Re: [EM] Saari reply

[Alex Small]

> MANY voters can understand wanting to be able to say:  I prefer Nader;
> I  can tolerate Gore as a second choice; my dislike for Bush requires
> that I  mark him as less desirable than Gore.
>
> Condorcet lets me say this, and expect to be heard when the votes are
> counted.
>
> IRV lets me say this, but I cannot depend on their noticing.
>
> Approval does not even let me say it.

That's an accurate assessment of the methods described, particularly IRV.

Two questions, however:

1)  What do you think of CR, which allows people to make distinctions and
is very easy to explain (compared with Condorcet and IRV)?
2)  What do you think of the 3-level Approval method discussed on the list
lately?  It also allows some level of distinction, although not as much as
Condorcet.

> Thus I believe in promoting Condorcet as the desired goal, rather than
> promoting and getting Approval and then needing a second effort stating
>  the achieved goal was unsatisfactory and we need to change again:

I agree that we'll look pretty flaky if we say "Hey, great, approval
voting.  But, um, we found something better, so let's put aside the reform
that so much effort and debate went into."

However, the problem with selling Condorcet methods is that even people
with a strong interest in the subject have difficulty agreeing on the best
way to resolve cyclic ambiguities.  The debate can get quite arcane.  In
the absence of a consensus position agreed on by most advocates, a public
effort to sell Condorcet could easily degenerate into infighting.

I'm open to any suggestions on this, as long as the suggestions
aren't "Method X is clearly superior, and if everybody would just accept
this criterion there'd be no disagreement."  Those arguments have yet to
sway everybody on this list.  The public will be in the same position as
jurors watching dueling expert witnesses hurl jargon.

I realize that taking this argument to its extreme means we shouldn't
propose any method, since plenty of people in the voting reform community
support IRV or Borda or whatever instead of Approval or Condorcet.
However, at least each of those factions offer very different systems with
easily appreciable differences.  Infighting over Condorcet variants would
be much more arcane.

>      If Approval was basically free, and current budgets would not
> support going to Condorcet, Approval would be an acceptable temporary
> step.

Approval and its 3-level cousin are basically free.  I'd think CR would be
cheap as well.  I don't know the cost of Condorcet.

Since Approval and its cousins are cheap, and the cousins offer more
expressivity than Approval, and since these methods don't carry the same
controversies as Condorcet variants, I think CR and Three-Level Approval
are the best methods to push.

Alex

--
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers!

Of course, that's just my opinion.  I could be wrong.

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