On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: > On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: >> On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: >> >>> it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and >>> proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order >>> ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. >>> with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? >> >> 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street >> fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. >> I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game >> is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a >> mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet >> variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each >> voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of >> their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple >> enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to >> market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. > > When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each other > candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given such top > ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over each other > should count, and does with Condorcet.
This seems to me to be a claim that is at best not self-evident (in the sense that Pareto or anti-dictatorship, say, are). While I'm not a fan of cardinal-utility voting systems, it seems entirely possible to make a utility argument or rationale against the *necessity* of electing the CW in all cases. That is, as a thought experiment, if we could somehow divine a workable electorate-wide utility function, it's at least arguable that the utility winner would legitimately trump the Condorcet winner, if different, while you couldn't make a similar argument wrt Pareto or dictatorship. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
