[EM] Reply to Paul Kislanko

[Paul Kislanko]

Actually, Paul understood that very well. If you recall, his original
statement was "this is why it's so hard to explain" to non-specialists.

I have something of a philosophical problem with methods that "count" the
results expressed as the pair-wise matrix, since the "winner" depends upon
which of the Condorcet methods is used to resolve cycles. This example
bothers me, too:

1992: 
45% Bush > Perot 
10% Perot 
45% Clinton > Perot

Bush: - 45 45
Perot 55 - 55
Clinton: 45 45 -

Perot is the clear Condorcet winner, but that cannot be the right result. If
you replace those names with A, B, C the result looks ok. 

But that's not a logical argument. More serious is the "transparency" of a
method.

Especially with the current controversies about how votes are counted, I
think it is critical to be able to map "what is counted" directly back to
"what the voters put on their ballots", and since the linear translation
from from the #voters by #candidates ranked ballots matrix to the
#candidates x #candidates pair-wise matrix is intransitive I don't think you
can convince the voters to accept that their vote was counted. (Even if it
is). 

>From the VOTERS perspective, if a majority of the voters are going to be
unhappy with the outcome, the purity of a Condorcet method that makes them
unhappy is indistinguishable from the unhappiness they get from Plurality. 

As to getting some empirical data, I think someone mentioned earlier that if
we could get ANY ranked-ballot approach approved, we'd have the raw data to
analyze different methods with. Until then, there's only the proprietary
data the pollsters collect.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: election-methods-electorama.com-bounces at electorama.com 
> [mailto:election-methods-electorama.com-bounces at electorama.com
] On Behalf Of RLSuter at aol.com
> Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 7:52 PM
> To: election-methods-electorama.com at electorama.com
> Subject: [EM] Reply to Paul Kislanko
> 
> In a message dated 10/6/04, kislanko at airmail.net writes:
> 
> > You may not take it that Paul has conceded anything since nobody's 
> > ever answered the original question.
> >
> > 5 of 9 voters voted C>A. 
> >
> > Paul's question is how can anyone justify A's win.
> >
> > No one has addressed that. Until they do, ad hominems are just an 
> > example of how unlikely it will be to convince voters to change 
> > election methods. >>
> 
> But in the example you cite, 7 of 9 voters voted B>C, so how 
> could anyone justify C's win? And 6 out of 9 voters voted 
> A>B, so how could anyone justify B's win?
> 
> The experts all agree that there is no perfect voting method 
> that will satisfy everyone in every conceivable case, so the 
> goal must be to find the method that will result in the most 
> satisfaction overall compared with other methods.
> 
> One question this list doesn't address very much is how often 
> the kinds of cycles that bother you (and everyone else) would 
> occur in actual voting situations. It's an empirical question 
> for which there is now very little data, because Condorcet 
> voting has rarely if ever been used in any elections of 
> public officials, and it has been used only slightly less 
> rarely in other kinds of elections (e.g., in elections held 
> by nongovernmental organizations).
> 
> Advocates of instant runoff voting, which has been used in 
> enough public elections to provide some useful data, argue in 
> response to criticisms of it that there have been few if any 
> instances where the theoretical problems it poses have 
> actually been a factor in elections.
> 
> It may well be that if Condorcet voting were used in a 
> variety of public elections over an extended period, over 99% 
> of cases if not 100% would have true Condorcet winners and no cycles.
> That is, in each case the winning candidate would be prefered 
> over every other candidate if matched one to one. If that 
> were the result, then I suspect Condorcet would be widely 
> preferred over other methods and you would not have any 
> problems with it.
> 
> But unfortunately, the empirical data needed to fairly 
> evaluate different voting methods in real world elections 
> just doesn't exist right now. That's a problem I wish the 
> participants on this list would devote more attention to. Has 
> anyone proposed any promising ways to test different methods 
> empirically? Has any such testing been done, and if so, what 
> have been the results?
> 
> -Ralph Suter
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