[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

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.