[EM] Deterministic MAM (Majority Preference Voting)

[Ernest Prabhakar]

Hi all,

Thanks to many of you for your comments.  I've posted my  election 
reform proposal -- based roughly on Steve Eppley's  Maximize Affirmed 
Majorities (MAM) --  which I'm now calling Majority Preference Voting, 
at:

http://radicalcentrism.org/majority_voting.html

The name MPV is an attempt to describe what is happening from both the 
-voters- and the -counters- perspective (unlike most of our names, 
which focus only on the counting perspective).  And, while it is 
Condorcet-compatible, that name (French as it is! :-) doesn't appear 
except in the footnotes.  The goal is for this page to be 
comprehensible to 'mere mortals' with no prior experience in voting 
systems. That means having an approachable marketing name as opposed to 
the intimidating technical name (like aspirin vs. acetylsalicylic acid) 
-- something the IRV proponents understand quite well.

At the same time, I want the description to be technically correct for 
experts (such as yourselves) to comment on.  To do that, I need to make 
sure I'm properly referring to the existing systems, especially in the 
footnotes.  To wit:

> MPV could also be called Majority Maximization Voting, as it is based 
> on a deterministic form of Steve Eppley's  Maximize Affirmed 
> Majorities (MAM) system, which in turn is a variant of Tideman's 
> well-studied Ranked Pairs algorithm for finding the pairwise winner 
> (also known as the Condorcet winner. This particular 
> Condorcet-compatible variant was apparently first proposed by Mike 
> Ossipoff, and recommended to me by Eric Gorr

This is a rather awkward paragraph, reflecting my rudimentary 
understanding of the situation.   Could one of you experts on "Maximize 
Affirmed Majorities" review my algorithm, to determine whether in fact 
it is a clone-independent, deterministic variation of MAM?    Is there 
a better way to characterize this than 'MAM-d'?  And whom should I 
credit for it?

Of course, any other comments or corrections are always welcome.   I've 
started thinking about how to rewrite my Python script to implement 
this, but would prefer to know that the algorithm itself is sound.

Thanks in advance,

- Ernie P.
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