Reveling the Majority Winner

[Bart Ingles]

Blake Cretney wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 18 Oct 1998 11:25:14   New Democracy wrote:
> > [...]
> >     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?
> 

I would expect many third-party supporters to do just that -- i.e. vote
for a large number of weaker candidates before including a "lesser evil"
major candidate.  In this case, the major candidate would be fairly
well-considered.  Maybe even more so than some of the minor candidates,
which the voter wouldn't expect to win anyway.

When the voter expects his top choice to win, his lower choices will be
less considered (and probably not counted under IRO).