[EM] To James A., about Bucklin & ERIRV

[James Green-Armytage]

this is James Green-Armytage responding to Mike Ossipoff

I wrote:
>(and in one case struck down by a state supreme
>court for failing later-no-harm!)).

Mike asked:
>Can you back up that claim? Can you post the wording of the supreme court 
>decision, their wording for why they ruled against Bucklin?

Now, I write:
	Here are the only excerpts I've been able to find so far, via google
searches. The court was the Minnesota Supreme Court. The case was Brown v.
Smallwood

"
the word “vote” meant a choice for a candidate by one constitutionally
qualified to exercise a choice. ... It was never meant that the ballot of
one elector, cast for
one candidate, could be of greater or less effect than the ballot of
another elector cast for
another candidate. It was to be of the same effect."

"The preferential system [Bucklin] directly diminishes the right of an
elector to give an
effective vote for the candidate of his choice. If he votes for him once,
his power to help
him is exhausted. If he votes for other candidates he may harm his choice,
but cannot
help him."

	It would be great if I could find the whole text of the decision, but I
don't know how to do that. There are these crazy footnotes that say stuff
like "Brown v. Smallwood, 130 Minn. at 497, 153 N.W. at 955", but I don't
know if that makes things any easier.
	I have to agree that Bucklin's later-no-harm failure is a big deal. I
think that it's much much worse than the later-no-harm failure of wv
Condorcet, since there needs to be a cycle for a later choice to harm an
earlier choice. I'd say that the later-no-harm problem is Bucklin is
somewhere in the same league as the same problem in Borda (*gasp!*), which
is pretty darn bad. Basically, the truncation incentive in Bucklin is "off
the hook." So I think that the court was right on that one.


James