Thanks to Juho for discussing some details.
While there have to be voters who would be tempted by each, if available,
they share a serious problem, and I will comment on each below. They
complicate the rules:
Voters must understand what is permitted, and what each facility means.
Vote counters must have the same, unambiguous, understanding of the
meaning of each.
On Sat, 13 Aug 2005 12:52:32 +0300 Juho Laatu wrote:
> Hello Dave et al,
>
> On Aug 13, 2005, at 06:16, Dave Ketchum wrote:
>
>> I __do__ get to express my n x (n-1) / 2 pairwise preferences (part or
>> all, as I as a voter choose). I just am forced to be consistent. If
>> I vote A>B and B>Z, then I have voted A>Z. If there is a C for which
>> I have given no explicit specification, then my above partial vote
>> implies A>C, B>C, and Z>C.
>
I would add to the above ability to vote A=D. Relative to other
candidates it has the same meaning as voting the pair A>D or D>A. In
counting, two voters voting A=D has the same effect as one voting A>D and
one D>A - matters in wv; does not matter in margins.
>
> Few observations about the ability to express the n x (n-1) / 2 preferences:
>
> 1) It would be quite easy to remove the rule of considering unranked
> candidates to be ranked last. This could of course lead to unwanted
> results like the most unknown and uninteresting candidate winning the
> election. For this reason it is good that by default unranked(/unknown)
> candidates are considered to be less preferred than the ranked ones. In
> principle it would be ok to allow those voters that know what they are
> doing to express their opinions also more widely, e.g. a>b>c[cut] (which
> means that unlisted candidates are not ranked last) or
How else would you count an unranked candidate?
> 2) a>b>others>c.
> The latter option introduces the risk of people ranking widely the
> strongest competitors of their favourite candidate last, even though
> that normally doesn't do them much good (would e.g. lead to election of
> some unknown candidate in the case of three major candidates).
This reads as doable - is it desirable enough to be worth the effort? I
dislike it, liking better leaving at the bottom all those not worth
mentioning (those worth mentioning as better than C are already votable as
such).
>
> 3) It would be also possible to allow circular rankings like a>b>c>a
> (mentioning "a" twice means that the intention is to describe a loop).
> Consistent voters do not normally have such looped opinions I guess, but
> they could be used for strategic or counter strategic reasons. (I don't
> however want to encourage this kind of voting since I think that voting
> methods that use strategies and counter strategies extensively are most
> probably not good enough to be used in normal public elections anyway.)
Again, how do you count such a vote - assuming you claim it should have
meaning when counting)?
Of course, groups of voters can, together, create a cycle that the
counters must break - by deciding which leg of the cycle is weakest - but
there is no weakest leg if/when a single voter is allowed to do this.
>
> 4) One option would be to allow candidates to be grouped. This could be
> useful if the number of candidates is large. One could vote for example
> Bush>Gore>Reagan>Republicans>Democrats>Greens ("Republicans" will be
> interpreted here as "other Republican candidates than Bush and Reagan"
> etc.).
Reads as doable. Desirable to encourage this type of thinking?
>
> Allowing individual Republican candidates to be ranked below the generic
> "Republicans" item could be banned even if such use of group entries
> would be allowed otherwise. This is to avoid the negative effects
> discussed in case 2. It may be better to force voters to list all
> republican candidates if they want to place one of them last. In this
> way they are at least forced to see what kind of (maybe even less wanted
> and totally unknown) candidates they are ranking above the candidate
> they want to rank last, and probability of "unintended stupid votes"
> would probably decrease.
Reads as doable. Sales pitch above sounds deservedly weak.
>
> 5) Yet another way of voting would be to use fragmented votes. One could
> vote Bush>Reagan;Gore>Clinton, which means that Bush is preferred to
> Reagan and Gore is preferred to Clinton but the voter has not indicated
> anything about if (s)he prefers Bush to Gore or the other way around,
> Bush to Clinton etc. I think voters that would be interested in voting
> this way would still be quite consistent. It is quite ok to have an
> opinion "Bush is nicer than Reagan but I don't care if Republicans or
> Democrats will win (others may decide)".
Voters might dream they are being consistent. WHAT have they said to the
counters?
>
> The current (EM) default rules concerning ranking based ballots are
> simple, in most cases they offer voters all the tools they need, and
> they often stop voters making foolish things (like ranking their worst
> enemies last or electing some unknown candidates). It could be possible
> to allow e.g. some or all of the five special cases above to be used but
> I doubt if they would bring more benefits than they do bring problems in
> the form of making the system more complex and inviting voters to do
> something stupid. Case 4 could maybe be helpful if the number of
> candidates is large. I have also sometimes had feelings like the example
> in case 5 myself. Note that combination of cases 5 and 1 makes it
> possible to set separately any of the n x (n-1) / 2 pairwise preferences.
>
> Best Regards,
> Juho
--
davek at clarityconnect.com people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026
Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
If you want peace, work for justice.