[EM] The Repoman strikes again

MIKE OSSIPOFF nkklrp at hotmail.com
Sun Jan 7 23:49:11 PST 2001



>For once, Donald has a point.  There will always be examples of any 
>election
>method electing an unpalitable candidate, and the example is meaningless.

The example dramatizes a genuine IRV problem: IRV tends to often
jump away from the voter median and choose an extreme. That's why
IRV did so poorly in Merrill's social utility simulation. Some here
don't like Approval, but both in Merrill's study and Norm's study,
Approval did better than IRV. You may not base your judgements on
social utility, but the fact remains that those SU studies
show IRV doing poorly because of its frequent jumps to extremes.

So it isn't really correct to say that Demorep's example is meaningless
or that any method could be made to look just as bad. The example
demonstrates a genuine problem that IRV has, something that IRV
really will do fairly often. IRV jumps to extremes.

Mike Ossipoff





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