Forest had said:
>At best Saari proves that Borda is the best choice method based on >rankings in situations where there can be no stacking of the deck (clones) >or insincere rankings. This seems to beg a question of balance. At what point is the BC's accuracy at determining the "correct" winner overcome by it's mamipulatability? I reply: When you speak of manipulability as the problem, you're missing the point, as was pointed out earlier in discussion with Blake. The real problem is the voter's dilemma on how & when to strategize. Sure, sometimes that situation is made worse still because of the liklihood that someone else will use strategy. You ask at what point that becomes a serious problem with Borda. At what point on what continuum? It becomes a serious problem as soon as Borda is used in a public election. As you must know, Borda is the only proposed voting system that can fail to elect a candidate who is the voted favorite of a majority of all the voters. Saari made it clear that he wasn't dealing with the matter of strategy problems. For situations where everyone ranks sincerely, because no one is interested in optimizing the outcome for themselves, and everyone is only interested in doing their part to maximize social utility by voting a sincere ranking--for that voting situation, Borda may be the best rank-count. That situation has no resemblence to the situation that exists in actual public political elections. Sportscasters use Borda to elect the most-valuable-player, and maybe they're deterred from insincere voting by the knowledge that everyone can observe how they voted. Borda can find application when the "voters" are considerations in a decision, or other nonhuman entities. But it's no good for political elections, and I'd have serious doubts about using it for any kind of elections. Someone described on this list how he proposed Borda for a vote about what sculptor a museum would hire. But people's voting strategy resulted in a winner so unpopular that he couldn't have possibly won even in Plurality. He said he'd never recommend Borda again. Mike Ossipoff Your qualification about sincere votes seems to imply that there must be some point at which another method is more likely then the BC to determine the winner(s) which would have been elected by the BC under sincere voting conditions. It seems to me that this may be a quantifiable problem. SB _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
