52 Names need no Elimination

[Mike Ossipoff]

Donald writes:
> 
> 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.

Another one of Don's many unsupported off-the-wall statements.

> 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.

Nonsense. Condorcet's method's "honesty" isn't affected by short
rankings. In fact, when comparing Condorcet to other pairwise methods
I often point out that Condorcet's method is different from the
other pairwise methods by being truncation-resistant.

The only difficult thing about using Condorcet in a 52-candidate
election would be if it were done byk hand-count. But several of
us, including me, have written computer programs for doing a Condorcet
count, and so there'd be nothing difficult about a 52-candidate
election.

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

Compulsory complete rankings will never be part of a sw reform,
and ther's absolutely no need for it, and in a 52 candidate election
it obviously wouldn't be desirable. So there's be no reason to 
require complete rankings in an example either.


> 
> 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".

Using IRO would compromise the integrity of the result.

> 
> 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.

I thought that it was obvious to everyone here that any method
can have an added tie-breaker, and that Condorcet isn't a tie-prone
method anyway, though any method, including IRO will have ties
in small elections. In no way is IRO better at "handling 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

No, Don, only in IRO are they necssarily tied. In Condorcet's method
other voters would likely vote some of those 20 over others of them.
You're assuming that it's an IRO count.


> could drop the entire twenty if the one candidate name before this string
> had more than twenty votes - but this condition may not exist.

A big problem for lRO, but not for Condorcet, which doesn't just
look at 1st place votes.


> 
> 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

That's your rule. Every rank balloting count rule does it differently,
but your rule is "the rule", even though you're the only person here
who likes it.



> 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.

Don, most of us have already heard about how IRO works.

> 
> No problem!

Depends on how particular you are about what the method might do :-)

> 
> 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,
> 
> 
> 
> .-
> 


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