Problems with Condorcet

[Mike Ositoff]

On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, bartman wrote:

> While Condorcet-type elections favor a compromise candidates in a closed
> setting such as a parliament (as favored in Roberts Rules) where
> candidates are relatively well-known peers of the voters themselves,
> Condorcet is not well suited for use in large public elections.  Given
> the realities of political advertising and voter psychology, full
> ranking can not be relied on to give meaningful enough results to
> support pairwise counting.

Though it isn't clear what you mean, people I've talked to would
very much welcome the opportunity to express all their preferences
& have them counted. Where do you get your information?
People like the idea of voting for their favorite over everyone,
without giving up their opportunity toi vote a lower choice
compromise over less-liked alternatives.

> 
> For example, a vote which ranks a major candidate last may simply mean
> that he is perceived as the greatest threat to the other major
> candidate.  This is reinforced by negative advertising by major
> candidates, who tend to demonize their main opponents while ignoring the
> rest.  This does not necessarily mean he is an extremist or unqualified;
> it may simply mean he is the second most popular. 

Were you here when we were discussing order-reversal?  I wrote
at great length, a month or 2 ago, about why it won't be a
problem in the votes-against methods that we recommend.
Are you saying that you have a proposed method that's
strategy-free? Are you saying even that you have one that's
as strategy-free as the various votes-against Condorcet versions
we've recommended, and are discussing? Maybe you'll propose one
further down in this letter that I'm replying to.


> 
> Middle-rankings are also suspect, since not all candidates are equally
> well known.  A vote which ranks a candidate somewhere in the middle may
> mean the candidate is an acceptable compromise, or it may simply mean he
> is an unknown who is not perceived as a threat to a more favored
> candidate.  Even if he is a reasonable compromise in one sense, he may
> be an extremist in other areas.  He may also be otherwise unqualified
> for some reason which could easily be overlooked, since a voter is not
> likely to use the same care in selecting lower-ranked candidates that he
> would use for his first choice.

So you feel that voters might not know all the candidates well,
or that they'll overlook something. And, for that reason you'd
deny them the right to express as many preferences as they want
to, and to have them counted reliably & fully. Maybe it's not
for you to judge the voter's judgement? I just wanted to establish
just what it is that you were saying.

> 
> If anyone wants to assert that the above scenarios will be rare
> exceptions, I would like to see the arguement.  Personally, I would
> suspect that these scenarios would be just as likely as not; the real
> problem is that there is no way to predict one way or the other.  As a

The real problem is that you haven't pointed out a problem.

> result, the only rankings with relatively unambiguous meaning would be
> the first, or possibly the first couple.  This may not matter much with
> IRO, since the lowest rankings are the least likely to be used, but it
> would render Condorcet the equivalent of pulling names out of a hat.

People really do have opinions about the relative merit of
candidates for an office. You only care about voting for your
top 2 or 3 choices? Fine. I encourage you to only rank 3 or 4.
With our methods you an do that without worry. It won't
adversely affect the results. But it certainly isn't for you
to say how many preferences others have, and how many they should
be allowed to express.

IRO encourages the expression of long rankings too. It just
doesn't reliably count the preferences that it allows you
to express. It's rather like a car, up on blocks. You get to
have fun running the engine & turning the steering wheel back
& forth, but nothing more is guaranteed.

> 
> While limiting the number of rankings may rule out some aesthetically
> "ideal" election methods, at least the remaining possibilities are
> simpler to implement.  Besides, there are other (probably more

I've often talked about the easy implementation & easy explanation
of Approval. But we agree that our time is better spent working
on & proposing the best. The best methods are rank-balloting
methods. You may disagree, because you have different standards.
Fine. Your standards aren't wrong, just different. But we're
interested in which methods are best according to some standards
important to many people.

> important) reasons to replace FPTP elections than the prospect of
> occasionally electing a 3rd-party candidate.  These should be of major
> concern to anyone interested in electing "compromise candidates".  Some
> examples:
> 
> 1)  When an FPTP vote is "spoiled", the winner is the candidate that the
> 3rd party voters would have voted *against* in a runoff (i.e. worst
> possible outcome).
> 
> 2)  In FPTP there is a tendency for centrist 3rd parties to push the
> major parties away from the center by devaluing swing votes (in a
> two-man race, swing votes are worth twice as much as "fringe" votes,
> since in gaining a swing voter, the opponent loses the same voter, for a
> net difference of two votes).  When a third candidate absorbs a large
> number of centrist votes, the major candidates have less reason to
> compete with each other for these votes and instead pay more attention
> to extremist voters.  This is in addition to any shift of the major
> candidates' bases of support due to displacement by the other parties.
> 
> Bart Ingles

You've gone and disappointed me, Bart. You didn't tell us what
method is better than the ones that we recommend & propose.



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