On Sat, 2007-03-03 at 02:06 -0500, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > And, please, explain to me why a method that will work well for > selecting pizzas, with sincere votes, will not work well selecting > political officers, similarly with sincere votes. If you think that. > > If we cannot agree on the best method with sincere votes, we are > highly unlikely to agree on the best method in the presence of > strategic voting, though I suppose it is possible....
The answer for pizza selection should be fairly obvious - SOME form of proportional representation. No one is stupid enough to insist on buying 10 pizzas of the exact same type for a large party. It's interesting you bring up the pizza example, as it's one I so often like to use when describing voting systems. Sometimes people have very strong preferences (say, vegetarian), and we let them have a veto over meat unless we can order more than one. Sometimes people's favorite is very very bizarre (anchovies), but pepperoni is a good compromise. Importantly, though, just about everyone understands how proportional representation "works" for pizza selection with large groups - it simply doesn't matter what others are eating. This isn't quite so for real elections; people care that extremists are in the parliament (even if they're only 1% of it), but they don't care that some weirdos are eating anchovies. Thanks, Scott Ritchie ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
