[EM] Re: What respected IRVists are saying about Condorcet, Approval, etc.

[Ted Stern]

On 9 Mar 2005 at 11:06 PST, Eric Gorr wrote:
>
> I attached a document, which I came across recently, being distributed 
> by an IRVist (Jim Lindsay) to fellow IRV supporters and found it quite 
> interesting.
>
> Thought others might be interested as well in what is being said about 
> Condorcet, Approval Voting, etc.

Who is Jim Lindsay?  Where is he located?  I know someone by that
name.

Surprisingly, Approval looks better in the table compared to IRV except
for already being used in public elections and the "Majority Vote
Wins" comparison (Approval: "usually").

But with Condorcet, he uses the potential worst possible case as a
straw man.  These are the key comparisons:

                                 IRV    Condorcet
--------------------------------------------------
Ties are unlikely or
easily adjudicated               YES    no
--------------------------------------------------
Encourages 'honest' voting; 
discourages strategic voting"    YES    depends
--------------------------------------------------
Encourages cooperation and
more positive campaigns.         YES    depends
--------------------------------------------------
Requires enthusiastic
support to win                   YES    no
--------------------------------------------------

I'm sure many list readers could argue the correctness or importance
of these comparisons.  These are the only real contrasting criteria
for preferring IRV to Condorcet.  Here is the remaining text of the
article for those without a way to read pdf [Sorry, I wish I had a
better way to convert the table to text!]

,----
|    Plurality is a very bad system. It is the easiest system to
|    administer, but that is about all that can be said for it. It
|    doesn't even require a majority vote to win, which is
|    ridiculous. It strongly discourages alternative parties, so if
|    one is a strong believer in the two party system, one might want
|    to be in favor of plurality voting. Traditional Runoff
|    (i.e. where the runoff is 1-9 months later) at least ensures a
|    majority winner. However, if the runoff is held as a special
|    election, it is common to have a a 50% dropoff in the vote, so
|    only those people determine the ultimate winner. Alternately, it
|    may be consolidated with the next major election date, in which
|    case it isn't rare for 8 months to pass between the first round
|    and second round of the election. Finally, they are quite
|    expensive to administer, costing jurisdictions a lot of money.
|
|    IRV is probably overall the best single-winner system, based on
|    the criteria above. It is a little harder to explain than other
|    systems, but not too hard. It is a good default choice for
|    single-winner elections. In IRV, a compromise candidate that does
|    not have a strong base of enthusiastic support will not get
|    elected. However, that candidate's voters will have a lot to say
|    about who wins, because the winner of the election will probably
|    be based on to whom that candidate's #2 votes transfer.
|    
|    Condorcet is a favorite of many mathmaticians. It is a very
|    strong system if a tiebreaking procedure is used that discourages
|    bullet voting. (Unfortunately ties would probably be common in
|    this system, and good Condorcet tiebreaking procedures are very
|    complex.) Condorcet tends to elect compromise candidates, so it
|    might be well utilized for a "healer" type executive
|    position. Let's say that a group has had a lot of internal
|    fighting. Electing the President of this group via Condorcet
|    might be good choice in this situation. Condorcet would be a
|    perfectly reasonable choice for electing a mayor of a city,
|    too.
|
|    Approval and Borda voting appear to be good choices for fairly
|    homogenous organizational elections. E.g., the IEEE and the
|    American Mathematical Association use Approval Voting, and to all
|    accounts, it has worked well for them. In emotional public
|    elections, however, these systems would probably devolve to
|    plurality, as candidates would ask their voters to bullet vote,
|    since voting for anyone else other than ones' favorite candidate
|    might very well cause that favored candidate to lose.
`----

Jobst Heitzig's recent Total Approval Chain Climbing (TACC) proposal,
when combined with an extra "Minimally Qualified" fictional candidate
as a way to handle the approval cutoff, appears to satisfy all of the
negatives above (Thanks for directing me to this, Forest!):

http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2005-March/014924.html

It appears to strongly discourage bullet voting and encourage full
sincere ranking and generous approval cutoff.  I think it may be as
easy or easier to explain than any other Condorcet Completion method,
including Ranked Pairs.

Ted
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	ted stern at u dot washington dot edu

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