Borda Count

[LAYTON Craig]

Yes, it is a tricky issue, and one that I've been thinking a bit about
recently.  Forest's example only really works if you assume sincere voting
(as do any arguments in favour of ratings systems).

I can say that I have rarely met someone who claims to have voted
strategically in an (Australian) election.  When I was much younger, I did
hear people saying that they wouldn't vote for a minor party because it was
a "wasted vote", but I haven't heard anyone talk like that for five or ten
years.  The only public aknowledgement of strategy is in the party's
how-to-vote cards.  I would say that the vast majority of voters (at least
90 or 95%) follow a how-to-vote card or vote sincerely.  Of course, there
isn't any way to tell for sure, but everyone I talk to about how they vote
says that they put a number one next to their favourite etc. etc.

Certainly, strategy does effect how some voting systems work in practice,
and you could hold a poll before-hand to give the voters some information to
strategise upon.  However, I think that doing that amoung a group of voting
theorists/mathmaticians etc would produce an enormous sampling error (ie
severe overuse of strategy compared to the general populace).

-----Original Message-----
From: Bart Ingles [mailto:bartman at netgate.net]
Sent: Friday, 2 February 2001 15:15
To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
Subject: Re: Borda Count

I don't know, I think strategy is an important part of any election
situation.

LAYTON Craig wrote:
> 
> There's no reason we couldn't do something like that here, depending on
how
> many subscribers we currently have (we could suppliment results using
people
> we know that aren't on the mailing list).  Neutral things that everyone
has
> an opinion/preference on like favourite colour are best, because there
isn't
> much need to vote insincerely.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Forest Simmons [mailto:fsimmons at pcc.edu]
> Sent: Friday, 2 February 2001 10:50
> To: LAYTON Craig
> Cc: 'election-methods-list at eskimo.com'
> Subject: RE: Borda Count
> 
> That's interesting. I wish we had more of these kinds of experiments with
> real live people to help educate our intuition.
> 
> On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, LAYTON Craig wrote:
> 
> > Yes, the first one.
> >
> > In relation to Borda, I remember an experiment we did in 1st year
> political
> > science, where all the students voted on the same thing (I think it was
> > chocolate bars).  We used a number of voting systems, and had to vote
> > sincerely and consistently across all the systems. The voting systems
> were;
> > first past the post, IRV, approval, borda and a rating system (out of
> 100).
> > The voting pattern was really interesting (there were two dominant
> factions,
> > one larger but more ambivalent, and the other smaller and more committed
> to
> > their candidate, and the members of a faction voted almost exactly the
> same
> > way, without prior communication on how to vote), but, anyway, all the
> > systems produced nearly the same result, except for borda, which
produced
> a
> > wildly different result (out of six candidates, the candidate who won
the
> > borda count came third in the rating system, and did even worse in some
of
> > the others).
> >
> > I thought it was quite interesting.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Forest Simmons [mailto:fsimmons at pcc.edu]
> > Sent: Thursday, 1 February 2001 14:58
> > To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
> > Subject: Re:Borda Count
> >
> > Suppose you have 16 candidates to rank.  You know how each of them
stands
> > on the four issues that you consider vital.  No two have the same
profile
> > on these issues, so if we represent "agrees with you" and "disagrees
with
> > you" by the letters a and d respectively, the 16 candidates can be
> > identified by their profiles:  aaaa, aaad, aada, aadd, adaa, adad, adda,
> > addd, daaa, daad, dada, dadd, ddaa, ddad, ddda, dddd
> >
> > In an informal non-binding poll you are asked to rate them on a scale of
> > zero to 100%, so naturally you rate them in proportion to the number of
> > issues on which they agree with you (assuming all of the issues are
> > equally important to you).
> >
> > aaaa gets 100%
> > addd, dadd, ddad, ddda get identical ratings of 75%
> > aadd, adad, adda, daad, dada, ddaa get identical ratings of 50%
> > daaa, adaa, aada, aaad  get identiacl ratings of 25%
> > dddd gets 0% .
> >
> > Next, in another informal non-binding poll you are asked to rank the
> > candidates.
> >
> > Since you cannot distinguish all of them on the issues, you use looks
and
> > personality to break up the groups with identical ratings:
> >
> > aaaa > aaad > aada > ... > dddd
> >
> > The second pollster immediately converts your rankings to a rating via
the
> > Borda Count with  rates between 0/15 and 15/15.
> >
> > Which would you consider to be a more accurate representation of your
> > estimation of the candidates' abilities to represent your viewpoint in
> > the legislature?
> >
> > Forest
> >
> >