On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Adam Tarr wrote: <snip>
> There's no way to distinguish between the lazy voter and the sincerely > indifferent voter, or between the informed voter and the haphazard > voter. The interactive ballot that queries the voter on all pairwise comparisons and distinguishes between A=B and A?B as suggested by Stephane and others might be able to effectively discern these differences. <snip> > > ... The simplicity to > the voter of ABCD(E)F voting is worth it. The voters who are interested > and involved enough to actually need six distinct levels of approval are > the same voters who will understand that the unmarked candidate will get > the E grade. > > I spent some time a few months back seeing if approval-completed Condorcet > could be made to work using this sort of ballot, but in the end I realized > that the only time approval completion worked like I thought it should was > when the approval votes supported the sincere Condorcet winner. When the > approval votes did not do so, the system encouraged all sorts of strategic > manipulations. So I gave up on ACC, and I now hang my hat with > winning-votes based Condorcet, which seems to be the system that is most > resistant to strategic manipulation by a wide margin. It is true that ACC was once one of the leading suggestions for scoring Grade Ballots. But don't forget that Grade Ballots can be scored pairwise. Once the pairwise matrix is constructed, the winner can be extracted from that matrix according to the rules of SSD or Ranked Pairs. It may seem like a defect that grade ballots cannot fully rank more than six candidates, but I believe that (1) the simplicity and clarity of the ballot far outweigh the supposed benefits of fully ranking more than six candidates, (2) forcing the voter to collapse preferences down to six levels makes the surviving comparisons more meaningful, and (3) therefore, in the statistically few cases when different results might obtain from the two distinct ballot types, as likely as not the grade ballot will give the superior result. A note about the danger of ranked preference ballots: When I was in Vietnam, the phrase "number one" meant best, while "number ten" meant worst. If memory serves me correctly, a few years later a movie came out in which Bo Derek played the part of a woman who was "a perfect ten," as in the scoring of Olympic skating, diving, gymnastics, etc. Would you rather have a 4.0 grade point, or a 1.5 ? It doesn't matter how prominently the instructions say to rank the candidates from one to N on the "Vietnamese system" where small is good and large is bad, a significant percentage of American voters will revert to the dominant "large=good, small=bad" mode of thought while filling out their ballots. It wouldn't do any good to change the convention either; there would still be plenty of confused people marking their ballots the exact opposite of their intentions. The confusing nature of ranked preference ballots is probably one of the main reasons that voters in Australia use candidate supplied "voter cards" in single winner elections and vote "above the line" for their party-approved order in multi-winner elections. In effect they have a proxy system that could be implemented more simply with plurality ballots: "Choose one voter card" or "Choose one party approved ranking." When interactive ballots become common, then we can start thinking about fully ranked preference ballots in public elections. By the way, here in Oregon the IRV initiative (which never made it to the ballot) was only proposing to rank the top three candidates, with mandatory truncation for the rest, due to supposed technological limitations, even though the public schools all have optical scanners for the ballots that we call "grade reports" filled out for each class each term by the teachers. In addition to the standard grades of A through F they allow for half a dozen other options (Incomplete, Pass, Withdrawal, etc.) without requiring more than one line per candidate (i.e. student). If more than six levels are really needed, we could minimize confusion by adding the familiar plus and minus options to the Grade Ballot rather than going over to a ranked system. A Grade Ballot with the plus/minus options could distinguish sixteen levels (because the default grade E has no plus/minus option), many more than the magical seven recommended by the psycho-metric folks. How many single winner elections have more than sixteen candidates worth distinguishing by rank? Ranked ballots (usually) do not give the option of collapsing any preferences except at the lowest level. A sixteen level grade ballot allows collapsing preferences at any level, as well as fully ranking up to sixteen candidates. So from now on, when discussing various Condorcet methods, why not keep in mind the option of collapsing preferences at any level, as Rob LeGrand has argued for in the past? The use of Grade Ballots makes allowing it easier than prohibiting it. Does this have any affect on the wv versus margins debate? Forest ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
