On 04/20/2013 10:32 PM, [email protected] wrote:
From: "Kevin Venzke" <[email protected]> > It's true that *with the ballots as cast* any Condorcet-compliant method would have > worked identically. including no specific Condorcet method, since there was a CW. > What you don't know until you try it, is whether voters would > actually cast those ballots, given the incentives created by the method. well, when at first i (mistakenly) thought that there were only 3 candidates (or candidate tickets, in this case), i could not see how there would be any different outcome at all because, even if there was a cycle, it would be a cycle with 3 in the Smith set.
I think his point was that the criterion compliances of the method might induce certain behavior that would not be in place with another method.
As a very drastic example, consider a Condorcet election where the CW is also the Plurality winner *given those ballots*. Strictly, one could argue that Plurality would have sufficed and would have produced the same winner - but the significant vote-splitting problems of Plurality might have led to a lesser-of-two-evils thinking and so the winner would have changed under the ballots that the voters would have submitted in Plurality.
On the other hand, one could also argue that there's too little difference between various Condorcet methods for this to happen. That is, the overwhelming majority of Condorcet elections in practice end with a CW, so the difference between Schulze and Copeland (or Borda-elimination) is so small one should just pick whichever the electorate will accept.
I don't know whether that is true or not - one would have to gather evidence to say either way - but in the absence of such, I prefer advanced Condorcet methods just to be on the safe side (or if the electorate learns to make use of the safety provided by them, they can comparably speaking be more expressive before being limited by the method). But if the voters absolutely won't accept the advanced methods, simple ones are better than Plurality.
---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
