On Oct 13, 2009, at 1:58 AM, Juho wrote:
Welcome to the list!
thanks.
On Oct 13, 2009, at 7:48 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
it is also important to have a deterministic and monotonic measure
of voter support that is understandable to the less scholarly
I have often promoted the measure of least additional votes
required to become a Condorcet winner as one understandable and
natural/fair (and simple, easy to display) measure of which
candidate is the best. This measure leads to the minmax(margins)
method. The "least additional votes" approach minimizes the
strength of opposition to change the winner to any single
alternative winner after the election (and thereby aims at making
the society more stable).
Not all on this list agree that minmax(margins) is a good method.
It may in some extreme cases elect outside the Smith set. But in
such cases the defeats within the Smith set are stronger than
defeats of the winner outside the Smith set, so electing that
candidate would not break my heart :-).
When deciding which Condorcet method is best some people put more
weight on resistance against strategic voting while some try to
optimize the output with sincere votes. Different environments may
have different needs with respect to strategic voting. In
environments where strategies are not expected to be a problem (in
Condorcet methods) one may use the latter type of criteria.
Just wanted to point this out since you seemed to make the
assumption that the best winner must come from the Smith set.
yeah, i guess i have made that assumption (or conclusion). i think
the same reasoning applies; to select a non-Smith candidate over a
Smith set candidate seems to violate the same really basic principle
of democracy as selecting someone else over the Condorcet winner if a
Condorcet winner exists. anyone inside the Smith set clearly beats
anyone outside of the Smith set if the voters are asked to simply
choose between the two.
from a political POV (not the academic one of worrying about obscure
details of hypotheticals that seem to me to be very unlikely to ever
happen in the context of a simple political spectrum), the *most*
important concern in my agenda is to promote Condorcet over any other
method and to worry about which Condorcet less. *some* method to
resolve a potential Condorcet cycle *does* have to be determined, in
advance, wherever Condorcet is adopted, but *which* method (as long
as it is meaningfully consistent with some monotonic measure of voter
preference) is less of a concern for me. and, if some really good
argument comes up to change one Condorcet method to another, i would
likely say "whatever" and i could vote either way.
i really think that moving away from 2 dominant parties and Choice
Voting is extremely important in the political marketplace, and even
though i supported it in the past, that all of these people plugging
IRV should be plugging Condorcet instead or, at least, along with IRV
as the alternative to plurality and/or delayed runoff. and i really
don't like the "happy talk" from the IRV activists (like fairvote)
about the "unmitigated successes" of IRV when i have seen it to fail,
first hand.
BTW, "hi" to Terry Bouricius and/or Rob Ritchie, if they be hangin'
out here.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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