Forest wrote: > As I see it, checking for a beats all winner (and saving the > approval winner for tie breaker) relieves some of the stress > associated with strategic voting (i.e. the worry that you may be > basing your strategy on inaccurate horse race information).
Excellent way to put it! That's why I see Forest's CR pairwise method (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/8008) as the brightest new idea here for quite a while. It's hard for me to imagine a better combination of Approval and Condorcet. > I like your Example 3 showing that the beats all loser (i.e. reverse > beats all winner) can be the Approval winner even when there are > four candidates. To me, Approval's advantages are its simplicity, its approximation of CR when voters are clueless and its approximation of Condorcet when voters are well-informed. However, I'm worried that voters might be motivated to lie to manipulate polls, and inaccurate polls would surely be worse than none at all. I imagine there to be plenty of research to do in this area. On the other hand, the best Condorcet methods, while imperfect, usually make it extremely difficult for a voter to take advantage of voting insincerely no matter what information he has. I'd rather have a method that doesn't depend on polls. On the other hand, Condorcet's (and CR pairwise's) requirement of new voting equipment is a huge disadvantage; the U.S. government spends far too much taypayers' money as it is! Approval's simplicity can't be beat. > Someday, someone with a lot of time on his/her hands should dig > through these archives and publish all of the good examples and > counter examples in a book like the classic book of examples and > counterexamples in topology. Good idea; it would make a fun project. But note that most Condorcet methods perform significantly better in my sincere-ballot simulations than Approval, which should be seen as a *very* rough approximation of CR. I think we should be very careful drawing conclusions from individual contrived examples. -- Rob LeGrand [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.aggies.org/honky98/
