[EM] Fwd: Re: Problems with finding the probable best governor

[David Catchpole]

This is where Catchy the idea-magpie swoops in when something catches his
eye. Definitely, it's true, that because the vote can't be split, per se,
newspapers dahn ahnder don't focus on strategic voting. They do however
focus on the two major parties and the preferences that will run off to
them from minor party votes. So, article titles like "Green preference
threat" are common. The power of the "How-to-vote card" is perhaps a bit
overemphasised over the ability of voters to express their own deliberated
preferences (this was particularly the case during the days of One Nation,
where even though most of their How-to-vote preferences went to
conservatives, most of their real voter preferences, especially where they
were most successful, in the marginal-working-class and semi-rural seats,
went to Labor).

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:

> 
> 
> I'd said:
> 
>  > You mentioned newspapers in IRV countries.
>  > I don't know if Australian newspapers have articles advising
>  > lesser-of-2-evils voting, but if they don't, that might merely
>  > reflect a difference in their newspapers from ours. Maybe
>  > U.S. newspapers are taking on more of a social control roll than
>  > Australian papers are. Do British newspapers have articles advising
>  > voters to vote for a lesser-evil instead of a "spoiler"? Of course
>  > Plurality is used there too. I don't think Australian newspapers
>  > can be used to show that IRV or Tideman(m) wouldn't have strategy
>  > problems here.
> 
> Blake wrote:
> 
> If you can come up with any evidence from any of the many countries
> where IRV or some form of successive elimination is used, that a
> significant number of people know that you can vote strategically to
> elect a compromise, then I would be very interested to here it.  I
> also argue against IRV, so I would actually be rather pleased if such
> evidence could be found.  I just don't think it exists.
> 
> I reply:
> 
> First of all, it isn't "many countries". It's Australia &
> Ireland. And you can't really count Ireland, because an Irishman
> told me that in his country IRV is only used for a ceremonial
> office. So, instead of many, it's one. And don't count
> the "2nd ballot" system as IRV.
> 
> I believe it was Tom Round, of Australia, who said that in
> Australia's IRV elections, the small parties have a difficult time
> getting their members to rank their own party in 1st place, because
> the members want to rank one of the big-2 in 1st place, as a
> lesser-evil, believing that their favorite can't win, but might
> eliminate the big-2 candidate whom that voters prefers to the
> other big-2 candidate.
> 
> Another thing: IRV is going to come under much harsher scrutiny
> & criticism here than in Australia. I, for one, will be obtaining
> the rankings, and studying them to determine if IRV has failed
> in the ways that we all predict that it must. That wasn't possible
> in Australia, for nearly the entire history of IRV's use there.
> The published count results don't include the necessary information.
> So the fact that it hasn't caused anger & resentment in Australia
> is due to the fact that no one has actually looked for those
> failures. Now it would be technologically possible, but now
> IRV is already well established, and not vulnerable the way it
> will be here. Of course I won't be the only one who will check the
> rankings to look for failures by IRV. No doubt a number of people
> who simply don't want reform (and may not realize that IRV isn't
> reform) will do the same thing.
> 
> For these reasons, and various cultural & political reasons,
> the fact that IRV hasn't been rejected in Australia doesn't mean
> that it won't be rejected here due to its results.
> 
> 
> Blake said:
> [regarding the best candidate estimate issue]
> 
> 
> My reasoning is this.  If we have majority (of those expressing a
> preference) decisions that form a cycle, we know that they cannot all
> be correct.  So, which one should we discard?  Presumably, the
> decision that has the least probability of being true.  The one where
> the balance evidence is least compelling.  This, I argue, is the
> proposition with the smallest margin of victory.
> 
> I reply:
> 
> I understand that part. What I don't understand is how that
> makes Tideman(m)'s winner the candidate most likely to be the
> best.
> 
> You correctly said that I was guessing you reasoning. I guessed
> that you were assuming that if the fact that A beats B says that
> A is more likely to be the best than B is, and the fact that
> B beats C means that B is more likely to be the best than C is,
> means that A is more likely to be the best than C is.
> 
> It's not like A beats C. Maybe C beats A. Doesn't that mean that
> the people said that C is more likely to be the best than A is?
> Sure, A>C was a weaker defeat, and has been dropped (or skipped).
> But the people nonetheless said, with that defeat, that C is
> more likely to be the best than A is, since you take a defeat as
> a statement of that type.
> 
> So I said that the assumptions needed to say that A is the most
> likely to be the best because it's the Tideman(m) winner are
> arguably less convincing than the assumption that we can judge
> a candidate's probability of being the best by counting how many
> favorable individual pairwise preference votes he has.
> 
> So I was saying that a claim that Borda picks the candidate most
> likely to be the best seems to require less questionable
> assumptions than a claim that Tideman(m) picks the candidate most
> likely to be the best.
> 
> Blake wrote:
> 
> Of course, there are some other possibilities.  You could decide to
> overturn more than one majority, or you could argue that a number of
> smaller majorities should be more powerful than one larger one.  I'll
> address these points if asked.
> 
> I reply:
> 
> Yes, that 2nd argument seems a good one.
> 
> Blake wrote:
> 
> It doesn't really make strategic sense to ever leave candidates
> unranked at the end of the ballot in either method.  However, the
> 
> I reply:
> 
> Maybe not if we ignore deterrence. But, as you know, defensive
> truncation, in Condorcet, deters offensive order-reversal.
> So you can't really correctly say that truncation doesn't make
> strategic sense.
> 
> 
> Blake wrote
> 
> This
> effect is much more pronounced in wv, and this is responsible for the
> "truncation-resistance" that has gained it so much support on this
> list.
> 
> If this is really a difference of opinion about a fact, and not just
> a subtle difference in the way we are using words...
> 
> I reply:
> 
> I think it's a difference in what we look at in  a method's results.
> 
> I don't think we disagree about an objective factual issue.
> 
> You want truncation to be able to take the election away from
> a sincere CW, and we Condorcet advocates don't want that to happen.
> SFC  describes the conditions under which that won't happen, with
> Condorcet's method. With Tideman(m) there's no such guarantee.
> 
> Mike Ossipoff
> 
> 
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