45: L>>C>R 20: C>>R>L 35: R>>C>L On Nov 5, 2006, at 10:34 , Chris Benham wrote:
>> In this case Ranked Preferences would elect L. > > Imagine that this is the first election after the abandonment of > FPP, and you have just unveiled > this result in front of an audience of supporters of Condorcet > methods, IRV and even DSC. To the Condorcet supporters I'd tell that the L and R supporters clearly said that they do not want C. Some of them may appreciate the fact that from Condorcet point of view L can be seen as the second best candidate (since R loses badly to C). IRV supporters are more tricky since all the votes of the example looked like IRV votes (= A>>>B>>C>D style votes) but they didn't lead to the expected result. Maybe I should ask them to learn to handle the >> in a new way (put it in different place). However if C and R team up the method easily elects C and not R (since A supporters find C better than R). I'm not familiar enough with the DSC state of mind to tell right now how to handle DSC supporters best. (I'll study more.) I have to say however that when studying different alternative ways of voting in this example I was not fully satisfied with the balance of the Ranked Preferences Method. The variant that I presented has the tied at top/bottom rules to allow voters to use the stronger preferences and trust that the method takes care that their vote is used in best possible way to push up/down the top/bottom candidates. It however seems that the position of A supporters was quite strong when compared to the other groups, and it seemed that in some cases the C supporters' votes worked against their interest by pushing R down. I'll try to see if some tuning is needed / if some other variants perform better than the described one. > They ask you "what is so special about this election profile that > you can justify electing the > FPP winner? There is nothing remarkable about it, just that all the > voters really want to elect their > favourites." What do you say to them? The FPP part is maybe not that difficult. I guess the intent of the various alternatives to FPP is not to not elect the FPP winner. If each party still has only one candidate (maybe that was the case in the example) then it is quite common that the other methods agree with FPP on the winner. And people are quite used to the FPP winners. > I think it is just impossible to justify collecting the > information that tells us who the Majority Loser > is and then electing that candidate. Do you mean that the Ranked Preferences Method would intentionally do so? > DMC(Ranking) I like Condorcet methods as well as their enhancements with approval cutoff, but note that in this study my goal is to study if one could add some more expressiveness to them, and achieve something positive with the new expression power, and still maintain sufficiently good strategic properties. The three candidate examples are good in revealing weaknesses of the ranked preferences methods but I hope that in elections with more candidates the benefits of several preference strengths could be demonstrated. If not, then I'm happy to jump back to some less expressive methods. >> I hope the readers of this list will point out any potential >> weaknesses. > Unfortunately the fact that your method is so complicated and such > a daunting chore to operate makes > this less likely. Ok. Sorry for not providing a counting service for it. I agree that without software the calculations may kill the interest of otherwise interested people. I like simplicity (like simple Condorcet methods, e.g. minmax) but in this case I couldn't make my point with less material. >> In principle I think all the candidates should be compared >> simultaneously against each others. > This seems to be just an aesthetic prejudice of yours that you > don't justify. No, no. Or maybe I didn't justify my claims well enough. I'll try again, although explaining this part is not so easy. Nice aesthetics sometimes correlate with good solutions. But I also tend to fight against some aesthetics that don't provide good results. In this case I start from comparison of IRV and Condorcet. Condorcet compares all alternatives in one round and declares the winner. Many people on this list feel that IRV doesn't do as good job when sequentially eliminating the weakest candidates. Sometimes one may eliminate e.g. the Condorcet winner. This is exactly the pattern that I refer to. A tournament like serial competition where the weakest ones are dropped is in a way entertaining to the watchers but there is the risk of introducing randomness and heuristics in the method (since in most cases there is no theoretical basis on why the one by one elimination needs to be done). I can't prove that, so you just need to trust me :-). I'd say this is more common sense than aesthetics (although common sense can be aesthetic to watch :-). There are also some aesthetics that I don't like. Often Condorcet methods are justified by reasoning that includes forcing the cycles in the preferences into a linear order. That makes sense for human brains that are used to handling physical objects for which linear order makes sense and cycles do not. I however prefer to see cycles as cycles and not try to forcefully open them. This means that I like ideas like ignoring certain expressed preference relations in order to achieve a linear order, or Smith set, or Condorcet loser criterion, less than many others. 3D aesthetics thus do not work well in models that are cyclic by nature. > mono-raise No comments on meeting that criterion at this moment. I'll come back if I find something useful later. 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