[EM] Relevance of Consistency

[Blake Cretney]

On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 21:28, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:

> Consistency, like a number of other criteria, is relevant to how
> well a voting system reflects the electorate's wishes. Say a candidate
> wins in each district. If he wins in each district, there's a
> meaningful sense in which he can be called the people's choice in
> each district. One hopes that the result, when a set of ballots is
> counted, in some way represents what those people want. So then
> we count the whole set of ballots systemwide, and that candidate
> loses. If there's some way in which the outcome in the districts
> can be called the people's choice, representative of what they want,
> then how can we say that about the systemwide result? The voting
> system has acted inconsistently. That's all the criterion is saying.

The argument seems to be that if X wins a district under method M, than
method M says that X is the choice of the district.  It makes sense to
think of districts as having choices, and method M says that it is
candidate X.  If X wins in every district, then we can look at X as the
unanimous choice of the districts (according to M), and therefore X
should win (if M is being consistent).

The argument takes the convenient phrasing (that a group chooses a
candidate) and interprets this as if it were literally true that groups
have choices.  They don't.  Neither do districts.  Nor is there really a
people's choice in a district.  Some people choose one thing, some
another.  Of course, you could define people's choice so that it means
the winner under a particular method.  But that doesn't mean that you
can treat the voters as if they were all just participants in a group
opinion.

---
Blake Cretney (http://condorcet.org)


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