[EM] James G.'s and Curt's strange prediction about your voting

[Curt Siffert]

Mike, that's a straw man.  I agree that your scenario is ridiculous.  
It wasn't my scenario, though.

This kind of debate is tiresome - any one of us can choose example 
candidates to appeal to biases.  Why not just use Ghandi, McCain, and 
Satan?

Two points.  First:

You yourself are on record as saying that you prefer CR to Condorcet if 
there isn't tactical voting, to maximize social utility.  I am not 
defending IRV, which I consider to be a lousy method.

Bolson just posted a scenario where the social utility winner is 
different than the Condorcet winner.  It just so happens that in that 
particular scenario, IRV picked the social utility winner.  This is not 
the same as saying that IRV is better than Condorcet.  There are acres 
of cases where Condorcet is better.  Condorcet is better overall.  But 
it is true that in rare cases, IRV will pick a winner with greater 
social utility than Condorcet.

Second:

You're trying to argue that if a population votes rationally and a 
Condorcet winner emerges, that it will be *impossible* for anyone, 
anywhere to regret their vote if their candidate wins, and that it is 
ridiculous for myself or James to argue that.

This is wrong.  A perfect example is a primary.  Someone could 
recognize after voting, by viewing the vote results, that their favored 
candidate does not have as much of a chance against their eventual 
general-election opponent as another candidate does.  Even if their 
favored candidate emerged as Condorcet Winner, they could regret it 
after looking at how the rest of the population voted.

It's a very different example than your example of a Nader-or-Kerry 
voter deciding to vote for Bush.

Curt


On May 19, 2004, at 4:45 PM, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:

>
> Here's James G.'s and Curt's prediction, if we were to hold a national 
> runoff between a CW chosen by Condorcet, and the winner by IRV:
>
> Say the candidates are Nader, Kerry, and Bush. Say Kerry is the CW 
> (just an assumption to illustrate the prediction). Most people on EM 
> prefer Nader to Kerry, and Kerry to Bush.
>
> And say that Kerry, in the report of the IRV count, has the fewest 1st 
> place votes, in the 1st IRV round, even though he's the CW.
>
> Now, according to James G. & Curt, you will say, "What's this? I'm 
> shocked that Kerry isn't a big favorite, with an enthusiastic broad 
> base who consider him favorite! Bush has people who consider him 
> favorite, and so, though Bush has been doing a lot of horrendous 
> things, Kerry's lack of enthusiastic favorite support is much worse, 
> and so I'm going to vote for Bush in the runoff."
>
> Ridiculous? Yes.
>
> Everyone I've spoken to about it says that they only vote for the 
> Democrats as a lesser-evil, and that they must hold their nose in 
> order to do so. That isn't what we call enthusiastic support for a 
> favorite. But those same people vote for the Democrat anyway, because 
> they'd much rather elect him than the Republican. That's common 
> knowledge. They don't vote for Kerry because they think that he has a 
> broad base of enthusiastic support as a big favorite.
>
> Mike Ossipoff
>
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