On Nov 5, 2009, at 1:35 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
robert bristow-johnson wrote:
...
simplicity and sufficient transparency is important to have public
confidence. otherwise i would probably just jump on the Schulze
bandwagon.
Ranked Pairs might be good here. If you can get the one you're
explaining it to, to understand the pairwise way of thinking, then
it "easily" follows that if you're going to build a ranking for
society itself piece by piece, the stronger defeats should be
considered before the weaker ones, and there you have Ranked Pairs.
On the other hand, more organizations use Schulze than Ranked
Pairs, so it comes down to which inspires greater confidence:
simplicity or a record of use.
i don't think a sequence of elimination rounds would be okay, but
the method of picking the biggest loser for each round needs to be
debated. i am not sure what would be best.
Are you referring to IRV here?
no. i mean if there is a Condorcet cycle, as an alternative to
Schulze or Ranked Pairs or whatever, you could start with the Smith
Set and, with some meaningful metric, eliminate a candidate deemed to
be the biggest loser, then rerun the superficial Condorcet tally
(just see if there is a Condorcet winner among the candidates left)
and repeat until a Condorcet winner is apparent from the candidates
left over.
Do Condorcet winners appear often enough in reality that it is
not a problem?
since no government yet uses Condorcet, i don't think any of us
know the answer.
You're right. If I were to guess, I'd say that in most situations,
unless the electorate is small or uncertain, there will be a CW;
however, once the method has been adopted, parties will try to
coordinate strategies to induce a cycle,
really? Terry B (also a Burlington resident) told me that, and i
find that to be an untested hypothesis. since the parties do not
know who will benefit from a cycle (who can tell the future?), i
really have my doubts about that.
because that's the only way they can game the system.
that's right. i see Condorcet as the least gameable (and the most
compliant to the fundamental concept of democracy) than any of the
others. *which* Condorcet (which boils down to which methods shall
we use to resolve a cycle or tie) is a secondary issue, in my
opinion. *any* Condorcet (with a reasonably meaningful method to
resolve a cycle, i.e. let's not draw lots nor give it to a candidate
outside of the Smith set) is better than IRV or Borda. and certainly
better than FPTP. my rejection of Range voting is because the ballot
requires more information from the voter than the simple ranked
ballot of Condorcet, IRV or Borda. asking the voter to rate their
candidate on a scale is asking too much and they would have to be
thinking about what would happen if they rate *anyone* other than
their primary pick with anything other than zero. the voter should
feel free to pick their first pick, back it up with a second pick and
not worry that their second pick somehow hurts their first. or that
their first pick somehow hurts the interest of their second pick
against some third candidate that they like even less. i think that
Range voters will give the guy they like a "10" and everyone else a
"0" in an effort to not harm the guy they like. then no more
information is gathered from the voter than you get with FPTP. the
ranked order ballot, where the voter only needs to ask themselves
"who do i prefer more, candidate A or candidate B?" extracts exactly
the right amount of information from the voter (i think that ties
should be allowed and we shall assume of course that any candidate
not ranked is tied for last place).
in Burlington Vermont, Repubs who voted for their candidate as their
first pick actually helped elect (with IRV) the candidate they liked
the least and that would not have happened if it was Condorcet. they
are mistaken in their belief that their candidate (the FPTP winner)
should have won, but i can understand their voter regret in that
their vote for their guy actually caused the election of the
candidate they liked the least.
There's certainly precedence for this,
not with Condorcet there is. it's never been used in a government
election.
in how the various parties in STV New York tried to employ vote
management to get more than their fair share of the local council.
but for there to be a paradox, you would need a situation where
there is no predictable voter alignment along a single dimensioned
political spectrum. you would need to have (in 2000) a lot of
Nader voters who choose Bush over Gore as their second choice, and
Bush voters that sincerely choose Nader over Gore, something i
really do not expect.
Perhaps the existence of Condorcet would permit variety to the
point that the political spectrum becomes multidimensional?
that would be fine. and, if in a multidimensional political
spectrum, we had a few elections that had a Condorcet cycle that was
resolved with a simple and meaningful method (like Ranked Pairs), i
would be quite happy with that.
For instance, there might be left-right and unitary-federalist.
actually the Libertarians here in New England look at it as left vs.
right on one dimension and libertarian vs. authoritarian on another.
some of us on the left might see "communitarian" as the opposite of
libertarian, but i *do* understand the concept of "fascist
liberals". i have bumped into a few of those myself a few times.
With the right distributions, these can lead to cycles.
"can". but this is so hypothetical. do we know that it really
*will* (with any frequency) in a real political reality?
Whether or not that diversification will actually happen is a
question to which I don't know the answer.
true. in 2005 when i voted for IRV in Burlington, i was thinking to
myself, "well, it isn't Condorcet, but i doubt it will ever elect a
non-Codorcet winner because all the Condorcet winner needs is to make
it to the final round and he/she will also win IRV." and that
confidence was supported in 2006 in Burlington, but 2009 was a big
wake-up for me. what we really know that will actually happen
(because it has) is that sometimes IRV will elect someone where a
majority (not just a mere plurality) of voters have expressed on
their ballots that they prefer some other specific candidate. that
*can't* be good.
while having *something* meaningful in law to deal with a
Condorcet cycle, i really think that the lack of "the perfect
solution" to the paradox problem (that likely will never happen in
a real election with real candidates) should not be used as a
block to adopting Condorcet in general. what to do with a cycle
can be adjusted at a later time.
That might be a problem, because we discuss many different
Condorcet variants on the EM list.
i know that. and what i am saying, as a value statement, is that we
(in the U.S.) need to concentrate on getting *some* kind of universal
health care adopted and not let details differentiating various
universal health care policies cause the whole reform to be tabled
because we can't decide *which* universal health care system we want
yet. i am *far* less concerned about how Schulze or Ranked Pairs or
Kemeney or some elimination round system will be "gamed" than i am of
IRV or FPTP simply electing the wrong candidate and causing a large
blowback by a *majority* of dissatisfied voters. elections should be
designed to *minimize* the overall metric of dissatisfaction
(otherwise, let's just give it to the least popular candidate, why
not?) and IRV and FPTP do not do that.
Unlike FairVote et al, we don't have a strong voice saying "Hey
public, if you think Plurality sucks, implement [method here]".
but if FairVote won't keep all of their eggs in the IRV basket, then
we need someone to do the same for Condorcet.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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