Election Methods Poll (final draft?)

[Hugh R. Tobin]

The work and thought that have gone into this report are impressive. 
One quibble: Despite the disclaimer as to completeness, it is so
detailed that the reader might conclude that he or she is supposed to
know what the undefined method "Smith-Condorcet-Tobin" would be.  It
would be simple enough to insert the definition, as proposed:

"The tiebreak based on who is "least beaten" should count equal rankings
or non-rankings under the following principle:

In each pairwise contest between X and Y, count as 1/2 vote for X and 
1/2 vote for Y an equal ranking of X with Y by a voter, if that voter 
ranked all other members of the Smith set ahead of X and Y.  Otherwise
count the ranking as 0 votes for each.  (All non-rankings count as equal
last rankings)."


Given that (a) Smith//Condorcet (or Condorcet) seems to yield an
obviously correct result when voters sincerely rank all candidates and
there is no circular tie, and (b) in practice, many voters may cast
shortened ballots, I think the criticism of these methods is likely to
focus on cases such as the example you gave -- where Y is "least-beaten"
20-34 while X's worst loss was 46-54, and all the voters whose votes are
not counted in Y's worst defeat ranked him equal last, not equal first. 
It therefore seems that the possibility of a variant that would lead to
another outcome in that case is worth mentioning.  When I made the
proposal I though it intuitively obvious that counting equal rankings
for tiebreak purposes in a manner that would better reflect the
preferences of the sincere voter in case of a circular tie, without
giving that voter more voting power than is consistent with
one-person-one-vote, would be desirable on democratic principles.  I
know that Steve and others do not share this view; that they discount
the incentives to tactical pairing or insincere random voting in
Condorcet-zero; and that they are not troubled by the possibility that a
candidate may lose the tiebreak solely because his supporters loathe all
the others equally and are not sophisticated enought to engage in
tactical second-place voting rather than truncating their ballots. 
However, I would suggest that the variant be defined in the posting,
both in order to show that the issue of how to count equal rankings did
get some attention for Smith//Condorcet as well as for IR, and in order
that the reader will not be puzzled or annoyed by its absence.

-- Hugh Tobin