On Jul 8, 2010, at 4:56 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote:
On Jul 6, 2010, at 11:31 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On Jul 6, 2010, at 9:31 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote:
Ballots: Must support write-ins and, perhaps, 3 ranks (do not
need to rank rejects and can do equal ranking).
i think that the number of ranking levels should be as large as the
number of candidates (and there should be ballot access laws that
make it difficult enough to get on the ballot that no more than
maybe 5 candidates normally get on).
Making getting on the ballot unreasonably difficult affects who gets
to run, unreasonably - lets don't.
No real need for a ranking level for every candidate. Especially
when there are many candidates voters will happily use some equal
ranks and will not bother to rank those they see as not worth ranking.
I'm not quite sure what term "not worth ranking" meant. Let's say that
there are three slots and there parties/groupings and three candidates
in each party/grouping. And among those three candidates there is
always one candidate that is quite acceptable to the other parties/
groupings and two that are not. Many voters might rank only the
candidates of their own party/grouping. The "internal" votes of each
party/grouping may well prefer one of the other candidates and not the
one that the voters of other parties/groupings like. In this situation
one might easily not elect any of the good compromise candidates but
one some "internal favourite" of one of parties/wings. And the method
is (with higher than small probability and with higher than small
margin) not Condorcet compliant (with sincere votes) now when the
voters have truncated their opinions.
A positive interpretation of term "not worth ranking" would thus be
"candidates that have no chance of being elected" and not "candidates
that the voter does not like". In the first case the method would
always pick a good winner, "only" some weak candidate related
preference information would be lost.
Juho
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