On Oct 13, 2009, at 9:01 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
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.
The Condorcet winner wins any other candidate. Smith set members do
not, and they may have worse losses than candidates outside the Smith
set.
I think the reason why the Smith criterion is so popular is that it
offers a visually attractive way to "break the cycles" and make the
social preferences look like they were transitive (although they in
principle are not). There sure are cases where one of the Smith set
members is the most natural winner, and that is by far the most
typical case, but I think there are also cases where one can justify
electing outside this set. The Smith criterion emphasizes the fact
that some candidates lose to _all_ members of this set but does not
put any weight e.g. on the _strength_ of defeats of the candidates.
Again, just trying to find weaknesses in criteria that are commonly
taken as granted. Since group preferences are not total linear
orderings one may have also other approaches to finding the best
winner, e.g. the strength and position of each candidate if he/she
will be elected.
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.
I agree that most members of the Condorcet family of methods are worth
promoting, and are excellent for typical single winner elections.
*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.
As already discussed above it is sufficient to determine one single
winner, and resolving the cycles (to form a linear preference order)
is not required. Group preferences are of different nature than the
preferences of individuals (that are typically assumed to be linear).
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.
I'm not a friend of two-party systems (although I think also they have
some good points and can be claimed to be one working model of
democracy). I believe proportional systems are better for most modern
democracies.
Condorcet is a single winner method (not a proportional multi-winner
method), so it may not be very helpful in trying to get rid of a two-
party system. Proper proportional multi-winner methods might be a good
target. (Condorcet is excellent for most single-winner elections
though, and it avoids some of the worst problems of IRV.)
BTW, "hi" to Terry Bouricius and/or Rob Ritchie, if they be hangin'
out here.
I guess they are. Hello! Btw, it has been said that the target of the
US IRV community is to end up in a STV based proportional system. The
STV style multi-winner approach would also alleviate the known
problems of plain single-winner IRV. There are of course also other
approaches to proportionality (= the most obvious alternative to a two-
party system).
Juho
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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