52 Names need no Elimination

[Donald]

Dear Methods list,

It is not proper to say there are too many choices - unless you are buying
ice cream. Candidates are not ice cream. You have no right to just
eliminate them because you cannot handle their numbers.

It is understandable that this condorcet person wants to eliminate
candidate names. Condorcet falls apart with any election larger than three
or four candidates. It would be amusing to see Steve try to work this
election of 52 using condorcet. Each voter would have to make 51 selections
in order to keep the mathematics honest with condorcet - the voters are not
going to do that.

How about one of you condorcet persons helping Steve out by constructing an
example of 52 candidates and 51 selections?

This is one time that Steve should put aside his dislike of Instant Run-off
and use it because it is best able to handle these 52 names "..without
compromising the integrity of the results".

Steve did not say how many people would be voting in this election. If the
number is to be less than one hundred we can expect a lot of ties. How
these ties are handled will be important. Instant Run-off can handle the
ties.

Example: Suppose the election results had a string of twenty candidate
names at the end with one vote each. These twenty are all tied. Now - we
could drop the entire twenty if the one candidate name before this string
had more than twenty votes - but this condition may not exist.

So - we are going to need to look at the second selections of only these
twenty candidate names in order to decide which of these twenty we are
going to drop. The rule is that we drop the candidate name that received
the lowest amount of votes from only the second selections of only these
twenty. If more then one received the same low number - we drop all the
ones with this same low number. (If in the event there is no lowest we go
look at the third set of selections of only the tied candidates.)

The ones that are dropped are to have their votes reassigned to their
second selections. We now drop the lowest candidate name and reassign his
votes to the next selections. Or - if we again have a tied condition at the
end, we repeat the above routine. We continue to solve ties and/or drop
candidate names until we have a winner.

No problem!

Hopefully the winner will have a majority of the votes cast - a rule of
Instant Run-off. We should ask the voters to make at least ten selections
in order to avoid a follow up election.

Donald,