Reply on EM to Mike's Reply on ER

[Steve Eppley]

Bruce Anderson:
>I don't think I ever said that (in my notation) Smith//Condorcet is
>too complicated to propose to the public.  I said that it is
>significantly more complicated than just Condorcet.

How do you define significantly more complicated, then?  Does your
definition relate to whether the public can be persuaded to approve
it when it's offered in state initiatives?  (To me, that seems the
practical benchmark.)

>Determining which standards are most desirable would be a good
>topic to debate--too good to try to rush out in a "quick-and-dirty"
>e-mail posting.

Did you receive the Glossary of standards I posted about a week ago?  
It's overly inclusive of standards.  If you have more standards you 
want added, though, I'd like to hear them so I can add them.

Several weeks ago we had two proposals for how to proceed here. 
Both involve our voting on the order in which we will discuss
standards (and how well the methods score on each standard).  
Maybe we'd vote all at once on the complete order, or maybe just
periodically pick the next few.  To be considered in the voting, 
they should be in the Glossary.

>As an aside, in my notation X-Y either means a particular voting
>method jointly proposed by X and Y, or it means a particular voting
>method where X and Y alone have no intrinsic meaning.  X//Y means
>that X and Y are both ranked-ballot single-winner voting methods
>where, if X produces a single winner, then that winner is the X//Y
>winner; while if X results in tied winners, then the result of
>applying method Y to this set of tied winners yields the overall
>X//Y winner(s).

So with this syntax the order of the two (or more) methods is
important.  Smith//Condorcet and Condorcet//Smith would be two
different systems.  In Smith//Condorcet, if the Smith set doesn't
have exactly one candidate, then smallest worst defeat breaks the
tie.  

Smith//Condorcet has three cases: 

1. Smith set is empty:  Condorcet picks from the candidates not in
the set (i.e., picks from all the candidates).

2. Smith set contains exactly one candidate:  This is the winner.

3. Smith set contains more than one candidate:  Condorcet picks from 
the candidates in the set.

>In fact, I have never used and I strongly oppose the use of the
>term "Instant Runoff" to mean MPV/STV/Hare voting.  Runoff has an
>established meaning, at least it does in the United States--it's
>the pairwise match between the top two plurality leaders, if
>neither has a strict majority.  So an "instant runoff" should be
>that pairwise match based on the voters ranked ballots.

How about "Instant Runoffs"?

But I'd rather reserve this moniker for pairwise methods, since the
pairings are just as much (maybe more so) "runoffs" as MPV's
attrition runoffs.  And maybe reserve it for one particular pairwise
method, so it can be used before the public when it's campaign time.

--Steve