[EM] Single Winner Systems categorization

[Jobst Heitzig]

Hi folks!

Back from Persia I still wonder why you still don't consider ballots
that allow voters to specify their preferences more accurately... Almost
all the methods in the "Ranked choice Voting" category can easily be
applied (or easily modified to be applicable) to ballots on which the
voter specifies for each pair of options whether (a) she prefers the
first, (b) she prefers the second, (c) she considers both equivalent, or
(d) she is undecided about this pair or wants to abstain from the
decision over this pair -- in other words: they can specify any binary
relation on the set of options (including linear orderings aka
"rankings", of course). Otherwise you simply cannot express that you
prefer A to B and B to C but don't want to evaluate D at all because you
would have to put D either above or below A,B,C, or between two of them,
or equivalent (aka tied) to one of them.
	GrouCho uses the general type of ballots ever since and I can't see why
one should ignore them. Even when some people might consider such
ballots too confusing for voters it is still sensitive to consider the
most inclusive class of preferences a method can deal with instead of
restricting voters to certain kinds of preferences without need...
	So my suggestion is to rename the category "Ranked choice Voting" to
something like "Preference Relation Voting" or "Pairwise Comparison Voting".

Sencondly, I also don't understand why the wiki should be titled "Voting
Systems". "Voting" (the process of expressing preferences on ballots or
by raising hands or by whatever means) is just the less interesting part
of elections and other group decisions! A far more accurate name for
what we are talking about is "election methods" or, even better, "group
decision methods"...

Finally, I'd like to suggest again to use a *different* wiki site than
the Wikipedia *Encyclopedia* to write wikis about aspects of election
methods and then perhaps copy the final versions of the less technical
wikis to Wikipedia.

Jobst


> On Jun 11, 2004, at 2:48 PM, Dr.Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
> 
>> Hi Tom,
>> It seems like an noble effort, and I appreciate the work.  I'm still a 
>> little unclear on what you mean by 'one vote'.  Do you mean one vote 
>> per candidate, one vote per position, or one vote per ballot?
> 
> Okay, after discussing with Tom offline, I'd like to propose the 
> following text for single-winner methods. Anyone else have thoughts?
> 
> -- Ernie P.
> 
> (A) Single Winner Systems
> 
> One useful way to classify single-winner voting systems is by how 
> voters indicate
> their preferences for a given seat on each ballot:
> 
> *********
> 1 "Single Choice Voting"
> Voters select at most one candidate as their preferred winner
> 
> 2 "Ranked choice Voting"
> Voters rank candidates in order of preference (e.g., 1 > 2 > 3)
> Some systems may permit equal and/or incomplete rankings
> 
> 3 "Rated Value Voting"
> Voters assign an independent numerical weight/category to each candidate
> (e..g, like letter grades on a report card)
> *********