Some more standards

[Bart Ingles]

New Democracy wrote:
> 
> [deleted]
> Bart wrote:
> >2. If "most hated" candidates are to be excluded, there should be a way
> >to distinguish truly hated candidates from those who are ranked last
> >merely because they compete with the voter's favorite -- in other words,
> >there should be no advantage to insincerely ranking a competitor last.
> 
> Donald: If there was a "truly hated candidate", it follows that that
> candidate will receive few first choices and few lower choices. This is how
> a "most hated" candidate can be excluded. This is the only way candidates
> should be excluded.

This kind of situation would take care of itself.  What I was referring
to was a situation where you have two or more strong factions (along
with a number of weaker factions), and each faction ranks its own
candidate at the extreme top and the others at the extreme bottom,
purely to help its own candidate.  If you were to design a system that
blindly eliminated candidates with large last-rank votes, you would be
eliminating the top candidates as well.  I doubt that there is a fair
way to determine why a candidate received last place votes, but unless
somebody comes up with one I would avoid using last-place votes as a
reason for elimination.

>      We have no right to make value judgements as to which candidate are
> "most hated" and then attempt to design an election method to exclude those
> candidates. The election method chosen must work ten years from now. Today,
> we have no way of knowing which candidates will be the "most hated" at that
> time.

Agreed.  That is not something I was proposing.