[EM] Discover Magazine article

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Markus said:

It makes sense to say that as the strongest pairwise defeat of
candidate D is the weakest candidate D should be elected. But
in so far as there is no reason why only candidate A or candidate D
can be elected, it doesn't make much sense to say that as candidate A
pairwise beats candidate D candidate A should be elected.

I reply:

Well here's one reason why only the Tideman(wv) winner or the
BeatpathWinner winner should be chosen:

Because the original question was which of those 2 methods would
be  better to use. Those are the 2 most popular rank-counts on EM.
If it's a choice between those 2 methods, then the Tideman(wv) winner
or the BeatpathWinner winner are the 2 candidates who could win.

Markus' PC standard sounds more abstract, less obvious, than
saying that T should win instead of S because the people like T better
than S. It can't really get any simpler or more obvious than that.

Aside from that, the justification that the PC standard seems to have
is that fewer voters are overruled. But, if that's what's important,
then we shouldn't just go by that one defeat. We'd be interested
in the number of candidates who beat the winner were ranked over the
winner by a particular voter, summing that over all the voters.

The PC standard, by itself doesn't seem to have any obvious compelling
justification, unless we're counting overruled voters.

Maybe BeatpathWinner & SSD do overrule fewer voters over the long run
than Tidemand does, but until that's demonstrated, it can't very
well be used as an argument.

Mike Ossipoff


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