--- On Sun, 7/27/08, James Gilmour <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> That is a consequence of your interpretation of how the
> voting system is supposed to work and what the voting
> system is supposed to
> be doing. But that's not what IRV is about. As I said
> in the previous message, the origins of IRV are in the
> Exhaustive Ballot,
> and in the Exhaustive Ballot there is no possibility of
> looking "at the entire ballot". IRV is not about
> satisfying a set of
> criteria derived from social choice philosophy.
>
Of course every reason you might offer for choosing one system over another is
based on an idea of what a reasonable decision rule for making collective
decisions in very large groups should look like. This is true for IRV advocate
no less than advocates for other systems; where the system came from is beside
the point, especially since most jurisdictions have never used the Exhaustive
Ballot.
In an important respect, Condorcet is more natural than IRV: if a majority
prefers Brad over Carter, this preference exists whether the voting system does
anything with it, or even elicits enough information to determine that it
exists. Condorcet simply discovers and applies this preference. IRV, on the
other hand, elicits enough information to discover it exists, but may decide to
ignore it based purely on procedural grounds. There are no good reasons for
this, ever. "Core support" is a bogus reason: every time IRV chooses someone
other than the plurality winner you're letting an overall majority trump a
comparison of core supporters. But other times IRV will fail to do this, for
reasons that simply don't exist apart from the system itself.
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