I erroneously said that MDDA was (if all canddts approved by all) just the "Smith set."
That was false. The first rule of MDDA is 1. A candidate is disqualified if another candidate is ranked over him/her by a majority of the voters. (Unless that rule would disqualify all the candidates, in which case no one is disqualified.) This is NOT a reduction to the Smith set, but rather, a reduction to the Condorcet Winner or all candidates. Aside from that, what I said before goes, and this is still bad (in fact arguably worse than a reduction to the Smith set) in the sense that it often leads to a lot of ties. So now we could discuss/invent yet another voting method, which is: step 1. reduce to Smith set. step 2. the most-approved of the remaining candidates wins. (The "Smith set" is the candidates S such that each candidate in S is pairwise winner over each candidate not in S. Different Smith - not me.) Well - is this a better or worse voting method than the original MDDA? Plausibly better... (By the way I am carelessly saying "MDDA" when I mean "deluxe MDDA") wds ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
