[EM] Nomination

Forest Simmons fsimmons at pcc.edu
Tue Apr 17 14:51:54 PDT 2001


I would like to nominate Approval Completed Condorcet as a method, and
give a campaign speech in favor of it.

In this version of Approval Completed Condorcet, regular preference
ballots are used with no special marks. 

All ranked candidates are considered approved and all unranked (truncated) 
candidates are considered unapproved (and for pairwise comparison
purposes, below all of the ranked candidates).

If pairwise comparisons yield a "beats all" winner, then that's our
guy/gal.

Otherwise, the most truncated (least approved) candidates are eliminated
from the contest one by one (starting with the worst) until there remains
a unique "beats all" winner.

Campaign Speech:

This method has the main advantages of Condorcet and Approval without
their main commonly perceived disadvantages: 

It is the only Condorcet method satisfying the Favorite Betrayal Criterion
while allowing more expressivity than plain Approval (the only other
contender that satisfies the FBC).

Majority defense by truncation works as well in this method as any other. 
Even the low utility accidental Condorcet Winners will be cut off by the
natural disapproval manifest in truncation.

No complicated, confusing Condorcet completion method needs to be sold to 
the voting public.

The strategy is easy: just sincerely rank all of the candidates down to
and including the one you would vote for under plurality. Be sure to leave
the most evil front runner unranked.

This is the only method in the running so far that completely solves the
spoiler problem in the psychology of Green IRVies, since they think that
having to approve Gore as well as Nader (under plain Approval) is a form
of spoilage.

Vote for the best, vote ACC !

Forest



More information about the Election-Methods mailing list