On 10/31/11 12:32 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
From: robert bristow-johnson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
To: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:30:22 -0400
Subject: Re: [EM] hello from DLW of "A New Kind of Party":long
time electoral reform enthusiast/iconoclast-wannabe...
On 10/30/11 9:33 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
So there's no cardinal or ordinal utility for any candidate
out there and all effective rankings of candidates used to
determine the Condorcet Candidate are ad hoc.
what do you mean by that? do you mean that any of the
Condorcet-compliant methods are ad hoc?
If my valuations of n candidates (or a subset therein) are fuzzy then
my rankings of them may be ad hoc and the odds are somebody's going to
be flipping a coin(possibly more than once) at some point. Thus,
there's less of a benefit from being Condorcet-compliant than might
seem to be the case in theory. As such, arguments that dismiss IRV or
IRV3 for failing to always be Condorcet-compliant are not slam dunks.
that is the case with any method. here in the Chittenden state senate
district, we elect 6 state senators out of maybe 15, where they are all
running against each other regardless if they share party affiliation or
not. we're a pretty liberal place so 5 of the 6 elected turned out to
be Dems with 1 GOP. we *knew* that this one GOP would be reelected
easily so then we knew that voting for one Dem might have the effect of
voting against another Dem. so then, for candidates that the voter knew
little about or didn't have much of an opinion about, it was a
crap-shoot about whether or not some voter would mark an X by their name
or not. clearly most voters did *not* exhaust all 6 of their votes. i
voted for 2 candidates that i particularly liked (and it turned out that
my two votes sorta canceled each other since one candidate came in 6th
and was elected, while the other came in 7th and was not).
so this is not a specific failing of Condorcet nor of the ranked-choice
ballot in general. at least with Condorcet, there is no logical problem
with equal ranking of candidates on one's ballot (whereas there *is* a
problem for IRV). if you don't give a rat's ass about whom you prefer
between Candidates C and D, rank them equally (if there are candidates
that you know you prefer less). if you don't like C and D at all, just
don't rank them.
so if there is any ambiguity of a particular voter's preference between
some group of candidates, that ambiguity is inherent with the voter, it
belongs there on the ballot to reflect the voter's choice. but even if
the voter prefers Candidate C over Candidate D by *just* a teeny-weeny
amount, just as with the case of the traditional ballot, it's
"one-person one vote" and that voter's vote counts just as much as
another voter who *really* prefers Candidate D over Candidate C a lot.
their votes are equal because their franchise is equal (even if the
relative strength of their preference is not equal).
this is why i don't like score voting except for Olympic competition.
anyone reducing the "score" for some candidate they like from 10 (or 100
or whatever the max) is volunteering that their vote does not carry
equal weight with someone who is scoring their candidate up to the
maximum. i won't do that and i doubt many other voters will do that
either. if voters end up plugging the candidate of their choice up to
10 and leaving the others at 0 (so as not to help these lessor
candidates defeat their favorite), then score voting will devolve to
plurality.
but i don't see why voter indecisiveness is a liability particular to
Condorcet or to Ranked-Choice Voting in general. by only asking "of the
two candidates, who do you prefer more?" and not asking dumb
quantitative questions like "how much more do you prefer one candidate
over the other?", RCV extracts exactly the right amount of information
from the voters. Score demands too much (require ad-hoc evaluations),
Approval not enough and, of course, the traditional ballot does not poll
enough information from the voters when it's a serious 3-way (or more) race.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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