[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
abd at lomaxdesign.com
Thu Apr 26 09:38:52 PDT 2007
At 12:02 PM 4/25/2007, Tim Hull wrote:
>On this topic, does anyone know of a modified,
>kind-of-Condorcet-but-not-quite method which preserves
>later-no-harm? This may be interesting as a starting point...
I don't see that Approval has been considered. If you are considering
retaining Plurality for single-winner, you should at least stop
tossing overvotes! This only violates Later-no-harm under
questionable analysis.
If, as a voter, you will be "harmed" if your second preference beats
your first by a vote, then don't vote for the second preference!
Under standard Approval strategy, you would not cast such a vote....
But my guess is that student elections are not preceded by wide
understanding of who are the front-runners. In any case, Approval
does not harm as an election method in place of Plurality. It uses
the same ballot, it is actually more simple to count than plurality --
Just Count All the Votes!
and nobody is forced to expose themselves to the alleged harm of
seeing your second preference win.
If everyone bullet-votes, Approval reduces to Plurality. But the same
is true of IRV, Range, etc.... IRV more clearly satisfies
Later-No-Harm, which many election experts consider a relatively
unimportant criterion. Like the Majority Criterion, we can see that
an election method which satisfies it can produce less-than-optimal
results. Sometimes much less, blatantly undesirable.
Technically, as well, Later-no-harm is about a theoretically
possibility that depends on a tie before the voter votes, whereas the
failures of IRV, for example, require no such rare scenario.
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