On Jul 27, 2008, at 22:26 , Terry Bouricius wrote:
While I agree that "core support" is not always well measured by first
choices (multiple clones can make all these clones appear to have
little
"core" support, where any of them would appear to have massive core
support running alone). However, I think the concept of "core
support" is
still an important factor in multi-candidate elections.
Any justification to why core support would be important? I can
imagine some specific cases where that could be a positive thing. But
there are also ones where there is no need to have core support.
It is also possible that if core support is needed, voters will
include that criterion in their preferences (i.e. if there is a very
good candidate but who is known not to have very much core support,
then most voters would simply rank that candidate lower than they
would in elections where they think that core support is not needed).
With respect to multi-winner methods there has been discussion on if
having a representative body where the representatives represent the
average opinion of the voters is enough or if the representatives
should be such that all sufficiently large opinion groupings will get
their own representative (such representatives would have "close core
support"). I think here it is a good default rule to elect
representatives that are close to their voters in their opinions.
While I think
Condorcet methods are much better than most methods, I remain
concerned
that it may, in fact, reward inoffensive candidates who
successfully hide
their policy positions, rather than just true "compromise" candidates.
I'm not sure if the alternatives would be much better, e.g. to elect
a candidate that gets support only from some strong faction and not
from the whole community.
The practice of considering unlisted candidates to be ranked equal at
bottom (not neutral) already gets rid of at least some types of
"candidates that hide their position".
Voters tend to have clear opinions of candidates at the top and
bottom of
their preference rankings, leaving the door open for inoffensive
candidates who have avoided revealing any controversial views, to
become
EVERY voter's second choice ("at least he must be better than X") and
likely Condorcet winner.
Are you referring to a case where the voter 1) intentionally says
that the "compromise candidate" is better than the "bad candidate" or
2) ranks the "bad candidate" below all the unknowns in the hope of
causing harm to him or maybe 3) sincerely thinks that any John Doe
would be better than the "bad candidate"? In first case maybe the
compromise candidate indeed is the most liked winner. In the second
case the voters seem irrational (or their strategy has failed). In
the third case maybe John Doe should win.
The third case is interesting in the sense that all the candidates
seem to be either very disliked or unknown/incompetent. In such
elections there are no good winners. Maybe one could expect that some
of the compromise candidates would be at least a good John Doe and
would deserve to win.
The voting method will cause candidates to tailor
their campaigns accordingly, and I fear Condorcet encourages
candidates to
limit voter information and instead campaign with slogans like "I
am the
candidate who listen to you" and policy will become even LESS
discussed in
campaigns than is already the case in the U.S.
In many elections candidates do their best to avoid offending any
potential voters. I don't know if Condorcet would increase this
behaviour. One viewpoint is that in Condorcet a candidate should try
to please the supporters of all the parties and segments of the
society (to get higher rankings on their ballots), not only those
that are close to considering himself as their most preferred
candidate. This may be easier if one has a clear message to all those
groups. And the messages of one candidate should not be conflicting
since that might mean loss of credibility. Based on this viewpoint
one could also argue that in Condorcet the candidates just need to
plan their messages more carefully and keep them such that they
reflect the opinions of the whole community.
One can of course ask if it is good to elect e.g. presidents so that
they always represent the interests of most people or if they should
represent some smaller groupings (and more biased opinions) and in
time the policies of several presidents would average to representing
all the groupings (i.e. steady vs. zigzag).
Note that also IRV encourages candidates to appeal to many voter
groups although IRV puts more weight on the first preferences.
Juho
So an important caveat to the assertion that "if a majority prefers
Brad
over Carter, this preference exists whether the voting system does
anything with it"...is that the voting method in use will affect
candidate
behavior, and thus may result in Brad NOT being actually preferred
over
Carter under a different voting method. In other words, voter
preferences
among candidates (whether scores, or rankings) are not actually
"given,"
as we assume when working out models (A>B>C), but will change
depending on
what campaign style is rewarded by the voting method in use.
Terry Bouricius
----- Original Message -----
From: "Aaron Armitage" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2008 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Election-Methods] RELEASE: Instant Runoff Voting
--- 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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