Rob LeGrand said: > Forest wrote: >> This leads to another question: >> >> Are voters more apt to vote sincerely if they know the winner will be >> determined according to the rules of margins or to the rules of >> winning votes? > > This is certainly an important question to ask.
As a practical matter, before we can get a public debate going on margins vs. winning votes, we'd need to sell the public on a Condorcet completion method (margins and wv. are equivalent when nobody reports equal rankings of 2 candidates, so the point can be ignored initially). Before we can sell the public on a Condorcet completion method we need to sell the public on Condorcet. Before we sell the public on Condorcet we need to get ourselves heard over the cacaphony of pro-IRV voices. Seen in that light, the new Approval Voting organization seems like a much better horse to back in any race. So I put that issue pretty low on the list of things to care about. If other people find is stimulating to debate that, have fun, but I'm agnostic on it for all practical purposes. Of course, I actually care about the obscure Strong FBC, but at least I can persuade myself that it addresses the well-known and much-lamented "lesser evil" problem. Keep this in mind about selling the public on winning votes or margins: Nobody says "Bush won Florida with <number of votes>", they say "Bush won Florida by 537 votes" or whatever the final margin was. (I say Bush won Florida 5-4 with 50% of the female vote, 100% of the African American vote, and 71% of the Republican-appointed vote.) ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
