[EM] STV's rejection: it's "not a defect, it's a feature!"

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

>At 10:36 15.03.00 -0800, Bart Ingles wrote:
> >
> >DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:
> >>
> >> Simple Approval Voting has the rather major defect of having a later
> >> vote cancel out an earlier vote.
> >
> >That's not a defect, it's a feature!  And it doesn't cancel out the
> >earlier vote, since the earlier vote still counts against non-approved
> >candidates.
> >
> >One benefit of not allowing the voter to distinguish between levels of
> >approval is that the voter will not add a second vote unless she
> >believes the compromise choice to be a good one.  This avoids the
> >situation that can happen with ranked methods, which can elect a
> >candidate whom the majority feel is only slightly better than the worst
> >possible choice.
>...
>
>The Approval Voting method, according to Mr Ossipoff, needs to be
>  considered undefined when this is not true: there are very few
>  candidates and only one winner is to be elected. Is that a

I didn't say anything resembling that. Craig, I'll thank you
not to attribute to me things that only you've said.

Approval doesn't need for there to be few candidates. As for
choosing one winner, yes that's usually how it's defined. What's
your problem with that. But Approval advocates have more than once
pointed out that an at-large city council election could let people
vote for as many candidates as they want to.

What I said was that Approval is usually defined for 1-winner
elections, and that those are the only kind that I discuss.

>viewpoint
>  of others, e.g. Bart?. It is bit like the gaps in the output winner
>  set of Condorcet, except that in the case of the Approval Voting
>  method, everbody knows what the definition is but defers to whatever
>  crumbs of assertions the authorities were able to give.
>
>These Ossipoff restrictions making the method undefined of course
>  invalidated some of my arguments that FBC was badly undefined. Of
>  course, Mr Ossipoff still needs to add another constraint to FBC, and
>  one I suspected all along [I called it a "contrived" rule]: FBC is
>  a test for only one method, the Approval Voting method. He countered
>  my arguments about FBC by constraining the number of winners in the
>  Approval Voting method, apparently not realising that others thought
>  that FBC need not be test doing nothing more than supporting that
>  particular method. Let's un-cripple the Approval Voting method and
>  allow more than one winner (and then reject it). Why not also

Propose what you want in your community. Here, in the U.S., and
in England too, and in Canada, the major elections are one-winner
elections. President; single member Congressional or Parliamentary
districts. So I hope you can forgive me for being interested in
single-winner elections.

>remove
>  the same constraint on FBC and reject that too, for being undefined.
>  All of which leads to a conclusion that a quality case defending the
>  Approval Voting has not yet been pulled off.

Defending Approval against what? Your gibberish? I have to
admit there's no defense against gibberish.

>
>An authority on a new method should be allowed to undefine it. But
>  isn't that a move in the wrong direction?. Particularly during the
>  course of arguments when the authority was defending a position
>  against my arguments that definitions (FBC, and I should include SARC)
>  were not fully defined

Craig the reason I don't have much patience with you is that
your claims to not understand those definitions aren't sincere.
The truth is that you just don't have anything else to do.

I don't want to spend appreciable time on someone who's only
wasting his time & mine because he has nothing to do. That's why
any message by you that's longer than 2K won't be displayed by
me. It will be deleted without being displayed.

Again, I don't dislike long letters. I usually like them. But
your letters never have enough meaningful content to justify
their length. When there's anything semi-worth-saying in your
letters, it could all easily fit in 2K.


>PS. Maximizing some Utility value is an unclear thing since the
>  maximizing is done under constraints. With suitably selected
>  constraints, the aim can be a test that passes only the Approval
>  Voting method. So the idea of maximal utility values able to be of

So far none of my arguments for Approval have to do with
utility maximization. Actually additional arguments that I
intend to post do speak of that, though. I don't suggest tests
unless they're natural things to expect from a voting system.

For instance, not being strategically forced to vote someone
else over your favorite is a reasonable thing to ask, as
is not causing your last choice to win or your 1st choice to
lose because you voted.

>Maybe Mr Ossipoff undefined the Approval Voting method by accident
>  and would like to recheck that previous attempt. After all, it was
>  couched in a personal desire/understanding framework (rather than
>  explicit and mathematical).

Is this explicit enough for you?:

Each voter may mark as many candidates as he wants to on the
ballot. Marking a candidate gives that candidate one whole vote.
The candidate with the most votes wins.

***

I might as well add here: My initial definition of FBC was
clear to anyone, probably even you, Craig. You want it worded
mathematically,  but given your problems understanding it
so far, I doubt that you'd do any better with mathematical
words & symbols. Mathematical wording can be awkward, because
it takes so many words to relate the symbols to what we're
talking about. That tends to make mathematical definitions often
rather strained, and unnecessarily long, when all the
preliminary definitions are included.

But English wordings can be more precise than mine. For instance
sometimes when wording a law, one wants to write it in such a way
that no attorney could conceivably come up with any possible
meaning other than the intended one. I suggest that it would
be ridiculous to demand that of the wordings in this list. I
also accept the fact that that it's being ridiculous won't stop
you.

Mike Ossipoff



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