[EM] 12/23/02 - Show Us The Ballots Mikeo!!

[Alex Small]

Donald E Davison said:
> Donald here:  Actually, there is a number four Mikeo, it's a variant of
> Approval Voting, it's called `Plurality-at-Large for single-seat'
> (Correction: Approval Voting is a variant of `Plurality-at-Large for
> single-seat').  It is used to elect the president of a council in many
> American cities, big and small.  This variant of Approval Voting does
> not elect the choice of the people, it elects the candidate with the
> most pity votes.

Are you referring to the common method for city council elections where
there are n seats and each person may vote for n candidates?  In some
places, the #1 vote getter is the chair of the council, while the other
top n-1 candidates are still council members.

This is a merger of Approval (a decent single-winner method) with
plurality at large (a horrible multi-winner method) to assign the first
rank among multiple winners.  I don't know that this Frankenstein method
counts as a true single-winner method, but your point is well taken.

> Approval Voting is just fine for any meaningless election, but as the
> election becomes more political we will find more voters bullet voting
> and therein lies the trump card that Irving holds over Approval Voting.
> While there is no danger for the voter to make choices in an Irving
> election, but if most of the voters do bullet vote, Irving can survive
> and still function as Irving, but Approval cannot function as Approval
> when faced with bullet voting by most of the public, it will turn into a
> variant of Irving (poetic justice).

Um, if enough people bullet vote, the election is de facto plurality.  Are
you saying that because IRV and Approval can both suffer the same
malfunction in practice that IRV somehow has a trump card over Approval? 
I'd think both degenerate to plurality if too few voters use the option to
support multiple candidates (be it through listing lower choices or
approving multiple candidates).

That's like saying that if two race horses with broken legs are unable to
run then one holds a trump card over the other.

> Mikeo, you are like a monk sitting on his fat ass in a dark room trying
> to think how the universe works without observing the universe.  You
> need to observe real elections.
>
> No good to just say you are sorry, you need to redeem yourself by
> getting off your fat ass and getting some ballots from a real Approval
> Voting election - Show Us The Ballots Mikeo!!

You know, we just had a proposal to boot people from the list for that
kind of commentary.  I argued against it, but I'd think the proposal would
cause everybody to reconsider the use of personal insults.  Personal
insults have no place in election discussions, unless of course you're a
candidate using negative ads to get ahead in the polls!



Alex


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