[EM] Ratings-based standards

[Bart Ingles]

In an earlier post, Blake Cretney wrote:

> Obviously, one can always come up with examples where a method
> behaves badly because of bad voters.  However, Average Ratings seems
> to greatly exaggerate the influence of small numbers of people who
> think in extreme terms and have single over-riding issues.  So, I
> reject this method as a standard by which other methods may be judged.


It occurs to me that extremist voting problems should be excluded from
the question of rating-based standards, just as strategy considerations
are.  An actual election method would need to deal with both, but the
standards are only dealing with hypothetical situations.  We can then
relate these standards to actual methods in two steps:

1)  What standard or combination of standards represents the "best"
candidate, assuming all voters are honest, sane, and not prone to
extremist thinking?  Which methods do a good job of following this
standard?

2)  Of the methods that "pass" step 1, which ones are undamaged by
strategy and the kinds of extremist voting problems excluded from step
1?

Bart