On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 09:16:52 -0800 (PST) Alex Small wrote:
Donald E Davison said:method, but in order to do that they need access to the ballots, that's why they are opposed to the secrecy of the ballots.Two types of ballot secrecy: 1) Nobody's name or ID number is printed on the ballot he uses, so it's anonymous.
Further, even if one could, somehow, identify a particular ballot's voter,
the ballots MUST/SHALL have been shuffled such that this information is not sufficient to identify another ballot as having been voted before or after this one.
2) Nobody has access to the ballots to examine them after the counts. The first secrecy is essential. The second is dangerous. I don't want another Katherine Harris to disappear into a back room with the ballots and then assure us "This was the correct result." I don't want to see a picture in the paper of people peering at punch-card ballots like entrails in a temple unless the people and the press have a chance to examine the "entrails" afterward. (Think of that famous picture from the FL recount.) If this means that people also get to say as an academic exercise "Hey, what if we used a different method?" then so be it. And nobody is saying that the IRV winner is the "wrong winner." The right winner is whoever wins under the rules in place at the time of the election. The only question is, which set of rules will be most responsive to the desires of the voters and foster the healthiest competition among candidates? (Healthy competition does NOT include giving crutches to weak candidates, but it does include removing incentives for a candidate to avoid votes, e.g. non-monotonicity.)
Maybe we need to look at two senses of right and wrong.
In the sense of conforming to the rules then, making assumptions I choose as to ballot content and depending on rules in effect, IRV can declare Bush to be winner and Condorcet can use the same ballots to declare Gore to be winner - so each can be "right winner" in this sense.
I demand that the rules be best practical in the sense of being "responsive to the desires of the voters" - an important sense when constructing the rules:
Here I like Condorcet, for it saw that while 40 voters liked Bush better than Gore, a larger group of 60 voters liked Gore better than Bush.
I reject IRV's approach for, when it saw that 31 of those who liked Gore better than Bush liked Nader even better, it discarded the 29 who liked Gore best and then awarded the election to Bush for being liked by more than Nader.
--I don't think you're a charlatan, Donald. I think your criteria for an optimal election method are not as desirable as some other criteria, but I think you are fully rational in your support for the method that best fits your criteria. So, don't call us charlatans. Alex
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Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026
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