[EM] Issues, Condorcet, and IRV (was: IRV vs. plurality)

[Rob Speer]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 09:23:18AM -0400, Eric Gorr wrote:
> The Participation Criterion seems useless.

It seems to me like a generalization of monotonicity. It seems difficult
to satisfy, but not useless.

Just because your favorite method fails a criterion doesn't mean it's
useless. You sound like Donald Saari, in the chapter of "Chaotic
Elections" where he explains why the Condorcet criterion is useless
because it disagrees with his lovely mathematical structures that he
designed for the Borda Count. Or like every dissertation on voting
theory with a chapter that attempts to discredit Arrow's Theorem.

Ranked Pairs is my favorite method, too, but if there were something
like Ranked Pairs that satisfied Participation, I'd prefer that.

> You should never force everyone who can vote to vote nor decide that 
> the only valid election is only that in which everyone has voted and 
> all votes were properly counted.

Where does "forcing people to vote" enter into it? Wouldn't it be good
if voters knew that voting couldn't make the result worse from their
point of view?

> This is asking for a level of perfection that is impossible to reach.

Do you have an Impossibility Theorem to back that up?

-- 
Rob Speer