On May 25, 2010, at 1:20 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
What are the worst aspects of each major voting system?
-Plurality: Everything. It routinely requires dishonest strategy
from a large minority, or even a majority, of voters. Enough said.
except some unnamed folks here (whose posts i don't see anymore) think
that it's better than IRV.
-IRV: Voting can hurt you (nonmonotonicity). That means that small
third parties can survive, but once they threaten to pass 25%,
you're back to the problems of plurality. A great learning tool to
understand this is http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline/ , which lets you
play with one-dimensional scenarios and see how common
nonmonotonicity is.
not only nonmonotonicity, your sincere first choice can help elect
your worst choice as what has happened in the case study in Burlington
VT in 2009. savvy voters that realize that happened to them will
consider voting strategy (compromising) in the next election to avoid
electing their worst choice. this was *precisely* what IRV (or any
preferential voting system) was meant to avoid.
-Condorcet: complexity.
i don't see it. Condorcet is simple and defaults most directly to the
"simple majority" rule of two-candidate elections.
While the basic idea of one-on-one matches is simple, the details of
tiebreakers are enough to make most voters' eyes glaze over.
by "tiebreakers", do you mean methods to resolve a Condorcet cycle or
paradox. i would agree that Schulze (which i have nothing against, in
fact i think it's the fairest way to do it) would make most voters'
eyes glaze over. but i don't think that is the case for Ranked Pairs
which is almost as good as Schulze and will elect the same candidate
virtually every time, and i would be happy to accept a suboptimal, but
simpler, Condorcet (like elect the candidate with the most 1st choices
in case of a cycle) just to *get* Condorcet adopted. small price to
pay, because i really am not convinced that cycles will happen very
often at all.
Moreover, the need to individually rank numerous candidates is more
work than many are ready for, and the inevitable shortcuts they'll
take could harm results.
there should always be ballot access laws. there should never be more
than 4 or 5 candidates on the ballot (along with Write-In). if there
are, the ballot access laws need to be more strict (more signatures
required). having 20 candidates on the ballot for a single seat is
ridiculous.
-Approval: divisiveness.
...
-Range: Strategy is too powerful.
i couldn't get the guys at ESF to even acknowledge the obvious
strategic considerations a voter would face with Approval or Range.
they just say that "it's mathematically proven" to be better than
anything else. Clay Shentrup needs to get on this list and start
defending his position rather than expecting me to do the same on his
list.
Clay, i'll take you on here on EM, but not on ESF. it takes too much
time and is a far less objective context.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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