I think the cited text provides an important distinction we need to use on EM.
In theory, we want to discuss election methods based upon how they collect and count ballots, which is "analytic" in some sense. As soon as you introduce real candidates and party politics (i.e. "strategies") we get a real mess that is not so easily analyzed. This is relevant to the "how do you define majority?" question because if the denominator doesn't include all of the non-voters who dis-approve of EVERY alternative it's not a "majority of stakeholders" and in some sense you need to count the non-voters, especially if the method discards ballots in its "counting rounds." So, just from a logical perspective a claim to "always select a majority-approved winner" must define "majority" in terms of Eligible Voters. Or at least define "majority" in terms of voters in the first round. So, an IRV winner with 47 votes out of 100 originally cast is NOT a "majority-winner." Bucklin is a method that identifies the rank for which a Majority agrees the alternative should be ranked at least that highly. No information is discarded in the counting process, and no ballots are ignored just because the ballots' #1 isn't a plurality winner. If we make the reasonable assumption that majority be defined in terms of the number of eligible voters who cast any (ranked-) ballot at all, we'd prefer counting methods that do not discard any of those ballots. Just my opinion. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Lundell >In the immortal words of Jim Hightower, "If the gods had meant us to vote, they would have given us candidates." ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
