At 03:29 PM 5/1/2006, Simmons, Forest wrote: >However, suppose that instead of comparing all C(N,K) of the K >candidate subsets, we just compare all submitted proposals, >including those sets that would be elected by STV under various >rules (Droop Quota, etc.). There might be ten thousand such >proposals. But that would only require C(10000, 2) = 49995000 >comparisons, a few seconds of CPU time on a second rate computer.
Yes, the objections to Condorcet proposals based on computational intractability are pretty silly, based only on a theoretical idea that all possible rankings will exist in the ballot population. But the ballot population is a limited set, with almost certainly a high degree of reduncancy. Systems that require all voters to rank all candidates make it worse, to be sure, but even that will have a lot of redundancy in it. However, I'm not sure why one needs Condorcet Voting for PR. Asset Voting should create a very accurate, non-party-list PR assembly rather directly. Asset Voting, though, requires a deliberative or bargaining step, which is a rather new idea, as the election method itself does not suffice, without candidate action after the election, to determine all the winners (it only determines those who gain the quota in the initial balloting). However, if Published Rankings are provided by candidates prior to the poll and are used to automatically reassign votes, it might be possible to have direct winner determination. All excess or unused votes would be subject to reassignment. There are details to be specified, to be sure. It's obvious what to do with a winner's excess votes: they go to the next position on the winner's Published Ranking. But it is the votes of those who don't gain the quota in the first round that are not so obvious. I'd guess, off-hand, that they would be reassigned with the lowest vote-getters first. In this case, it might not be so problematic as that is with IRV. If there are N candidates and any one of them has the direct and sole support of 1/N of the voters, that candidate would be elected immediately. Many, perhaps most winners would win like this, unless there were a very large number of candidates with distributed popularity. I prefer conscious, deliberate, and negotiated transfer of votes, i.e., deliberative process, which I consier would be quite safe in the formation of a large PR assembly, but an automatic system could work pretty well. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
