Legality of "inverting" ballots by Condorcet.

[Forest Simmons]

I wouldn't call it "heavy handed" or "attacking a straw man."

Demo is just using a bit of dramatic poetic license to make a good point,
like my grandfather used to do when he said it was a capital crime to
leave the root in the ground when a weed breaks off in your hand.

Now that Demo has our attention let's look at the merit of using Yes/No
Approval completion.

Personally, I think it beats all of the completion methods that are merely
based on preference ballots.

In fact, I believe that the Yes/No information is at least as important as
the other preference information for determining the will of the people. 

Demo's method has the following advantages at minimal cost (the cost of
ascertaining the Approval cutoffs):

1. It is simpler than the pure Condorcet methods.

2. It satisfies the Favorite Betrayal Criterion (a stronger version of the
FBC than Approval satisfies by itself).

3. It eliminates the occasional low utility Condorcet Winner.

4. It preserves the form of "majority rule" that is easily understood and
held sacred by the public. 


Because of the first advantage it is a better public proposal than
Universal Approval or other methods based on dyadic ballots.

Because of the second and fourth advantages it competes well with ordinary
Approval as a public proposal, and may be superior in the minds of the
public in spite of Approval's maximum bang for the buck.

Because of the fourth advantage it may compete with Five Slot Approval in
the eyes of the voters, in spite of FSA's superior simplicity and favorable
comparison on the other points. 

Let's not overlook the advantages of Demo's method just because he
sometimes gets overly dramatic in pointing out the defects of other
methods in comparison to his.

My main disagreement with Demorep is that I tend to prefer the Approval
winner over the majority first place winner in the rare instances when the
two might differ. But I'm sure that the public would side with Demorep on
this issue. 

Example:

55 A > B >> C
45 C > B >> A

Demorep and most other people would say that A is the clear choice of the
people. The 45% minority lost the election fair and square. Let them tough
it out for the next four years.

I believe that B would be more likely to represent the common interests of
the people.

Universal Approval agrees with me in this example, but it agrees with
Demorep if the larger faction is increased to 67 percent of the voters,
which seems like a reasonable result to me.

Doesn't our constitution require a two thirds majority on certain
important issues?

I'm curious about how others view this example, in particular, and about
how they view Demorep's ACMA (Approval Condorcet Maximum Approval) method
in general, since it has so many good points in its favor, and the public
would probably side with him on this example.

Forest



On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Buddha Buck wrote:

> At 11:23 PM 07-05-2001 -0700, Richard Moore wrote:
> 
> >Especially since the rules were in place before the election. I think 
> >Demo's being a bit heavy-handed here.
> 
> Actually, I think he's attacking a strawman.  Changing ballots and 
> reporting incorrect vote tallies are of course major election fraud, making 
> those practices an easy target to attack.  Of course, what we're discussing 
> is not what he's attacking.
> 
> >It would of course be fraudulent to change the rules after the election.
> 
> I'm pretty sure someone changed the rules in Florida, I'm just not sure 
> who, or if they got away with it.
> 
> >Richard
> 
>