[EM] Voting paradoxes article

[David Catchpole]

Much of Saari's work regards positional voting schema, of which
(obviously) Borda is the best. He uses weird logic to say Borda is better
than Condorcet in his articles by saying something like "the absence of a 
Condorcet answer corresponds with voting paradoxes, and Borda gives
solutions in these cases, so obviously Borda is better." I don't think
he's done much work on approval (not sure though...). I'd prefer to think
that as time progresses we get back to the generalities of Sen, Arrow,
Gibbard and Satterthwaite, because it is so apparent that ignoring some
electoral systems allows us to become biased, as Saari does and as
approval-voterers do, and as Condorcetists do, etc. etc.

Personal whinge- multiple-"seat" elections barely get a look in, which is
a shame because some interesting parallels with Condorcet arise which one
day I will actually do work on (hopefully).



On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Bart Ingles wrote:

> I had considered looking over his book, in hopes of finding a solid
> critique of approval voting, but from the quotes I have seen, as well as
> the material on his web site (http://www.math.nwu.edu/~d_saari/), I
> didn't think I would see much that I could buy into (unless he's saving
> his best arguments for paying customers).
> 
> I was thinking of replying to Science News, but haven't had time.  Not
> that it would take much, I guess.  That mag is written mostly for
> entertainment value anyway, same as Discover channel.  But then maybe an
> EM war would be entertaining.
> 
> Here is another odd quote from the article:
> 
> "The worst scheme is the simple plurality vote. In elections in which
> voters must select candidates to fill two or more positions, giving the
> voters the option to choose any number of candidates up to the full
> allotment (approval voting) messes up the results even more."
> 
> Is the second sentence just filler, or is someone actually advancing
> Borda as a multi-winner method?
> 
> Bart
> 
> 
> 
> David Catchpole wrote:
> > 
> > An article misquoting Saari misquoting himself! Awesome! What I would like
> > is for us to-
> > 
> > discuss Saari's books and articles on this list,
> > work out (in a way that can be convincing) what misunderstandings of
> > Saari's work and mistakes in Saari's work exist, write to Saari and
> > attempt to have him account for all this.
> > 
> > Tall order, I know, but we can only really make an impact if we can haul
> > arse together and make it apparent that we know what we're talking about.
> > 
> > On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Bart Ingles wrote:
> > 
> > > One particularly inane quote from the article:
> > >
> > > "if something goes wrong in the Borda count, it will go wrong in every
> > > other procedure."
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:
> > > >
> > > > http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_31_98/mathland.htm
> > > >
> > > > has a summary of an article about voting paradoxes.
> > > >
> > > > Unfortunately the article authors have not defended their observations on
> > > > this list.
> > >
> > >
> 
>