Steve, You have a different way of calculating the Borda winner than I do, so I won't go to the trouble of finding the errors in your math. I'm so used to compiling the pairwise matrix for other methods that I use it for Borda too. You can see the way I do it at http://www.onr.com/user/honky98/rbvote/calc.html (enter the votes in the box and press the Borda button). It gives the Borda societal outcome of my example as Bush>Browne>Gore>Nader>Buchanan.
> So, what's the point? Well, looking at the ranked votes, do you think Bush is the "best" candidate? I don't. Bush's Borda score is propped up by his near-clone Buchanan. Borda is the only ranked-ballot method I know (besides Black) that gives the win to Bush. As a simpler example, consider an election with three candidates. Eric is freedom-loving and Fran and Gary are socialist. 63% of the voters are freedom-loving, 37% are socialist and all of the voters prefer Fran to Gary because of a scandal involving Gary, so the ranked votes are 63:Eric>Fran>Gary 37:Fran>Gary>Eric Borda gives the win to Fran even though Eric received a majority of first-place votes and would have won in a landslide if Gary hadn't run. Borda encourages a party or ideology to run lots of candidates. Some methods, like Simpson (i.e. Minmax, Condorcet(EM)), fail clone independence only in contrived cases, but Borda fails badly. Blake's page http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/harrow/124/path/pos.html also has some good intuitive arguments against Borda. ===== Rob LeGrand [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.aggies.org/honky98/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games http://sports.yahoo.com
