[EM] Truncation

[matt at tidalwave.net]

I sent this and another e-mail by mistake. I am using a new e-mail client and was 
trying to figure out how delete it without success and I must have hit the send button 
by mistake.  

Correction:  I misunderstood. I now agree with Adam.

> You are clearly right,  so Adam Tarr and others are mistaken.  Truncation by voters 
> for C elected A instead of B, thus hurting the C voters who preferred B to A.  
> However, you are wrong about wv.  Wv also elects A because
> 55 B>C
> 50 A>C
> 45 A>B
> leaves A undefeated (as does margins with 55 B>C 45 A>C and 35 A>B).
> So wv has no advantage over margins as far as I can see.
> 
> > But then I don't see truncation as necessarily a bad thing.  If
> > truncation can defeat a "hated middle" candidate, it addresses my main
> > misgiving about the Condorcet methods.
> 
> This is the lesser of of two misgivings I have (my bigger misgiving is the potential 
> impact of strategic voting).  I don't see either encouraging or discouraging 
> truncation as a satisfactory remedy because some people will truncate and others 
> won't no matter what the proper authorities tell them.  Ultimately, the problem is 
> unresolvable when dealing with any rank based ballot system because one person's 
> grade A is another person's grade B is another person's grade C.  For preference 
> ballots, requesting that the voter identify the approval cutoff and then inserting the 
> unranked ballots at the cutoff still seems to me to be the fairest method.  As 
> suggested by Forest Simmons, maybe this can be combined with disqualifying 
> candidates who do not receive a minimum approval percent.  However, I don't know 
> how to pre-determine a sensible minimum approval percent.  Should the minimum 
> required approval percent depend on the number of winners and number of 
> candidates or maybe based on the statistical properties of the actual post-vote 
> approval percentages?  Any meaningful pre-vote determined minimum may have to 
> be lowered (or scrapped) if not enough winners meet that percent, but that doesn't 
> subtract any from the idea's merit.  Does anyone have ideas?

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