Reveling the Majority Winner

[Blake Cretney]

On Sun, 18 Oct 1998 11:25:14   New Democracy wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>On Fri, 16 Oct 1998 Blake Cretney wrote: "I think we should think of
>majority winners as produced by voters, and merely reveled by methods."
>
>Dear Blake,
>      I like what you are saying. But, now the argument is: Where does the
>majority lie? I say it lies in the first choices of the voters. The lower
>choices are merely on standby.
>
>     Election methods like Approval Voting, Borda Count, and Condorcet are
>making too much out of the lower choices. These three methods assume too
>much intelligence in the lower choices. It is not the intent of the voters
>to give the power of the vote to the lower choices at the same time their
>first choice has the vote.
>
>     I like to think of my first choice as being my Plan A and I wish to
>stay with my Plan A as long as possible. Plans B and C etc are there in the
>event Plan A does not work out.
>
I think you're right that on average peoples rankings towards the end
of the ballot will be less considered than those at the beginning.
They may not have even heard of some of the candidates they rank last.
But, what if a voter's ballot starts with a large number of weaker
candidates.  In IRO, these candidates are likely to be all eliminated
and the voter is likely to have a fully weighted vote between the two
final candidates, even though this preference may appear far down on
his ballot, and therefore, we might conclude, is less meaningful.  
Do you see this as a good thing, or a bad thing?



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