On 10/01/2012 08:50 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
the reason i like margins over winning votes is that the margin, in vote count, is the product of the margin as a percent (that would be a measure of the decisiveness of the electorate) times the total number of votes (which is a measure of how important the election is). so the margin in votes is the product of salience of the race times how decisive the decision is.
Similarly, one might say that wv is more about the degree of contention about something than the margin of victory. If most people have no opinion about A vs B, but 10 people vote A ahead of B, then that, according to wv, is less important than if, out of a million, ten more people vote A ahead of B than B ahead of A. In the latter case, the contest draws significant attention; in the former, it doesn't.
It's a bit like polling. Say you poll a thousand voters and 990 of them decline to answer. Then that ten answer in favor of A isn't going to carry much weight in favor of A; but if all thousand answer and 510 are in favor of A, that's quite a bit more important.
---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
