Warren said: Although Bishop failed to find better behavior (by his Spearman measure) for "Ossipoff" (it was not said exactly what "Ossipoff" was) versus Webster, Bishop will definitely find superior behavior for the scheme advocated at the beginning of http://rangevoting.org/NewAppo.html versus Webster - it is merely a matter of wat the best value of the magic constant "d" is. Bishop can search for the best value of d with 0<d<1 to optimize his Spearman measure.
I reply: It goes wilthout saying that anythng can be tweaked, by trial and error.Say I wanted to improve BF's results in that census apportionment. I could systematically change all the rounding points, maybe by the same factor, maybe by adding a constant amount. If Webster did best because its slight large-bias is just right for canceling the small-bias resulting from the free-seats, thenanyhone could keep adjusing a uniform rounding point to achieve that. But our method, as I said, has a cruder unbias. How can it be otherwise, when the rounding point is fixed rather than found by a formula that optimizes it for each cycle? For instance, your R is near the midpoint of each cycle. Making the lowest-population cycles have s/q = 1 requires lower rounding points in those cycles. Your method will give the lowest cycles less s/q. That's biased by anyone's definition. Mike Ossipoff ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
