[EM] Correction. Big CS fault?

Forest Simmons fsimmons at pcc.edu
Wed Dec 18 15:41:00 PST 2002


I took it for granted that "favorite" would also be among the approved on
Majority Choice ballots, and that favorites would be determined from the
rankings or ratings in the case of CR or ranked ballots.

But I still think that CS as I proposed it suffers from a fault.  If the
race is perceived as being between candidate A and B, and the race is
close, it would be tempting to list A as favorite and vote just like
another member of A's camp in order to add zero to the average distance
from A, thereby giving A the best chance of winning.

Of course, if your favorite and B were on direct opposite sides of A, then
moving closer to A would remove precisely as much from B's total as it
would from A's total, so there would be no advantage to abandoning
favorite.

Perhaps the best strategy would be to vote at the foot of the
perpendicular from favorite's position to the line determined by A and B.

[How to accomplish that is another question.]

In that case the Euclidean distance would make the most sense.


I'll continue in another posting.

Forest

----
For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), 
please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em



More information about the Election-Methods mailing list