On Apr 18, 2010, at 6:39 PM, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hi Robert,
...
I somewhat admire FPP incentives, as they do a pretty good job of delivering to the median voter two reasonable choices. A lot is accomplished with a simple method that mostly lacks potential for voter strategy.
There are many elections with only one reasonable choice - such as a good qualified worker trying for re-election. Here even FPP would be fine, and we hope for nothing that makes voting unreasonably labor intensive.
The many with two reasonable choices are also doable with FPP, though needing TTR for help when losers prevent FPP from seeing a majority.
But, while many elections have no reason for more than the above complexity, we must not plan when setting up for an election that this particular one will fit. For example the one worker mentioned above may no longer be available and there may be half a dozen wannabes. While TTRs can help FPP, it is worth some effort in picking a method to avoid the expense and time consumption of runoffs when possible.
I think that a modest goal would be to have a method that provides incentive to coalesce behind three candidates.
While we should be prepared to serve such, I see no reason for trying for any particular count of serious candidates.
The Burlington votes are inspiring. I'm amazed at how close the first preference counts were, and that a fourth candidate even got 15%. Unfortunately the resolution is so stereotypical you could think it was contrived to make a point. What worries me is the possibility that every time we succeed in implementing an election method which can handle any number of candidates that we throw at it, we will mostly see scenarios with one or two strong candidates and a half-dozen losers that never coalesced into anything, so that we mostly will not be able to tell the difference in effect from just using FPP.
This brings me back to Condorcet. Bullet voting is no more painful to the voter than FPP, and counting is trivial extra effort - but it is ready when some, or even all, voters wish to do ranking. It is the ability to do ranking when voters want this that makes it better than FPP.
Also Condorcet can survive having many candidates, while a voter truly desiring to vote more than 3 ranks should be rare enough that supporting such is debatable.
Dave Ketchum
Kevin Venzke
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