It was reasonable to suggest ranking the candidates in order of their probability of being the beat compromise you can get, the best one who has a pairwise majority against those whom you like less, but part of my paragraph about that wasn't worded that well in my previous message.
Of course that's easier said than done, and one must simply guess at the candidates' order in that regard. Of course that isn't at all complete because it doesn't account for candidate utilities. Of course there's a more detailed and accurate strategy for IRV, but it would be quite complicated, a sort of Runoff to the nth power. Runoff's mathematical strategy is already complicated enough, but IRV takes it to a much greater extreme. It isn't just the computation, but also it's all the probabilities that would have to be estimated. But, when there are completely unacceptable candidates, ranking the acceptable candidates in order of their probability of being able, with your help, to deny victory to an unacceptable candidate is a valid good strategy. As with other methods, strategy is much simpler when there are completely unacceptable candidates, or, at least, when there are 2 sets of candidates for whom the merit differences within the sets are insignificant compared to the merit difference between the sets. But I'd be ashamed if I'd started a discussion of IRV strategy, so I hope no one but Don or Craig will reply to this message. I'd probably not vote at all in an IRV election. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
