At 05:31 PM 12/25/2008, James Gilmour wrote:
It is not a question of my thinking in terms of plurality - that
is where our electors (UK and USA) are coming from. It is my
experience (nearly five decades of campaigning) that UK electors
attach great importance to their first preference.
*Of course they do.* At least the majority do; more accurately, some
do and some don't, with the majority having a strong preference for
their first preference, over all others. There is a feedback between
single-winner plurality, or other strong two-party system, and the
strength of preference for the favorite:
You may say
that's the result of bad conditioning, but if we want to achieve
real reform of the voting systems used in public elections, these
are the political inconveniences we have to accommodate.
Absolutely. This is why I concluded that Bucklin was the place to
start. The only argument for Approval that might prevail in some
places is that it's cheap. The strong preference for the first
preference will result in more disuse of additional rankings with
Open Voting -- Approval -- than with Bucklin. But Bucklin provides
sufficient protection for the first preference, in my opinion. And
this is the question that you have not been asking, you have been
asking within the assumptions of other methods and the presentation
of Later No Harm within those assumptions.
And you need to ask yourself, first, you seem to be quite ambivalent,
confusing your own position with political expedience. That's a form
of strategic voting, isn't it?
A 5% Condorcet winner could possibly be a disaster, or could possibly
be a great relief. Which is more likely? Doesn't it depend on the
conditions that led to it? If a condorcet winner only gets 5% first
preference votes, what was the system? What was the overall voting
pattern? It's quite possible that *no* outcome of this election would
be other than a disaster!
Looking at this in isolation is, for you, projecting present
experience onto a situation where present assumptions and conditions
don't apply. Pretty easy to make a drastic mistake, doing this.
Want to consider election scenarios? You *must* consider sincere
preference strengths, which is the same as saying that you must
consider underlying utilities. 5% Condorcet winner tells us almost
nothing about this. So you are taking a situation where we know
almost nothing, and confidently predicting chaos. If it's 5% first
preference, with twenty candidates, similarly to what was noted
originally, the Condorcet winner might *unanimously* be considered an
excellent compromise. The voters could be *very* happy with the result.
Or it might be very different. It depends on underlying utilities;
and to be accurate, it depends on underlying *absolute* utilities,
not merely relative ones.
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