[EM] Janets questions

[Craig Carey]

At 12:49 09.10.00 -0700 Monday, JanetRAnderson wrote:
 >Dear Creigs, Mike, Bart and David,
 >Thank you for such quick and mostly understandable responses.  Calling CVD
 >anti human rights, I still don't get!)
 >
...
 >The second hat I wear is Chair of the Washington LWV Election Methods study
 >which has served as the basis for two meetings of all the State's local
 >leagues this fall..  If you don't like what California is doing, you
 >probably won't like what we did either!  The study can be found at
 >www.lwvwa.org/election.  We were faced with the need  to provide enough
 >information to serve as a basis of two or three hours of discussion by
 >people who for the most part are even less math inclined than I am!   We did
 >not include Condorcet in fear of losing our audience on details.  Since most
...
 >independent worker bees in various states.  I think of them [the CVD] as
 >pragmatists rather than researchers.  As for software, what is Cambridge,
 >Mass. now using for their elections?
 >
 >I have not yet had time to visit the web sites you referred me to, but I
 >will.  I hope you now have a clearer idea of what a LWV "study" can and
 >cannot do.  I think there is a need for the work you do in the ivory tower
 >as well as what we do.  I'm not sure how long I will remain on this list,
 >but do keep my address and let me know of any break throughs or consensus
 >you might achieve.
 >

Anybody seen mathematics professors at universities knocking at each others'
doors in pursuit of 'consensus'?. Help me understand what value Boolean x
has... This is a world apart from women's reforming groups.




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   I ask people that post to state their position on truncation resistance.
   This asked to all subscribed, provided they post a lot or they want to
   make a statement on this (yes/no) question.

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I am looking forward to a statement from Mr Markus Schulze. As far as I
can tell, these people reject truncation resistance and hence are
unfriendly to STV:

    Mr David Catchpole, Mr Markus Schulze, Blake Cretney, Mr Bart Ingles,
    [Mr gruff Mike my dog ate all 10 pages of the proof Ossipoff], and
    Demorep. [Total number = 6]

I myself expect that a method that has papers like STV may have, should
not be used in a public election if it is not truncation resistant. Note
that this is a clear answer. My IFPP is in the STV-family of methods so
the question really ought not be 'do you believe in STV' because that is
too narrow and it would cut out a fixed STV that was monotonic.

Does any know of court cases opposing STV's introduction?. There should
be an effort to progress and advance the edifice of ideas that the CVD
and other hard workers created.

Appendix A

At 04:06 10.10.00 +0000 Tuesday, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:

>Hi--
>
>It seems to me that this installment of my reply to Janet might not
>have gotten sent, and so I'm sending it now. My apologies if I'm
>sending it twice. But first let me add a brief p.s:

...

>Another thing: IRV, because of its capricious choice of whose
>voted preferences to count and whose not to count, likely is
>unconstitutional, because it violates the U.S. Constitution's
>"equal protection under the law" clause, a clause often applied to
>voting rights. IRV violates the basic principle of one person, one
>(counted) vote. Not counting some people's preferences violates
>1-person-1-vote, and the equal protection clause.

That sort of arguing against IRV is not rightly done and instead there
would be a more persuasive argument if there was a comparing with the
ideal. I started out days ago by saying IRV violates "one person,
one vote", but my position has been and is that IRV very probably
passes that test but the proof may be quite hard. Like I wrote, that
passes a method that multiplies someone's vote by -0.9 but fails the
method if the weight is -1.1 or 1.1. If the weight is negative the
person can somehow negate their vote. It means a single voter does
not get too much power. STV and the Alternative Vote (=IRV) pass
perfectly I suppose. [An Approval Vote with STV papers fails a
'one man one vote' rule as I have defined it.]
Maybe people want to say my interpretation is wrong because I am
saying it is OK to have papers have zero influence. But it is worse
to have 1 vote have an influence of 1.001. The question is: is the
idea of 'limitation of power' able to be named 'one man, one vote'?.
In the Approval Vote, all preferences can be used and the vote has
0 power to do anything, so that alone is enough to make Mike know
that the test he has to reject IRV fails his own Approval method
in some elections (e.g. 3 paper elections). So the complaint was
unsound.

A feature of "capricious"ness is improved by making a passable method,
quite monotonic


I retract my expulsion complaint about Mike Ossipoff: (1) he may not
have been reading my messages (like I wrote); (2) posting can be just
blocked (however he is such a prolific source of errors he is integrated
into the list greatly).


-------------------------------

Appendix B:

      A definition of Truncation Resistance:
      That is the principle that says that for each candidate, and for all
      STV style ballot paper collections, the alteration of preferences
      after than candidates preferences makes no difference to the win-lose
      state of the candidate. [Papers not holding a preferences for the
      candidate can't be altered. More than one paper can be altered.]