[EM] Collecting Ordinal Information

[Jobst Heitzig]

Dear Forest!

I like your idea very much!

And I think we should also try to more often consider statistical
methods to *analyse* election methods, for example to assess their
anti-strategic properties or to define some kind of "robustness"
measures for methods.

Yours, Jobst

PS: My DFC-WAP-site is now launched! Perhaps you find a minute of time
to test it with some WAP-enabled mobile phone at
wap.groucho.info/index.wml


Simmons, Forest wrote:
> Recently someone asked about the best way to collect ordinal
> information.
> 
> Jobst and Ted have recently suggested methods that use the basic
> information theoretic principle of encoding the most likely messages
> with the smallest code words, and getting approval information as a
> bonus. [The most likely messages are party and candidate
> preferences.]
> 
> I would like to supplement their suggestions with one inspired by Joe
> Weinstein, a statistician who contributed to this EM list before his
> wife passed away a few years ago.
> 
> Joe's "election jury duty" idea is based on the idea that in a large
> public election, a large enough sample of the voters is sufficient to
> determine the winner, and that, once singled out, a random sample of,
> say, ten thousand voters charged with deciding the election, would
> take this duty as seriously as a jury on a criminal case (since
> politicians often turn out to be criminals, anyway), and knowing that
> the outcome depended on them, they would study the candidates in
> depth, etc. and would be willing to rank the candidates on ballots
> more complex than mere plurality ballots, after receiving training.
> 
> My idea is that in a large enough election, the individual pairwise
> contests could be farmed out at random to the voters.
> 
> Here in Oregon everbody votes by mail.  We get our ballots a month
> before the election, so we have weeks to study the issues and
> candidates, and fill in the ballots as we make our decisions.
> 
> Even so when the ballots are long, it is hard to learn enough to make
> a wise decision on every contest.
> 
> In an election with twenty single winner races, and with several
> candidates per race, it is hard to really get to know all of the
> candidates, not to mention all of the alternatives on the various
> "ballot measures."
> 
> What if all of these races were broken down into pairwise contests,
> which in turn, were farmed out randomly so that nobody had to vote on
> all of them?
> 
> To be specific, suppose that you had twenty single winner races with
> ten candidates each, and no ballot measures.
> 
> Each of the ten candidate races could be broken down into 45 pairwise
> contests, so the total number of pairwise contests would be
> 20*45=900.
> 
> If there were nine hundred thousand voters, and each of them received
> a random selection of ten pairwise contests to weigh in on, then each
> pairwise defeat would be based on ten thousand ballots, well above
> the statistical sample size requirement for 99% confidence.
> 
> Forest
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
> list info