[EM] Majority winner set

[Markus Schulze]

Dear Mike,

you say that the well known and widely used concept that
criteria and election methods are defined on the reported
von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the voters is
"inadequate," "vague," "sloppy," "dishonest," "absurd,"
"faulty," "incorrect," "poor," "silly," "contradictory,"
"incoherent," "useless," "garbage" and "mumbojumbo." But
on the other side, your concept has similar ingredients.

First:

Your definitions of SFC, GSFC, WDSC, SDSC, FBC,
SARC and defensive strategies use "sincere preferences."

Second:

Your definition of "sincerity" is implausible. You wrote
(24 Nov 2000):
> A voter votes sincrely if he doesn't vote a preference
> that isn't a sincere preference or leave unvoted a sincere
> preference that the balloting system would have allowed him
> to vote in addition to the preferences that he actually did
> vote.

Example:

  Suppose that Approval Voting is used. Suppose that the
  sincere opinion of a given voter is A > B > C > D > E and
  that this voter decides to approve A, B, C and D.

  The day before election day, this voter hears that candidate
  E has no chances to win and that only candidate B and
  candidate C have realistic chances to win. Therefore, this
  given voter decides to approve only candidate A and
  candidate B.

  Due to your definition of "sincerity," this given voter votes
  "sincerely." But (1) in so far as this voter changes his
  voting behaviour after he has got additional information
  about the voting behaviour of the other voters and (2) in so
  far as this given voter changes his voting behaviour because
  of strategical considerations, it is clear that this given
  voter votes strategically. Therefore your definition of
  "sincerity" isn't suitable to differ between sincere voters
  and strategical voters.

Again: When you really think that the well known and widely
used concept that criteria and election methods are defined
on the reported von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the voters
is "inadequate," "vague," "sloppy," "dishonest," "absurd,"
"faulty," "incorrect," "poor," "silly," "contradictory,"
"incoherent," "useless," "garbage" and "mumbojumbo" then
please explain why you think that your "universally accepted"
concept that criteria should be defined on sincere opinions
and election methods should be defined on casted ballots might
be better. Actually the fact that you define criteria and
election methods on different inputs makes it significantly
more difficult to check whether a given election method meets
a given criterion. Example: It hasn't yet been demonstrated
whether PC resp. Smith//PC meets SDSC.

You claim that I "endlessly repeated" the same questions.
You claim that you are "real tired of that repetition." But
you apparently neglect that you have never answered any of my
questions. Although I have invited you several times to explain
why you think that your concept might be better, you have never
answered.

However, I doubt that those who don't promote Approval Voting
will agree to your definition of "sincerity."

However, I don't have the impression that your statements have
anything to do with majority winner sets or beat path GMC.

Markus Schulze