Coombs' Method

[New Democracy]

Greetings,

Thank you Mike for telling me about this Coombs' Method.

If anyone knows where I would be able to get the details of the Coombs'
Method I would thank them. I am most interested in knowing more about it. I
tried the internet - but Yahoo came up with zero reference out of their
Political Section.

Steve wrote:
An alternative is to count those ballots as being full votes against
both A and C, rather than splitting them.  It's unclear why Donald
prefers to split them.  My instinct would be to count them as full
votes.  (This would not violate the "one person, one vote" principle.)

DEMOREP1 wrote:
I would suggest that it is equally improper to use only partial votes in
Plurality as in Davidson (2 of 6 *selections*).

Donald writes: My reason for spliting the votes is pure mathematical. I
want the total number of points against all candidates to be the same as
the number of voters in the election. If I give whole points to candidates
in cases in which voters did not make two or more selections, I end up with
more points than number of voters in the election.

Example:   1 ABCD             One for D                            =  1
           1 ABC              One for D                            =  1
           1 AB               One for D    One for C               =  2
           1 A                One for D    One for C    One for B  =  3
          --------            ------       -------     -----       -----
           4  Does not equal > 4     +      2      +     1         =  7

But - if I were to split the votes it balances out:

Example:   1 ABCD             One for D                            =  1
           1 ABC              One for D                            =  1
           1 AB               1/2 for D    1/2 for C               =  1
           1 A                1/3 for D    1/3 for C    1/3 for B  =  1
         --------            -----        -----        -----       -----
           4   Does equal >  2-5/6    +    5/6     +    2/6        =  4

Donald,