[EM]Definite Majority Choice, AWP, AM

[Juho Laatu]

Hello James and All,

On Mar 26, 2005, at 14:05, James Green-Armytage wrote:

> 	Yes, but you've not yet understood the virtue of cardinal-weighted
> pairwise and approval-weighted pairwise. I request that you read my
> cardinal pairwise paper, as most of the arguments used therein apply to
> AWP as well.
> http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/cwp13.htm
> 	No Condorcet method can escape the possibility of the burying 
> strategy,
> but CWP and AWP make it so that you can't change the result from a 
> sincere
> CW to someone who is very *different* from the sincere CW (except by 
> large
> cycle strategies that are probably to complex to be realistic).

I think there is some confusion here. My intention was not to criticize 
the cardinal pairwise or other methods but just to comment on the 
(voting method independent) evaluation criteria that were used when 
studying the voting examples. My statement was thus that if sincere 
votes would be X but real votes are Y, it is very difficult (maybe not 
possible in practice) to construct a voting method that would take X 
into account when making decisions. This is because only Y is known and 
it is too difficult to guess what X was (or to identify which 
individual votes are strategic in Y). We can only use some generic 
means (=no reference to the actual sincere votes X) when trying to 
eliminate strategies. Agreed?

Concerning the rest of your mail I think your analysis of this example 
is good, and related voting methods that add new information to basic 
ranking are a very fruitful area of study. Since I commented the 
evaluation criteria only, my intention was not to say that K/Kerry 
should not win this election. I only said that being a sincere 
Condorcet winner is not a good argument to favour K. I agree that the 
ratings give additional information that can be used to determine how 
the cycles should be solved, and in this case evidence supports Kerry 
quite well. I believe I'm quite in line with you here.

>> The best voting methods or voting organizers can do in this situation
>> is to try to discourage strategic voting.
>>
> 	If the reward-strength/probability of a given strategy obviously
> outweighs the risk strength/probability, then we should assume that 
> voters
> will tend to use the strategy. Perhaps they won't, but we should err on
> the side of caution, especially where flagrant incursions are 
> concerned.
> Anything else would be naive and dangerous.

I agree. But in addition to "risk strength/probability" we should cover 
also things like difficulty to understand/apply, difficulty to agree on 
the strategy etc. Also the "level of distortion" (a strategy may lead 
e.g. to election of the second best or the worst candidate) should be 
taken into account when evaluating the need to defend against different 
strategies.

Happy birthday to you.
Best Regards,
Juho