[EM] Clarification about pork-chops meeting criteria

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Chris--


I mentioned two separate reasons why Plurality meets Non-Drastic Defense.

Let me quote what I got from a website:

Non-Drastic Defense:

"Each voter must be allowed to vote as many alternatives as s/he wishes tied 
for top, and if more than half the voters vote some alternative y (tied for) 
top, then no alternative voted below y by more than half of the voters may 
be chosen."

[end of NDD definition at the website]

I should have checked your posting before starting this posting, but it 
seems to me that, in your posting, you worded NDD differently from that, in 
such a way that Plurality passes because NDD's premise makes a requirement 
that can't be met in a Plurality example, meaning that there can be no 
Plurality failure example, because there can be no Plurality example that 
the criterion applies to, and because your NDD didn't have the requirement 
for allowing equal top ranking.

It was in regards to that that you said that a pork chop passes NDD for the 
same reason.

I agree that something's wrong when a method passes for that reason. My 
criteria are universally and uniformly applicable. Well, all of them but 
SARC, which I rarely if ever use, and will drop if I can't make it 
universally applicable without changing it too much.

You stated a few criteria of your own, and they all stipulated, in their 
premise, something that could only  be possible if the ballot has at least 3 
rank positions. That's another example of a criterion which Plurality passes 
for the same reason that a pork chop passes. No one can vote 3 rank 
positions in Plurality, and so there's no Plurality example that your 
criterion applies to. Therefore there's no plurality failure example for 
your criterion
.
Now, if you had added a requirement that the method must allow at least 3 
voting levels, then Pluralilty would fail, by fiat, in the way that it fails 
the actual NDD quoted above. But your criterion didn't have that 
requirement.

So Plurality passes it for the same reason as pork chop does. I don't 
remember if there was another reason why Plurality would pass, even if that 
weren't so.

But, returning to NDD, the version that I quoted above, from the website: 
Plurality fails that version of NDD, which is more likely to be the official 
version, since it's at the website. And it fails for a similar reason: 
Pluralitiy fails because it doesn't allow the voter to vote as many 
alternatives as s/he wishes tied for top, and NDD requires that a method 
allow that.  It's a "rules criterion", because it says that a method fails 
if it doesn't have a certain type of rule--in this case it's about balloting 
rules.

That's something that I avoid, because, as I said, I want my criteria to be 
universally and uniformly applicable. If some methods can pass simply 
because their examples can't meet the requirements in the criterion's 
premise, that isn't very uniform applicabililty. If some methods fail simply 
because their rules aren't of a certain kind explicitly required by the 
criterion, then that isn't very uniform applicability either.

Without that rules-requirement, Plurality would pass the criterion, because 
if more than half of the voters vote Y at top, then no one voted below y by 
most of the voters can win.

That's why the criterion needs the rules-requirement.

Ok, this posting is a mess, but I hope it clarifies my previous reply.

If there's a point to be found in all this, it's that it would be better if 
other criteria were universally and uniformly applicable, as the defensive 
strategy criteria are.

Mike Ossipoff

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