[EM] Intro to list (etc)

[Rob LeGrand]

Rob Brown wrote:
> Here is a UI I am working on for doing for ranking
> candidates:    http://weblogz.com/voting/2000pres.html

It's a good-looking, easy-to-use interface.  The only improvement I'd
suggest would be to allow tied ranks anywhere in the ballot, so that a
Browne>Keyes>Buchanan=McCain=Bush>Bradley=Gore>Nader vote would be allowed.
 That way you could get rid of the notion of picking and unpicking since
every option would be somewhere on the ballot.

Rob Speer wrote:
> The only worry would be if a Condorcet method could produce a ranking
> where someone loses to the candidate directly below him, which would
> confuse and alarm people by displaying a negative margin of defeat.
> However, it seems that generally cycles are unrolled in such a way that
> this does not happen.

I generally prefer Schulze's beatpath to Ranked Pairs, but the ranking
returned by Ranked Pairs has an important advantage:  Every candidate beats
pairwise the one just below him in the ranking.  So, in the absence of
pairwise ties, any RP election could be summarized like the Free State
Project results, and the above would never happen.

Adam Tarr wrote:
> 1)  Determine the winner.
> 2)  Order the losing candidates from the one with the strongest beatpath
> against the winner, to the one with the weakest.
> 3)  Assign the winning candidate a score equal to its beatpath against
the
> strongest losing candidate.
> 4)  Replace all non-winning candidates' scores with the number of votes
> they received against the winning candidate, unless this amount is larger
> than the winner's score.

I'd like to point out that, with fully-ranked ballots and a Condorcet
winner, this scheme will give the same result as the Approval Voting
equilibrium found when all voters use strategy A (see
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/9713).

My personal opinion is that directly using Approval Voting would be ideal
for online polls when voters are allowed to change their vote in light of
more recent results.  The running poll results would be very easy to
display and understand and the voting interface could be extremely simple.

=====
Rob LeGrand, psephologist
rob at approvalvoting.org
Citizens for Approval Voting
http://www.approvalvoting.org/

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