[EM] Truncation issues

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

One person's theory about how to interpret rankings, let alone
how to count them after interpreting them, can be incomprehensible to
another person. That strongly underlines a big advantage of Approval:
There's only one way to interpret the Approval votes, and there's
only one way to count them: Add them up.

But, about the truncated rankings, Demorep, I don't understand what
the problem is. The voter who votes a short ranking is still ranking
some candidates over others, and those pairwise preferences that he
has expressed should be counted. I think you're making it more
complicated than it is.

But there's another issue about truncated rankings: I've always
felt that the voter who votes a short ranking wants to be understood
as voting every candidate he's ranked over every candidate he's not
ranked.

But maybe not always. Maybe you rank the main contenders, against
eachother, but you don't want to take the time to rank all the
less winnable candidates whom you consider it less important to rank.
You _don't_ want your ranking to be interpreted as saying that your
lowest ranked candidate is better than everyone whom you didn't rank.

On the other hand, maybe you only rank a few candidates because
you want to say that they're better than all the others.

It seems clear that both interpretations would be wanted by some
votes. So the voter should be able to indicate which he wants.

The question is, though: Which should be the default interpretation?

I recently proposed a Presidential poll on a newsgroup. I said that,
though Nader, Gore, Bush, Browne & Buchannan are the obvious candidates,
one should feel free to rank anyone else too, including demos & repubs
who lost the primaries.

Then I gave my ranking, which was:

1. Nader
2. Gore
3. Browne
4. Bush
5. Buchannan

Only afterwards did it occur to me that I'd said with my ranking that
Buchannan is better than McCain and Bradley, etc.--that ranking
of course should be interpreted as only a comparison of its ranked
candidates.

So obviously the voter should be able to choose which interpretation
he wants--but which should be the default interpretation?

Mike Ossipoff


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