CR vs Condorcet

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Doug--

You wrote:


This is primarily directed to Mike, but I'd like to know why list members
support Condorcet over cardinal rankings/range voting.  BTW, I've posted
Warren Smith's work on range voting to our Yahoo!Group.

I reply:

As a public proposal, CR is most likely better than Condorcet. Especially 
its 0,1 and -1,0,1 versions. So I advocate CR over
Condorcet, as a public proposal.

But if it's a question of which I'd prefer if I could enact whatever
single-winner reform I wanted, I'd choose Ranked-Pairs(wv) or
the wv version of BeatpathWinner/CSSD. If defining and explaining them
before someone tuned out, and showing everyone why those are the
rank-counts that they want weren't a factor. The big problem with
rank methods is that there are innumerable ways to count rank ballots,
and most of those are no good, in terms of the most widely-held
standards. Even if there are no IRVists involved in a particular local
proposal, why should people take my word for which of the infinitely
many rank-counts is what they should adopt? Legislators or
initiative-committee members are likely to want to get more opinions.
When they do, they'll find that there's no consensus, and we'll hear
"This needs a study". Or maybe they'll just go with IRV because it
has an organization of very busy promoters behind it. But there's only
one way to count Approval ballots: Add them up. And there's only one
way in which people would expect you to count CR ballots: Add them up.

Assigning points from 1 to 10 is already familiar to people. CR, the
points assignment method, has familiarity. And, as I always point out,
Approval, far from being a completely new voting system, is just
the most minimal, but powerful, modification of Plurality. Plurality
done right.

But why would I choose Condorcet if the enactment decision were
entirely up to me? Because, with Condorcet(wv), the voter who feels
that it's necessary to fully support Gore against Bush will still be fully 
helping Nader beat Gore.

Of course it's true that Nader's true support would become known
right after the election, and, if he outpolls Bush, people will know
not to vote for the Democrat next time. Approval quickly homes in on
the voter median, and stays there, but Condorcet gets there slightly
faster. Condorcet has a good chance of going right to the voter
median in Condorcet's 1st election, instead of in the 2nd election
as Approval might do, if people's estimates were off in the 1st election.

Said in that way, the advantage of Condorcet over Approval doesn't
sound so great. All the more reason to propose Approval, -1,0,1, or
other CR versions instead, due to their greater simplicity and
proposableness.

Mike Ossipoff




_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus

----
For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), 
please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em