On Jan 8, 2007, at 6:23 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > I find it odd that IRV proponents would claim that IRV can save > money by eliminating the need for primaries
I just note that in principle primaries are different from the actual election in the sense that in typical primaries the _party_supporters_ elect their candidate for the actual race. This means that you will get an "average" compromise candidate from the party. In the US the difference could be that in a situation where democrats have the majority the primaries would first elect a median democratic candidate that would then be elected in the actual election by majority (at least if the Republicans followed the same practice and elected their median candidate in their primary). If all the democrat candidates would participate directly in the actual election, a probable outcome would be to elect not the median democratic candidate but one that is relatively close to the republicans. In the political system of the US where most of Washington is replaced by the new president to members of his own party electing a candidate that is the choice of the party that will rule makes some sense. But if one would seek for a president that represents the whole population (over republicans and democrats), a compromise candidate could make sense. Note also that if one party goes directly to the election with several candidates and the other one arranges a preliminary it is possible that the one with multiple candidates will win since it is likely to have a more centrist candidate among its candidates than the other party. > , and eliminating primaries could make more likely the conditions > under which IRV would select a winner against the preference of a > majority. Didn't quite understand this scenario. > The basic method is to select and vote for all candidates who one > judges as acceptable as winners. This is why it is named > "Approval." If voters are fully honest in this, and make reasonable > accomodation for the views and satisfaction of others (In other > words, A is my favorite, but I know that B is preferred by many who > don't like A so much, and I think of B as a reasonable choice for > the office as well), then the method clearly works to find a good > winner. I think the name of the Approval method is not a very good one since the best (and quite sensible from sincere point of view too) strategy is not to vote based on which candidates one agrees but based on which candidates are probable winners and how one's own preferences relate to that. Maybe it should be renamed to something like "pick the winner and the your favourite candidates" :-). The end result may not be a very good one even if all voters would vote sincerely vote according to their view on which candidates are approvable. In this case the votes of those voters who find most candidates (especially the major ones) acceptable and those ones that strictly accept only some non major candidates would be wasted (from the point of view of deciding who the winner is). (Maybe someone thinks that excluding the extremists or those who are happy with any choice is a good thing, but this sure violates the one man one vote principle.) Strategic voting in Approval may thus be a good recommendation both from strategic and sincere point of view. > For a poll to move a candidate from not-close to frontrunner > status, it would have to be drastically distorted. As I've > mentioned, there are more subtle, more serious, and less provable > forms of lying than this. I really don't think it's a matter for > special concern. Ok, I don't claim that this vulnerability would be the most critical one. But making propaganda is common and generally accepted or understood. Light propaganda has similar but maybe weaker effect than a forged poll, but it is more acceptable and therefore risk of backfiring may be smaller. I have seen also promotion/claims of "two leading candidates" in a multiparty setting. Often it is beneficial to make some (or lots of) propaganda even if there were no guarantees that it will make the difference on who wins. > As I mentioned, it could backfire. We don't know whether distorted > polls like this would improve or hurt a candidate's chance of > success, because only one of the possible effects was considered, > one which is thought to move the result in a direction favoring > those who distorted the polling. We would also have to consider the > effects which could move the vote in the opposite direction. Ok, I didn't pay too much attention to this yet. Let's see if someone identifies some new properties. Juho Laatu Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
