Here are additional paragraphs we can add to the declaration to further
resolve the criticism from Markus Schulze that there are "too many ...
methods":
"To appreciate the importance of the few election methods we support,
consider that there are hundreds of other election methods and voting
methods, plus countless combinations of them, that we unanimously agree
should not be used in governmental elections. All of us agree that we
will oppose the adoption of any of those inferior methods."
"Why do we not support a single "best" election method? We are highly
trained in mathematics and there is a mathematical proof (commonly
called "Arrow's Impossibility Theorem") that mathematically proves that
there cannot be a voting method that has all the expected and desirable
characteristics of a "best" voting method. This means that each of our
supported election methods has advantages and disadvantages compared to
each another. For example, approval voting has the advantage of using a
ballot layout that is similar to single-mark ballots (with the
difference being that approval voting allows marking more than one
candidate as acceptable). As another example, the range ballot (which
is used in range voting) collects more preference information compared
to the ranked ballot (because the "distance" between candidates can be
expressed)."
"As a related complexity, different election methods have different
levels of vulnerability to "strategic" voting, which means that if a
group of voters knows how other voters will vote, they may be able to
mark their ballots differently in a way that increases their influence
in the election results. We have rejected as unacceptable the election
methods that are most vulnerable to strategic voting. All of our
supported election methods have at least some vulnerability to strategic
voting, but their vulnerability is small compared to plurality voting,
which is highly vulnerable to strategic voting."
Richard Fobes
On 8/24/2011 5:52 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
On 8/24/2011 2:15 PM, Markus Schulze wrote:
...
Well, one of the most frequently used arguments
against Condorcet methods is that there are too
many Condorcet methods and that there is no
agreement on the best one.
Markus Schulze
Perhaps we can add a statement that says something like:
"In most cases the different Condorcet methods identify the same winner.
Occasionally they identify different winners, but those situations
involve complications that make it difficult to objectively determine
which candidate is really the most popular. Each of these Condorcet
methods has slight advantages and disadvantages compared to one another,
and some are easier to explain than others. Yet in all cases they
provide dramatically fairer results compared to plurality voting, and
significantly fairer results compared to instant-runoff voting, so any
of them is suitable for use in governmental elections."
Richard Fobes
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