York's version of Nanson's method

[Mike Ossipoff]

Well a big difference between York's method & Nanson's method is that
York's method lets voter assign any point value they want to
(within a specified range) to any candidate. That's much better than
Borda scoring, which is much less flexible. "Weighted Balloting", or
"Point Assignment" is better than Borda, though, in such an election,
Borda scoring could be a default option for the person who wants to
only vote a ranking.

Anyway, since WB is better than Borda, that seems to me to mean
that York's Renormalized WB is better than Nanson's method. Whether
York's method meets the Smith Criterion I don't know.

***

Maybe Gibbard & Satterthwaite showed that any method is at least
in some way not free of strategy. I don't know exactly what they 
showed. But that doesn't mean we should give up on finding the
most strategy-free methods. Copeland is a pushover for truncation,
a common voting practice that would screw up Copeland elections
even if it isn't strategically intended. Also, whether strategically-]
intended or not, a partisan Copeland election would be stronly
influenced by how many candidates the various parties were
running--something that shouldn't affect which party wins.

As I always say, the important thing is the need for defensive
strategy, not the possibility of offensive strategy. For instance,
MPV makes successful offensive strategy virtually impossible, but
still often requires drastic defensive strategy under ordinary
conditions, when no one's trying to use offensive strategy.

As I said, Copeland requires drastic defensive strategy (ranking
a lower choice equal to or over a higher choice) under ordinary
conditions, and can even require ranking a lower choice _over_
a higher one. But Condorcet's method doesn't require drastic
defensive strategy, and, unless risky & devious offensive strategy
is attempted on a large scale, doesn' require _any_ defensive
strategy. 

Based on that comparison, the choice between Copeland & Condorcet
(whether plain Condorcet or Smith//Condorcet) is an obvious one.

Also, as I've said, not only does Smith//Condorcet have the above
advantage over Copeland, but it also meets the academic criteria
that Copeland meets, which is why I say that Smith//Condorcet has
Copeland completely dominated.

***

Mike



--