[EM] Displaying intermediate results in Condorcet-based elections (re: Rob Brown's original question)

[Paul Kislanko]

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Brown <rob at hypermatch.com>
To: election-methods at electorama.com <election-methods at electorama.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 9:33 PM
Subject: Re: [EM] Displaying intermediate results in Condorcet-based
elections (re: Rob Brown's original question)



>Well, if many others on this list can accept that Condorcet methods for
>determining a winner are reasonable to use -- even though Arrow has proven
>them to be imperfect -- I don't think I'll burn in hell for showing a set
>of scores which is equally discredited by Arrow.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I have no objection to using Condorcet to select
the winner - I applaud that and really like the voting interface. I am just
struggling with how to make the scalar values meaningful as intermediate
results. Since the last ballot that comes in can change any of the victory
strengths used in Beatpath or Ranked Pairs, the scalar values aren't useful
as a guage of how far ahead the winner is, and this could confuse the voters
who are used to other methods.

It's not a bad thing - just depends upon the purpose of displaying
intermediate results. As long as the results are labeled with something like
"If the election were over now, the winners would be..." or some such
disclaimer it would be fine. You just don't want a lot of after-the-fact
questions like "How could Sally have lost? She was 'ahead' by 30 points
yesterday...."

I think the first few suggestions were good ones for your purposes. For the
generalization to other purposes where the electorate understands that it is
using Condorcet, I'd prefer something like my list of all ballots with
non-zero votes, because that is more accurate an indicator of where my vote
fits with the others.

Again, I understand your clients' (and their clients) requirements are
different, I was just thinking beyond this implementation to the more
general one.