Finding the probable best candidate?

[Steve Barney]

Rob:

First, I really never thought of Buchanan as a clone of Bush, just as I didn't
think of Gore as a clone of Bush (Nader may have, but I didn't). In fact, in
that election it always seemed to me that the fairly strong vote for Nader in
Florida and other states, in spite of the obvious spoiler problem for Gore, was
an indication that there where more voters on Gore's side of the political
spectrum than Bush's, where right wingers like Buchanan did poorly in
comparison to Nader. It seemed to me that the presence of a strong third party
candidate on the left is evidence of more overall voter support for the left
than the right. I wonder sometimes whether the BC's sensitivity to "clones"
(failure to satisfy the IIA criterion) might not be such a bad thing, as long
as there is actually no such thing as a human clone. Perhaps this is just too a
radical idea for us at first blush, and perhaps we need to open our minds up to
new political world with many choices and colors to choose from (human clones
do not actually exist - yet). Perhaps it would be good to be faced with the
opposite problem - too many candidates spanning the political spectrum (again,
at least for now human clones remain a fantasy), rather than too few. Given
that the plurality procedure's spoilage is bad, perhaps the opposite of that,
the BC's sensitivity to clones or non-IIA, is good. I don't know, but it is not
beyond the realm of possibility, is it? Maybe, just maybe, part of the problem
is that we are sort of prejudiced in favor of majoritarian systems, and too
uncritically accepting of the majority rules ideal. Perhaps we should start
experimenting with it on a small scale, such as school elections, and see what
happens over time. Several schools are already doing just that, including one
governing body at my own campus - thanks to a visit by Donald Saari (guess who
organized that visit):

	Alternative Voting Systems in Student Governments
	http://www.fairvote.org/irv/studentgov.htm

The argument against Fran, in your other example:

	63:Eric>Fran>Gary
	37:Fran>Gary>Eric

can be turned on its head. Let's say:

	1,000,001:Eric>Fran>Gary
	1,000,000:Fran>Gary>Eric

or

	1,000,000:Eric>Fran>Gary
	1,000,000:Fran>Gary>Eric

In that case Fran is the 1st or 2nd preference of all the voters. Whereas Eric
is despised by about half, and nobody despises Fran. Do you see what I mean?

-Steve Barney
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

--- In election-methods-list at y..., Rob LeGrand <honky1998 at y...> wrote:
> Steve,
[...]
> > So, what's the point?
> 
> Well, looking at the ranked votes, do you think Bush is the "best" candidate?

> I don't.  Bush's Borda score is propped up by his near-clone Buchanan.  Borda
> is the only ranked-ballot method I know (besides Black) that gives the win to
> Bush.
> 
> As a simpler example, consider an election with three candidates.  Eric is
> freedom-loving and Fran and Gary are socialist.  63% of the voters are
> freedom-loving, 37% are socialist and all of the voters prefer Fran to Gary
> because of a scandal involving Gary, so the ranked votes are
> 
> 63:Eric>Fran>Gary
> 37:Fran>Gary>Eric
> 
> Borda gives the win to Fran even though Eric received a majority of
first-place
> votes and would have won in a landslide if Gary hadn't run.  Borda encourages
a
> party or ideology to run lots of candidates.  Some methods, like Simpson
(i.e.
> Minmax, Condorcet(EM)), fail clone independence only in contrived cases, but
> Borda fails badly.
[...]



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