with the overwhelming concern of voters -- how their votes are reflected in the outcome -- but he even quantified his argument, and offered proof. I reply: You see, you're repeating again. I had just answered that statement in my previous posting. Advocates of any method, when applying their own personal standards, will talk about how people's votes are reflected in the outcome. IRV advocates, Margies, and Borda advocates talk about that, for instance. Obviously any voter would agree that the outcome should reflect voters' votes. Richard agrees with the voters on that, and that's very nice. But what you keep missing is that voters haven't said that they have any interest in Richard's notion of the way in which the outcome should reflect voter's votes. Maybe I'd better explain this to you: There are innumerable ways in which an outcome can reflect voters' rankings. That's because there are innumerable possible rank counts. And there are many proposed ones. So what could be sillier than telling us that Richard answers voters' concerns because he talks about how the outome reflects voters' votes, in terms of how he thinks it should, without citing any evidence that appreciable numbers of voters share Richard's measure of how well an outcome reflects voters' votes, or that that measure speaks to a specific concern expressed by voters. Richard & most voters agree that the outcome should reflect voters' votes? Meaningless, useless, ridiculous. I'd said: >>By the way, are you one of the mathematically-trained people that Blake >>referred to, the ones whose words are especially valid? :-) Richard replied: Accounting is training. Mathematics is education. I reply: I should explain to you that I was using Blake's term, facetiously. Blake had referred to mathematically-trained people. If, as you suggested, you identify yourself as such a person, then these postings of yours say something about how reliably we can be assured that what a mathematically-trained person says is meaningful & valuable. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
