[EM] The Coming California Single Seat Election

[Rob Speer]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 12:11:42AM -0700, Alex Small wrote:
> Dave Ketchum said:
> > 9045?  I see counts for A>B and B>A as separate tallies.
> 
> Good point.  I forgot about equal rankings necessitating such separate
> tallies.

This part confuses me. I assume this is the same as counting an equal
ranking as "half a vote for each", which has come up a lot, when I
always thought of an equal ranking as simply not changing anything
between the two candidates.

Since most Condorcet methods I'm familiar with use margins, there is no
need to keep separate tallies - so separate tallies are "necessitated"
only for Winning Votes methods, right?

> More important is that Donald tried to imply the ballot would have
> separate slots for the 9,045 pairwise contests, in which case the ballots
> would be thicker than encyclopedias.  In fact it would just be a standard
> ranked ballot.

I've encountered people who have heard of Condorcet but are scared off
because they think the voter has to vote explicitly in each pairwise
contest. Is this just misinterpretation, or deliberate FUD by IRV
supporters?

-- 
Rob Speer