At 06:31 PM 11/8/2006, Michael Poole wrote: >Abd ul-Rahman Lomax writes: > >[snip] > > Now, it does appear to me that the people who have explained the MC in > > the past have been to some extent aware of the problem, which is why > > we get vague language like "if the voters are asked which candidate > > they prefer over all the others," "Asked?" How? It must be on the > > ballot, and it must be through a method of expressing such strict > > preference that the ballot allows. Approval allows such expression. In > > only one way. Exactly the same as in Plurality. >[snip] > >Coming from someone who recently advocated in favor of exit polls as a >way of measuring actual voter preference, this insistence on looking >only at ballot markings is extremely strange.
This is getting entirely out of hand. Exit polls may be useful for this or that, but they are irrelevant when it comes to whether the election method being used satisfies one of the election criteria. I'm saying that *for evaluating an election method objectively,* we must look only at the ballots, not at what people say about them, urge voters to do with them, or think about the candidates. The criterion says that "if a majority of voters do X," -- and it must be interpreted that way, rather than "if a majority of voters think X," since people often do not do what they think, for various reasons -- and Y must happen if they do this, then the method satisfies the criterion. Voters can do X with Approval Voting, just as they can, and in the same manner, as they can do it with Plurality. That they cannot simultaneously do X *and* do something else which Approval allows but does not require, and which Plurality prohibits on pain of discard of the ballot, is irrelevant. If they do Y, then, as it happens, they have not done X. So? They are not required by the method to do Y, it's an option. Approval voters may express exclusive preference for a single candidate, just as they can in Plurality, and in the same manner. If a majority of them do that, then this candidate must win. That these voters have additional options does not change this in the least, and every other voter in the election, if a majority have expressed strict preference for a candidate, can do whatever they like, the majority-preferred candidate must win. > The winner contemplated >under MC has never been, and should not be, defined by what the ballot >allows a voter to express. This is utter nonsense. If the ballot allows the voter to express what the criterion is using as a standard, then the criterion can directly evaluate the method. We can also say that the criterion is not satisfied -- the usual language -- if the method does not allow expression of the necessary data. Thus a Condorcet method, to fully satisfy the Condorcet Criterion, must allow all candidates to be ranked. However, the number of ranks expressable could be truncated; and, while the method would not strictly satisfy the criterion, since it would be possible to postulate an election situation where voters could not provide the necessary data, we could state that it sufficiently or generally satisfies it. >As an extreme case, in an election for president with three >candidates, if the ballots only have one checkbox, and the name of >George W. Bush next to it, does that make Bush the majority winner? Yes, probably. There is, in this election, only one candidate. For election method analysis, candidates not on the ballot are not considered, unless they may be added by the voter and thus counted in the same way as would be candidates on the ballot. What is happening here is that we are seeing a series of arguments that are so silly that they must be coming from a fixed opinion to which the writers are attached, though it is possible that they are playing the devil's advocate role and attempting to exhaust all reasonable or even unreasonable arguments. >A lot of your other claims are wrong -- for example, claiming that I >make a "very important and false assumption" about a secondary >election that I neither considered nor discussed -- but most of them >boil down to the issue of whether election criteria should be judged >based on objectively obtainable information or on what the ballots >actually capture. "Objectively obtainable information." How? Polls? The voters may lie. Whether or not a poll is accurate is generally a subjective judgement unless verified by actual vote data. The information being described here is unverifiable. Yes, you could run an Approval election in a manner that could reasonably be said to collect this data. That is, you could use a full Condorcet ballot, for example, but with an Approval cutoff, and the ballot would be counted simply as Approval. This is really, however, a modified election method, such as my A+ proposal is a modified method. It adds a Favorite designation to the ballot, but that designation is not used to determine the winner, it is used for other purposes. It gets tricky to determine if A+ satisfies the Majority Criterion, because really voters are making two separate designations, the one effective in the election, and a favorite designation, which is optional (and which can likewise be checked for more than one, but we assume that most would not do this.) Voters might, for example, check the Favorite designation in order to move campaign funding to the party of that candidate, even though they actually prefer, perhaps slightly, the other candidate whom they approved. They prefer the *party*, not the candidate, per se. So I'd say that extra information collected on the ballot, not used in the determination of the winner, is irrelevant to election criteria satisfaction. Again, it is very simple, and these writers are trying to make it complex. The criterion says that if a majority of voters do X, and Y necessarily results from that, the criterion is necessarily satisfied. Approval allows a majority of voters to do X, and Y necessarily results from that. Geez, Louise, it looks airtight to me! Approval satisfies the Majority Criterion, the news is coming soon to a wiki near you. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
