VA, Margins, & voter wishes

[Charles Fiterman]

At 11:43 AM 10/6/98 -0700, you wrote:
>On Sun, 4 Oct 1998 00:04:31    Mike Ositoff wrote:
>>But you never said why margin of victory is important. We know
>>that majority is important to many, when a result is desired
>>by more than half the voters.
>
>To explain this I am first going to explain why I like majority
>rule.  I favor majority rule because of the somewhat hopeful belief
>that given two alternatives, people will on average be drawn to
>the better one.  Of course, sometimes everyone will pick the wrong
>one, and almost always some people will, but on average and over time
>people will slightly favor good over bad ideas.

I favor majority rule because we need a procedure
that people can accept as a substitute for violent
conflict and this seems to work. If a great majority
favored some form of divination I would use that. 
Where votes are even people generally agree to flip
a coin.

For most decisions we use a better procedure where
people decide what's best for them and get left alone.

Instead of asking people what they want most I prefer
asking them what they can live with. This is a much
simpler question than what do you want most. This 
results in governments that people can live with and
that is about the most you can expect.

A lot of people walk into an election ignorant of
anyone running for some of the offices. There will
be six people voting for controller and they don't
know any of them. It should be easy to say so.

There are organizations that can spend a lot of time
looking at choices and voters should be able to say
two I delegate my choices to this organization. Not
only should they be able to say that but the fact
that they said that should be recorded.

So when the United Chicken Pluckers Union says they
represent 40,000 voters candidates can say "Odd only
two people voted the UCPU ticket." The UCPU shouldn't
have to field any candidates, they should only have
to list who they like.