> 12/19/02 - Ballots from an Approval election: Donald Davison wrote: > The great thinker, Tom Ruen, has kindly given me the ballots from an > election he conducted last year. I share them with you, being as Approval > ballots are hard to come by. > > You Condorcet people will not be able to work the ballots as a Condorcet > election because the ballots are not ranked, that's the problem with > Approval.
I'm not sure what Donald meant by this comment, but I doubt the validity of Tom Ruen's "IRV" analysis because of the assumptions he made in the absence of actual rankings. > Please notice in the last chart that forty-four percent of the voters made > two or less choices. This should be no surprise because these electors were voting in an Approval election. I would expect a very different result from a real IRV election with 12 candidates. We do know from real public elections that voter behaviour changes when the voting system is changed. In particular, with preferential voting, electors will mark several or many preferences, not just one or two. The only way to make a valid comparison is to ask the same voters to vote for the same set of candidates by each of the different methods under comparison. There have been one or two limited attempts to do this as "exit polls" alongside public elections in the UK, but I am not aware of any full comparison being made. James ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
