Winning-votes intuitive?

[Forest Simmons]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Adam Tarr wrote:

> Forest wrote:
> 
> >[...] if we interpret truncations as NO and ranked as YES.
> >
> >This time Bush wins, having greater approval than Gore.
> >
> >I suggest that this is a reasonable interpretation, and that the resulting
> >version of Approval Completed Condorcet is not too shabby.
> 
> The problem with handling Approval Completed Condorcet in this fashion is 
> that it creates a strong incentive to truncate those candidates you 
> disapprove of, even if you have a preference between some of them.  In the 
> example I gave, for instance, it would create a strong incentive for the 12 
> Gore>Bush>Nader voters to bullet vote for Gore.  This denies information to 
> the preceding Condorcet vote; we may end up with the Approval completion 
> corrupting the initial search for a Condorcet winner.

True, from the Condorcet point of view it increases the incentive for
truncation, but from the Approval point of view it decreases the incentive
to bullet vote, since bullet voting nullifies your influence among the
candidates that you truncate.


> 
> As Alex said, it seems that putting a yes/no vote would not be too much 
> extra effort.  A 5 grade (4 grade? 6 grade? ABCDEF?) ballot that allows 
> implicit yes/no votes by the grade given is a possible solution here, and 
> allows for very intuitive Approval Completed Condorcet.  Has anyone tried 
> to figure out what criteria are satisfied by such a form of ACC?

Of course this is better than truncation for an approval marker.  It is
what Demorep has been advocating for a long time.  Another way to handle
it is with a NOTB candidate as approval cutoff.

In my opinion it is very easy to improve on any Condorcet method by
abandoning pure ranked ballots for better style ballots that still allow
the pairwise comparisons.

Forest