[EM] Discover Magazine article

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Bart Ingles wrote:

> >From the November '00 issue of Discover.  Should be understandable even
 > to someone who has difficulty grasping the concept of approval voting:
 >
 > http://www.discover.com/nov_00/gthere.html?article=featbestman.html


Rob L. wrote:

This is a great article.  I don't entirely agree on the conclusion (Donald
Saari's work on Borda again comes out pretty favorably), but the fact that
the reporter also talked to Brams makes it a much more balanced article
than the piece in the Economist a few months back.  There's also some
really interesting discussion of using voting methods in character
recognition, plotting space probe trajectories, and other computer
applications.

I comment:

But the author did mention that strategy by voters can make Borda
mess-up, wiping out the perfection that Saari claims. The author also
pointed out that Borda himself said that his method was only for honest
, nonstrategizing voters, adding that that isn't a realistic expectation
for our current public political elections. So then, the article is
very fair, because, though it presented Saari's case, it also told
what's wrong with it.

We've all long known that, if voters rank completely sincerely, and
if they only care about the greatest good for the greatest number,
not about majority rule, then Borda would be the ideal best way to
count ranked ballots. Saari has devised some clever & interesting new
ways to dramatize that idealness for that application. But the
odd thing is that Saari is proposing Borda for Presidential elections.
Can it be that he thinks that American voters are the nonstrategizing
voters that Borda spoke of, or that majority rule doesn't matter in
the U.S.?

Mike Ossipoff

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